Home
Rudy Garns's Library tagged → View Popular, Search in Google
The world has become increasingly “flat,” as Tom Friedman has shown. Thanks to massive improvements in communications and transportation, virtually any place on earth can be connected to markets anywhere else on earth and can become globally competitive.1 But at the same time that the world has become flatter, it has also become “spikier”: the places that are globally competitive are those that have robust local ecosystems of resources supporting innovation and productiveness.2 A key part of any such ecosystem is a well-educated workforce with the requisite competitive skills. And in a rapidly changing world, these ecosystems must not only supply this workforce but also provide support for continuous learning and for the ongoing creation of new ideas and skills.
This ECAR research bulletin discusses the use of student-developed social contracts to support a vital online community of inquiry. In blended classes—which combine co-present and web-mediated interaction—contracts that address both settings are particularly effective. This bulletin provides examples of successful student social contracts and describes students’ views on the impact of the social contract on their learning.
Students use technology in natural ways that allow them to do what they want: communicate with anyone they want, in the time and space that suits them best. Easily accessible and user-friendly, collaboration tools allow students to explore, share, engage, and connect with people and content in meaningful ways that help them learn. By relying on the familiar ways students use these tools, faculty can enable new forms of communication and engagement in the classroom, permitting extensions and variations of the informal interactions already occurring in classrooms and hallways, and creating new frontiers for collaboration across geographic boundaries.
* A new course teaching media, mass communication, and political identities in the Middle East and North Africa explored the use of social media in pursuit of effective learning.
* Using a variety of social media and other tools encouraged student engagement in and out of the classroom.
* Student responses varied from discomfort with the technology to enthusiastic adoption and continued use after the course ended.
Social networking services routinely enroll millions. Social music-sharing services continue to grow, as Last.fm continues to build a user base and Apple’s iTunes now maintains a social function, My iTunes (http://www.apple.com/itunes/myitunes). It is no longer shocking to realize that photos are largely digital, rather than analog; it is also not surprising that they are published in active social networks, such as Flickr and Picasa. RSS feeds appear not only on most blogs and news sites, but on campus home pages and corporate intranets. Folksonomic tagging, briefly controversial, now appears in the most widely used platforms, like Amazon.com and YouTube.
The emergence of the networked information economy is unleashing two powerful forces. On one hand, easy access to high-speed networks is empowering individuals. People can now discover and consume information resources and services globally from their homes. Further, new social computing approaches are inviting people to share in the creation and edification of information on the Internet. Empowerment of the individual—or consumerization—is reducing the individual's reliance on traditional brick-and-mortar institutions in favor of new and emerging virtual ones. Second, ubiquitous access to high-speed networks along with network standards, open standards and content, and techniques for virtualizing hardware, software, and services is making it possible to leverage scale economies in unprecedented ways. What appears to be emerging is industrial-scale computing—a standardized infrastructure for delivering computing power, network bandwidth, data storage and protection, and services. Consumerization and industrialization beg the question "Is this the end of the middle?"; that is, what will be the role of "enterprise" IT in the future? Indeed, the bigger question is what will become of all of our intermediating institutions? This volume examines the impact of IT on higher education and on the IT organization in higher education.
The Net Generation has grown up with information technology. The aptitudes, attitudes, expectations, and learning styles of Net Gen students reflect the environment in which they were raised-one that is decidedly different from that which existed when faculty and administrators were growing up.\n\nThis collection explores the Net Gen and the implications for institutions in areas such as teaching, service, learning space design, faculty development, and curriculum. Contributions by educators and students are included.
"Academia has adopted open source software for some online learning initiatives because it addresses persistent technical challenges" (EDUCAUSE Quarterly) | EDUCAUSE CONNECT)
"The default design of commercial course management systems limits instructional creativity and pedagogical approaches, particularly for novice users" (EDUCAUSE Quarterly) | EDUCAUSE CONNECT
This research bulletin examines the wiki philosophy and how it fits within the Web 2.0 context. While wikis offer a number of benefits for supporting knowledge creation in collaborative groups, the literature suggests a strong need to establish convention
This collection explores the Net Gen and the implications for institutions in areas such as teaching, service, learning space design, faculty development, and curriculum. Contributions by educators and students are included.
7 Things You Should Know About...pieces provide quick, no-jargon overviews of technologies and related practices that have demonstrated or may demonstrate positive learning impacts.
Technology and the way information is created, used, and disseminated have changed, as has the definition of "net savvy" EDUCAUSE Quarterly | Volume 30 Number 1 2007
An Educause article on social bookmarking
Selected Tags
Related Tags
Top Contributors
Groups interested in EDUCause
Highlighter, Sticky notes, Tagging, Groups and Network: integrated suite dramatically boosting research productivity. Learn more »
Join Diigo