Kent Gerber's List: Laptop Learning

• While some professors seek to exclude the devices from the classroom, others are creating multimedia-rich curricula in which students can draw on online resources and interact with each other. Banning laptops is just plain wrong, according to Don Krug, associate professor at UBC’s department of curriculum studies. He says students are adults, and the best a professor can hope for is a “respectful learning environment,” where students limit their own behaviour. “If they really want to learn the information, they will. They’re paying a lot of money,” he says. “We’re better off teaching them how to be responsible learners.”

• Nearly half reported that email enables them to express ideas to a professor  that they would not have expressed in class.

• Thomas Armstrong explains why students enjoy being part of the creative  process:

   

  Essentially, creativity designates the capacity to give birth to new ways of  looking at things, the ability to make novel connections between disparate  things, and the knack for seeing things that might be missed by the typical way  of viewing life (Armstrong, n.d., para. 15).

   

  Mrs. Campbell had found a way to inspire her students’ creativity while  also addressing the Sunshine State Standards and science content that her sixth  grade students needed to know.

• • Good to find ways to collaborate positively and support common goals.
• (a physical place to meet, a toolbar, a set of services in the course management  system, a FaceBook application, a set of RSS feeds, office hours in a school or  department, and so on).

  • Many ways the library can be percieved by a patron.
• For example, in his book about VLEs (that is, learning or course management  systems), Weller (2007) talks about the changing, and sometimes politically  difficult, relationship between the library and e–learning developments.
• For this reason, developments in the consumer and retail space will increasingly  outpace those in enterprise or educational contexts, and many enterprise or  educational services will have substitute or rival products in the consumer  space (Stokes, 2008). Think, for example, of what is happening with e–mail,  where people may use their Gmail account in preference to an institutional one.  Or think of discussions around personal learning environments, where it is  recognized that students now have a rich set of social networking, content  management, coordination and other services available to them outside of the  university environment. The university, library, or work environment can no  longer expect to provide a more sophisticated digital environment than that  which is available in the general consumer space; in fact, the formal learning  or work environment may appear increasingly clunky beside the social networking  and consumer sites which increasingly set our expectations.

  • Highlights how some users have familiarity with applications that are not yet available or of less quality than what they are familiar with. How business and academia can be behind in this way.
• “From a conceptual point of view, the widgetization adopted by Facebook, iGoogle and netvibes weighed strongly on our initial thinking. We wanted to build the foundation and DNA of the new site in line with the ongoing trend and evolution of the Internet towards dynamically generated and syndicable content through technologies like RSS, atom and xml. This trend essentially abstracts the content from its presentation and distribution, atomizing content into a feed–based universe. Browsers, devices, etc therefore become lenses through which this content can be collected, tailored and consumed by the audience.” (Titus, 2007)

  • Essential consideration for Web design. Must think beyond the desktop.
• Rave Wireless (http://www.ravewireless.com/). Boopsie indexes content from providers and makes it available in mobile–friendly ways. Rave Wireless provides services to meet communication needs across whole campus populations through various infrastructure services. These include alerting, security, and various information services (video, shuttle bus locations).

  • Saw Rave this at the Maryland Web 2.0 conference. Still had issues implementing system but students did mention that they liked it.
• An institution cannot necessarily rely on one vehicle — e–mail or texting, for example — to reach everyone in a timely way.
• Second, recent discussion of social networks has highlighted the importance of ‘social objects’: the shared interests around which people affiliate, such as photographs, movies, music, and holiday destinations

  • Think about using these items in classes or training.
• This attention scarcity is apparent also in the academic environment where a bouncing and skimming style of consumption has been observed (Nicholas, et al., 2006). Palmer, et al. (2007) talk about actual ‘reading avoidance’. Researchers may survey more material, but spend less time with each item, relying on abstracts and other content clues to avoid reading in full.

  • Our website should reflect this.

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