From Edpunk to Citizen science, from podcast lectures listened to on smart phones to flipped classrooms, educational technologies are catalyzing some of the great new experiments in how we deliver and how we receive education. The Chronicle of Higher Education has now gathered together twelve recent articles on innovators in the field for an exploration of what’s cutting edge.

Rebooting the Academy

by various Chronicle of Higher Education writers / 26 February 2012 parent article

Salman Khan
Khan Academy

In just a few short years, Salman Khan has built a free online educational institution from scratch that has nudged major universities to offer free self-guided courses and inspired many

Salman Khan

professors to change their teaching methods.

His creation is called Khan Academy, and its core is a library of thousands of 10-minute educational videos, most of them created by Mr. Khan himself. The format is simple but feels intimate: Mr. Khan’s voice narrates as viewers watch him sketch out his thoughts on a digital whiteboard. He made the first videos for faraway cousins who asked for tutoring help. Encouraging feedback by others who watched the videos on YouTube led him to start the academy as a nonprofit.

Laura Czerniewicz
U. of Cape Town

François Grey
Tsinghua U.

Jim Groom
U. of Mary Washington

Adrian Sannier
Pearson

Candace Thille
Carnegie Mellon U.

Bradley C. Wheeler
Indiana U.

Burck Smith
StraighterLine

Kathleen Fitzpatrick
Modern Language Association

Robert W. Mendenhall
Western Governors U.

Daniel J. Cohen
George Mason U.

John P. Wilkin
U. of Michigan

To read more…

Image Source: Chronicle parent article

 

Today, the Dalai Lama’s official Facebook post touched upon whether education as such has value, suggesting that it doesn’t on its own, that it can even have a negative value depending on who holds it:

Education and knowledge by themselves do not bring inner peace to individuals, families or the society in which they live. But education combined with warmheartedness, a sense of concern for the well-being of others, has much more positive results. If you have a great deal of knowledge, but you’re governed by negative emotions, then you tend to use your knowledge in negative ways. Therefore, while you are learning, don’t forget the importance of warmheartedness.

The theme of warmheartedness in teaching is also the subject of a new Chronicle article on Michael Wesch, the KSU anthro professor who has been a passionate advocate for the incorporation of technologies like YouTube and Twitter in the pedagogy of higher education. At the heart of the matter is the pursuit of what inspires students and motivates them to learn. Wesch has come to the conclusion that it’s not ed technology that does this, but the shoulder-to-shoulder relationship with a teacher who seeks to impart the wonder of a field to students whose learning and learning experience he or she cares about.

A Tech-Happy Professor Reboots After Hearing His Teaching Advice Isn’t Working

by Jeffrey R. Young / The Chronicle of Higher Education / 12 February 2012

Michael Wesch has been on the lecture circuit for years touting new models of active teaching with technology. The associate professor of cultural anthropology at Kansas State University has given TED talks. Wired magazine gave him a Rave Award. The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching once named him a national professor of the year. But now Mr. Wesch finds himself rethinking the fundamentals of teaching—and questioning his own advice.

The professor’s popular talks have detailed his experiments teaching with Twitter, YouTube videos, collaborative Google Docs—and they present a general critique of the chalk-and-talk lecture as outmoded. To get a sense of his teaching style, check out a video he made about one of his anthropology courses. In it, some 200 students designed their own imaginary cultures and ran a world-history simulation by sending updates via Twitter and a voice-to-text application called Jott.

To be fair, Mr. Wesch always pointed to the downsides of technology (it can be a classroom distraction, for instance). But he saw tech-infused methods as a way to upgrade teaching.

Then a frustrated colleague approached him after one of his talks: “I implemented your idea, and it just didn’t work,” Mr. Wesch was told. “The students thought it was chaos.”

To read more…

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One important area of focus in support of the whole student is school environment. A key aspect of school environment is student culture, and we might even say cultures, that can evolve within particular classrooms and other collective spaces and activities, grades, and, gender groups. New research led by renowned bullying expert Dorothy Espelage suggests that a positive, high empathy, low-tolerance for bullying student culture may be essential to enabling peer intervention on behalf of bullied students.

Study examines what factors may predict intervention to stop bullies

by Sharita Forrest / U Illinois Press Release / 19 December 2011

Prof. Dorothy Espelage, educational psychology

A new study of more than 346 middle-school children indicates that boys are less likely than girls to intervene to protect a bullying victim, especially if the boy is a member of a peer group in which bullying is the norm. The study also suggests that anti-bullying programs that focus on bystander intervention and empathy training aren’t likely to have much impact unless attention is given to reducing bullying perpetration within children’s peer groups.

The study, led by educational psychologist Dorothy Espelage at the University of Illinois, examined the attitudes and behaviors of sixth- and seventh-grade students and their networks of friends to determine if certain factors – such as gender, empathy and belonging to peer groups that perpetrate bullying – might be predictive of bystander intervention.

To read more…

Image Source: article (staff photographer L. Brian Stauffer)

Lecture was once a default mode of education delivery worldwide, and some might say that it remains so today. As more teachers at all levels adopt alternative teaching methods, we’re left to ask if lectures are ever appropriate. Here, Robert Talbert gives some good advice about when and why they still  work.

by Robert Talbert / The Chronicle of Higher Education Casting Out Nines blog / 13 February 2012

A lot of my posts here are about alternatives to the traditional lecture-oriented classroom. Based on that, and on somewhat testy comments like thesethat I leave lying around the internet, you might get the idea that I am firmly anti-lecture. But that’s not entirely true. There are times and places where lecture works quite well, even better than the alternatives. Here are a few purposes for which I think lecture is well-suited:

• Modeling thought processes. The benefit of hearing an expert learner lecture on a subject is that, if the lecture is clearly given, the audience can gain some insights into what makes the expert an expert. A good lecture does more than convey facts or put problems on the board — it lays bare the cognitive processes that an expert uses to assimilate those facts or think his or her way through those problems.

To read more…

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At one time, the promise of tablets or netbooks for education was the ability of students to learn anywhere, anytime. This Education Week article picks up a more recent theme: the possibility of a constant stream of formative assessment to help teachers teach more responsively and students learn more actively.

Schools administer assessments via mobile device

by Katie Ash / Education Week / 8 February 2012

Students in Kelly Neuserâ's kindergarten class at Deer Run Elementary School in East Haven, CT

The 3,200-student East Haven schools in Connecticut, elementary teachers did their initial student reading assessments a bit differently this school year.

Instead of using paper and pencil to jot down observations about each of their students and then collecting and analyzing those notes by hand, each teacher used an iPad to collect the information and send it to a centralized database through software from the New York City-based ed-tech company Wireless Generation.

“One of our primary goals was to be able to develop a system that would bring a lot of the data into one place,” says Taylor Auger, a technology-integration teacher in the district who helped incorporate use of the iPads into classrooms. “Previously, the data was processed by hand, and it wasn’t really being put to use effectively. I’m all for data, but that data has to drive instruction.”

To read more…

Image Source: article (Christopher Capozziello for Digital Directions)

There’s no question that learning can and does happen everywhere. The new learning concepts of ubiquity and engagement are powerful game-changers that depend in part on access to technology-enabled social learning experiences. The question is how to keep these safe and appropriate; as Jennifer Preston’s article explores, there are no easy answers.

by Jennifer Preston / New York Times / 17 December 2011

Lewis Holloway, a schools superintendent in Georgia, has imposed a strict social media policy

Faced with scandals and complaints involving teachers who misuse social media, school districts across the country are imposing strict new guidelines that ban private conversations between teachers and their students on cellphones and online platforms like Facebook and Twitter.

The policies come as educators deal with a wide range of new problems. Some teachers have set poor examples by posting lurid comments or photographs involving sex or alcohol on social media sites. Some have had inappropriate contact with students that blur the teacher-student boundary. In extreme cases, teachers and coaches have been jailed on sexual abuse and assault charges after having relationships with students that, law enforcement officials say, began with electronic communication.

To read more…

Image Source: Stephen Morton for the New York Times (accompanies original article)

Amy Burke’s list of the 5 top classroom management technologies gives a good start to resources teachers will find everyday useful. We hope that one day teachers everywhere will add Scholar to their personal lists!

by Amy Burke / Mashable Tech / 10 February 2012

1. Edutopia

This site makes it easy for you to see what other schools are doing around the country to motivate their students, with everything from technology integration to project-based learning. While incorporating real-life video to inform and improve learning, the site offers its best practices for development in student achievement with commentary and blogs from experienced teachers and curriculum experts.

To read more…

Image Source: Edutopia home page

So much of the education debate in the US has focused on high school graduate rates and college preparedness that Academically Adrift gave a kind of shock to the collective system when its authors claimed to demonstrate that most students learn very little when they actually get to college.  More than a year later, sociologists Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa’s book seems to have  to have held fast, establishing what is now widely regarded as an important critique of the higher education industry, which the book claims serves two classes of students quite differently, those who are prepared, and come ready and able to educate themselves, and those who aren’t, can’t, and don’t.

What Chronicle columnist Kevin Carey misses emphasizing in his otherwise excellent column calling for increased focus on studying learning outcomes at the college-level is that there seems to be little public awareness that there are two classes of not only students but of the qualities of higher education offered to them. Academically Adrift‘s depiction of President King of Walden College as the quintessential cynic on the value of a college education underscores this unpleasant truth, when King suggests that parents (and students) are happy with mediocre educations so long as the basic expected credentialing happens.

Which is why the learning outcomes research for which Carey calls should focus not just on how disadvantaged students are prepared for college, but also on how colleges ought to be prepared to maintain high rigor and expectations for all students, so that higher education empowers everyone who undertakes it to think critically and creatively, use language ably, and reason about the world effectively.

by Kevin Carey / The Chronicle of Higher Education / 12 February 2012

In the last few months of 2010, rumors began circulating among higher-education policy geeks that the University of Chicago Press was about to publish a new book written by a pair of very smart sociologists who were trying to answer a question to which most people thought they already knew the answer: How much do students learn while they’re in college? Their findings, one heard, were … interesting.

The book, Academically Adrift, by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, fulfilled that promise—and then some. It was no surprise that The Chronicle gave prominent coverage to the conclusion that “American higher education is characterized by limited or no learning for a large proportion of students,” but few people anticipated that the book would become the rare piece of serious academic scholarship that jumps the fence and roams free into the larger culture.

Vanity Fair used space normally allotted to Kennedy hagiography to call it a “crushing exposé of the heretofore secret society known as ‘college.’” The gossip mavens at Gawker ran the book through their patented Internet cynicism machine and wrote that “To get a college degree, you must go into a soul-crushing amount of debt. And what do you get for all that money? Not learning.”

To read more…

Image Source: book cover / U Chicago Press

As ed tech publishers strive to convince markets of the value of their products, the question of how their claims should be evaluated and by whom is raised. Here, Watters practical tips for non-experts who want to get a baseline of whether claims they are encountering may be valid.

How to Judge if Research is Trustworthy

B. Gillard

by Audrey Watters/ MindShift / 31 January 2012

Scientists are notorious for questioning the veracity of publicized research — and with good reason. They want to know: Who conducted the research? Where was it published? What were the survey questions?

It’s that much more important when it comes to evaluating research in education that will affect the investment decisions of teachers, parents, and administrators.

Case in point: does the iPad boost student learning? Is it a solid educational tool, as the headline from a recent article in Wired magazine says, maintaining that the devices are improving student engagement and assessment.

To read more…

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