The New Media Consortium (NMC) and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) have released the 2010 Horizon Report. The annual Horizon Report features the continuing work of the NMC’s Horizon Project, a long-term research project that identifies and describes emerging technologies likely to have considerable impact on teaching, learning, and creative inquiry within higher education.
If you want to start a lively debate with your colleagues, just say one word: Facebook. You’re likely to hear many different arguments and at some point someone will declare that if students would spend less time on Facebook and other social networking sites they’d get better grades. Maybe, maybe not.
Cheating is not a new problem for colleges, but the Internet and other technologies have increased opportunities for cheating, making it more tempting to try and easier to pull off than ever before.
A critical component to building an American workforce with 21st century skills through science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) undergraduate education is already being demonstrated successfully at several minority-serving institutions (MSIs)—Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), Tribal Colleges and Universities (TCUs), and Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs). During the past three years, MSIs continue to take steps that help to further improve America’s global competitiveness and increase equity, especially among minority students, in STEM education.
With interest in Twitter on the rise, many instructors continue to grapple with the question of whether it has a place in the college classroom. And, if it does, what is the best, most effective way to use it? So perhaps it comes as no surprise that we’re starting to see studies on the use of Twitter in both traditional and online courses.
Most colleges and universities have fairly lenient drop/add policies. Students can drop a course well into the semester, and courses can be added during a short time window at the beginning of the semester or term. During that course add period, some students do course shopping. They sign up for a course, attend the first couple of sessions, then drop the course and replace it with another course.
At its heart, The World is Open: How Web Technology is Revolutionizing Education is based on the premise that “anyone can now learn anything from anyone at anytime.”(p. 7)
If you are part of a social network, you may have already had this experience: a current or former student attempts to “friend” you online.
Social presence, “the degree to which a medium is perceived as representing the presence of communication participants,” is an important factor in students’ learning and satisfaction. With online learning reaching across cultures, Judy Teng, educational technologist at the College of Saint Rose, studied how ethnicity affects student perceptions of social presence.
Results are in from the Faculty Focus survey on Twitter usage and trends among college faculty. The survey of approximately 2,000 higher education professionals found that nearly one-third (30.7 percent) of the 1,958 respondents say they use Twitter in some capacity. More than half, (56.4 percent) say they’ve never used Twitter.
