The Invisible Adjunct points to an excellent op-ed article in the New York Times on higher ed costs [free registration with NYtimes.com required] by one of my favorite thinkers, Stanley Fish. Fish writes:
If there is a crisis in college costs it has not been caused by price-gouging or bureaucratic incompetence on the part of universities; a better analogy would be the mass circulation magazines of the 1950’s like Collier’s and Look, which folded at the very point when they had more readers than ever. The problem was that production costs far outpaced the revenues from subscriptions and advertisers, and every new reader actually cost them money.
Well worth the read.
I also heartily recommend Fish’s collection of essays, There’s No Such Thing As Free Speech (And It’s A Good Thing, Too), which I just recently re-read.
Education
Interesting resource with some good links worth following up on: Collaborative Learning Environments Sourcebook.
Education
John Kruper writes a remarkably well-balanced entry, Blogs as Course Management Systems: Is their biggest advantage also their achille’s heel?, on his weblog, The Electric Lyceum:
The moral of the story? While blogs and other “lightweight” community publishing systems will surely find their way into the motivated educator’s hands, their impact will remain limited until they are married to the more mundane (and decidedly not pedagogically-valued) class management features that are the bread and butter of “traditional” course management systems.
The interesting question then becomes, from which end of the spectrum will this post-revolution revolution emerge? Will blogs grow class management wings? Or will commercial course management systems shove blogs inside the courses alongside their documents and folders? Of course, don’t count out the possibility that an entirely new species may emerge, one that is natively optimized along both dimensions!
I’ve always thought that the idea of replacing course management systems with weblogs just illustrated that the person making the suggestion didn’t understand the role of course management systems at the institutional level. Kruper hits the nail on the head, though.
FWIW, weblogs won’t take on course management functionality because weblog vendors aren’t going to be competitive in that vertical (and they know it). Course management system will eventually integrate with existing weblog tools or incorporate blog-like publishing, though.
Education, Weblogs
Slow week due to post-vacation brain getting back up to speed.
This should entertain you for a while: an Educational Technology Wiki that’s been mentioned on several other sites this week.
(What’s a “wiki” you ask? A wiki is a “collection of web pages which can be edited by anyone, at any time, from anywhere.” Yeah, it sounds funky, but it’s fairly self-policing most of the time.)
Education
Evan Kirchhoff responds to the Chronicle article, “Can Grand Theft Auto Inspire Professors?”
For all you ed bloggers out there, I highly recommend Ev’s blog, 101-280. He’s not always writing about education, but he’s a remarkably clear-headed thinker. Plus, I once had dinner with him at a Ukranian diner.* I don’t know why that’s relevant. I just like people to know I frequent Ukranian diners.
Interestingly, Evan was also someone I met on the listserv mentioned in the last post. It must be Future Culture week here on 10RW.
*For the record, it was in Manhattan, not Ukraine.
Education
Check out this rendering (I don’t know what else to call it) of a Neruda poem. Run your cursor over each line, and it is auto-translated. [link via DangerousMeta]
It’s hard-coded with some simple onMouseOver properties in a <span> tag for each line. Would be nice if there were a way to roll your mouse over them again and translate them back, but I’m sure that’s possible with some Javascript. An app that extended on this idea, by allowing a teacher to input the original and translated version of a poem and then generating the code to allow mouseover switching of the lines, would be a nifty teaching tool for translation.
Education
David Carter-Tod is live-blogging the Blackboard Building Blocks Developers Workshop.
I’m not, of course, because I’m busy being one of the people putting on the workshop. And I’m not a Java developer, so it’s all over my head anyway. :-)
Update 2:35pm: The newly-founded Building Blocks Open Source Group is blogging the conference.
Education
The title of this article, “Better Off With or Without Your CMS?” (from Syllabus), is a bit misleading, because the authors (Steve Ehrmann and Steve Gilbert of the TLT Group, both of whom I worked with on an Annenberg grant project back in the mid-90’s) don’t ever raise that question. The questions they do raise are much more valuable: “Do you have any way of knowing how much educational value your college or university currently derives from its use of a CMS? Do you have a strategy for increasing its value in a course or across the curriculum?” They provide a set of five general assessments an institution can undertake to answer those questions.
The assessments and examples that the Steves provide reinforce what has always been my mantra regarding education & technology: It’s not about the technology, it’s about what you do with it. Maybe I picked that up from the Steves years ago. :-)
Every school with a course management system should be conducting regular evaluations on its use, and feeding the results of those evaluation back into faculty development programs.
Education
Hey, I’m going to the MERLOT International Conference 2003 in Vancouver next month.
I’ve never been to Vancouver. :-)
Education
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has released a report on Internet Blocking in Public Schools. [link via Boing Boing]
I haven’t read the whole report, but the abstract tells me enough:
- The use of Internet blocking software in schools cannot help schools comply with the law because schools do not and cannot set the software to block only the categories required by the law, and because the software is incapable of blocking only the visual depictions required by CIPA. Blocking software overblocks and underblocks, that is, the software blocks access to many web pages protected by the First Amendment and does not block many of the web pages that CIPA would likely prohibit.
- Blocking software does not protect children from exposure to a large volume of material that is harmful to minors within the legal definitions. Blocking software cannot adapt adequately to local community standards. Most schools already have in place alternatives to Internet blocking software, such as adoption and enforcement of Internet use policies, media literacy education, directed use, and supervised use.
- Blocking software in schools damages educational opportunities for students, both by blocking access to web pages that are directly related to state-mandated curriculums and by restricting broader inquiries of both students and teachers. Teachers and students 17 years or older (most high school juniors and seniors) should be exempt, yet suffer the consequences of CIPA implementation.
Education, Technology & Internet