Educause Review

EDUCAUSE is a nonprofit association whose mission is to advance higher education by promoting the intelligent use of information technology.

Audience: consists of presidents/chancellors, senior academic and administrative leaders, non-IT staff, faculty in all disciplines, librarians, and corporate staff/leaders.

• 22,000 distributed copies
• 50,000 visits per month
• 250,000+ monthly page views

Awards

• APEX Awards for Publication Excellence
• Magnum Opus Awards for Outstanding Achievement in Custom Publishing
• Ozzie Awards for Excellence in Magazine Design
• Tabbies Awards
• Publication of the Year by the Colorado Society of Association Executives

How to access: http://connect.educause.edu/er
The magazine takes a broad look at current developments and trends in information technology, how they may affect the college/university as an institution, and what these mean for higher education and society.

Minds On Fire
John Seely Brown

• Visiting Scholar and Advisor to the Provost at the University of Southern California (USC)
• Independent Co-Chairman of a New Deloitte Research Center.

Richard P. Adler

• Research Affiliate at the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto
• Principal of People & Technology, a research and consulting firm in Cupertino, California.

More than one-third of the world’s population is under 20. There are over 30 million people today qualified to enter a university who have no place to go. During the next decade, this 30 million will grow to 100 million. To meet this staggering demand, a major university needs to be created each week.
—Sir John Daniel, 1996

Social Learning
"…based on the premise that our understanding of content is socially constructed through conversations about that content and through grounded interactions, especially with others, around problems or actions. The focus is not so much on what we are learning but on how we are learning."

Richard J. Light, of Harvard. Light found:
"…that the method used by students to study and do home work assignments is a far stronger predictor of engagement and learning than particular details of their instructor’s teaching style. Specifically, those students who study outside of class in small groups of four to six students, even just once a week, benefit enormously. …as a result of their study group discussion, students are far more engaged and better prepared for class, learning significantly more" (http://athome.harvard.edu/programs/light/light5/light5.html).

"These communities are harbingers of the emergence of a new form of technology-enhanced learning—Learning 2.0—which goes beyond providing free access to traditional course materials and educational tools and creates a participatory architecture for supporting communities of learners."

Examples:

David Wiley at Utah State University:
"Because my goal as a teacher is to bring my students into full legitimate participation in the community of instructional technologists as quickly as possible, all student writing was done on public blogs. The writing students did in the first few weeks was interesting but average. In the fourth week, however, I posted a list of links to all the student blogs and mentioned the list on my own blog. I also encouraged the students to start reading one another's writing. The difference in the writing that next week was startling. Each student wrote significantly more than they had previously. Each piece was more thoughtful. Students commented on each other's writing and interlinked their pieces to show related or contradicting thoughts. Then one of the student assignments was commented on and linked to from a very prominent blogger. Many people read the student blogs and subscribed to some of them. When these outside comments showed up, indicating that the students really were plugging into the international community's discourse, the quality of the writing improved again. The power of peer review had been brought to bear on the assignments.

http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Italian_Studies/dweb/dweb.shtml
Italian collection of tales in prose. The collection is structured as 100 tales told over the span of 10 days by seven ladies and three gentlemen (the word "decameron" is derived from the Greek and means "ten days").

http://www.handsonuniverse.org/
The Faulkes project allows students to control high-powered robotic telescopes, one in Hawaii and the other in Australia.

http://faulkes-telescope.com/
students can request observations from professional observatories and then analyze the data from the software provided to them which encourages the interaction between professionals and students.

http://bugscope.beckman.uiuc.edu/
helps students to become participants in a field. K – 12 students send insects they find to the University of Illinois. Then via the Internet they are able to log on and control the microscope in real time to see their specimens.

http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/vvvv/category/projects/cyberone-hls/
Harvard Law School experimented with Second Life for the course “CyberOne: Law in the Court of Public Opinion.” There were three levels of participation. First, students registered for the course attended in person. Second, Harvard students who were not law students could attend the course, attend lectures, participate in discussions, and visit faculty during their business hours in Second Life. Third, anyone could review lectures and course materials through Second Life at no cost.

http://commons.carnegiefoundation.org/
The Commons is an open forum where instructors at all levels (and from around the world) can post their own examples and can participate in an ongoing conversation about effective teaching practices, as a means of supporting a process of “creating/using/re-mixing (or creating/sharing/using).”