Interesting article about future directions for computing on campus:
The Invisible Computer Lab
January 20, 2011
In the future, campus computer labs will be invisible, personal computers will be shapeshifters, and colleges will have to spend much less to make sure students have access to the software they need for certain courses.
This according to technology officials at several colleges that have recently deployed “virtual computing labs” — Web-based hubs where students can go to use sophisticated programs from their personal computers without having to buy and install expensive software, or slog to a campus lab and pray for a vacant workstation.
Some rather sobering news the effectiveness of higher education.
‘Academically Adrift’
January 18, 2011
If the purpose of a college education is for students to learn, academe is failing, according to Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, a book being released today by University of Chicago Press.
The book cites data from student surveys and transcript analysis to show that many college students have minimal classwork expectations — and then it tracks the academic gains (or stagnation) of 2,300 students of traditional college age enrolled at a range of four-year colleges and universities.
“Editing Matters”
by Carmen Werder and Karen Hoelscher
Editing — oh, whoop-de-do — hardly a topic of intense interest in and of itself. One challenge of focusing on issues such as grammar and usage is that they seem to matter only when they’re not in place. Unlike matters of content, where you can impress readers by developing intriguing ideas and clever metaphors, editing issues seem mundane and not a topic for engaging others seriously — except, perhaps, for rhetoricians or grammarians.
Your readers simply assume you will follow the appropriate conventions until you do something to suggest otherwise.
So why get too worked up about it? After studying the responses of 14 non-academics (business people) to various kinds of errors, Larry Beason suggested why: while the range of reactions tended to be broad, with some patterns of agreement, the ultimate result of error was that readers “constructed a negative ethos of the writer.”
I thought some of you might find this article of interest:
“Searching For Better Research Habits” September 29, 2010, Inside Higher Ed
NEW YORK CITY — Should colleges teach students how to be better Googlers?
Educators who see the popular search engine as antithetical to good research might cringe at the thought of endorsing it to students. But they might not cringe nearly as hard as did attendees of the 2010 Ithaka Sustainable Scholarship Conference when Andrew Asher showed them what happens when students do not learn how to use Google properly.
Thus spake Zuckerberg: “We don’t think a modern messaging system is going to be e-mail.”
The Facebook founder said so in November, when his company unveiled its new messaging platform: a system, sans subject lines, designed based on the assumption that in the future most electronic communication will come in brief, informal bursts. In December, Zuckerberg’s prognosis was essentially certified by the New York Times, which ran an article suggesting that among young people who are in college or about to be, e-mail is quickly going out of style.
Meanwhile, learning-management platforms — notably Blackboard, the market leader among nonprofit institutions — have been building more just-in-time messaging features with an eye to becoming the hub for student-to-student and professor-to-student communications around academic coursework.
All this has left campus technologists to ponder the future of institutional e-mail systems, which are still by and large the standard electronic medium connecting colleges with their students.
If students are in fact moving away from e-mail in their personal lives, …
How do students use Wikipedia? See this research report from First Monday, a peer reviewed online journal.
Here’s the abstract from the first page of the report:
Findings are reported from student focus groups and a large–scale survey about how and why students (enrolled at six different U.S. colleges) use Wikipedia during the course–related research process. A majority of respondents frequently used Wikipedia for background information, but less often than they used other common resources, such as course readings and Google. Architecture, engineering, and science majors were more likely to use Wikipedia for course–related research than respondents in other majors. The findings suggest Wikipedia is used in combination with other information resources. Wikipedia meets the needs of college students because it offers a mixture of coverage, currency, convenience, and comprehensibility in a world where credibility is less of a given or an expectation from today’s students.
This press release describes the results of a new student from the International Center for Media & the Public Agenda (ICMPA) at the University of Maryland, which “concludes that most college students are not just unwilling, but functionally unable to be without their media links to the world.”
This famous video by a cultural anthropologist shows the disconnect between traditional methods of teaching in higher education and today’s social media savvy students.
This article from the Chronicle of Higher Education discusses recent research into how well we learn while multitasking. If you have the Diigo toolbar installed and active in your web browser, you’ll see my highlighting as well as class discussions of the article.
UPDATE: This site is scheduled for a complete redesign over the Spring 2012 semester. Check back later for new and improved resources!
This site will provide resources for college students who use digital tools for school, work, and play.
The site was previously used to host class blogs for Amy Goodloe's WRTG 1150 and WRTG 2090 classes at CU Boulder, but those blogs are no longer available. You can find some featured student work from those classes here on the main blog.