By Claude Almansi
Editor, Accessibility Issues
ETCJ Associate Administrator
[Note: This announcement is from a post (6 Apr. 2011) by Elizabeth Stark in the A2k listserv.]
The Berkman Center at Harvard University and Stanford Law School are pleased to announce a new initiative in which we invite the world to submit their ‘Ideas for a Better Internet.’ We are seeking out brief proposals from anyone with ideas as to how to improve the Internet. Students at Harvard and Stanford will work through early next year to implement the ideas selected. Interested parties should submit their ideas at http://bit.ly/i4bicfp by Friday, April 15. Please spread the word far and wide, and follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/Ideas4BetterNet.
—————————————————————————————— Ideas For A Better Internet
The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University and Stanford Law School are pleased to announce ‘Ideas for a Better Internet,’ a joint initiative aimed at fostering innovation around the most pressing issues currently facing the Internet. We invite anyone — interested individuals, scholars, entrepreneurs, organizations, and others with great ideas — to submit a proposal. Continue reading →
I’m a chronic reader of The Chronicle of Higher Education. Part scholarly journal, part newspaper and gossip column and help wanted advertising, each week its reporting brings to me the doings and thinking of faculty, students, academic administrators and education officials and accrediting agencies and all the shapers of academia in the colleges and universities in the US and around the world.
Lately I’ve been bemused by that 375-billion dollar question asked in the October 3, 2008 issue:
“The 375-Billion Dollar Question: Why Does College Cost So Much?”
The article itself never really gets around to answering the question. But each issue of the Chronicle provides pieces of the answer—and often analyses that are quite convincing.
Here is the answer of Honor Jones, a student. Her piece in the May 8, 2008 Chronicle is titled “Invest in People, Not Buildings.”
“Everywhere I hear the sound of dump trucks. It’s my fourth year at the University of Virginia, and they haven’t stopped building since I got here. A new commerce school, a new theater. If UVA is any example of the state of public education in general, we need to evaluate our priorities before another brick gets bought.”
In his “Meditation on Building” in the October 20 Chronicle faculty member David Orr paints this grim picture:
“It is estimated that the construction, maintenance, and operation of buildings in the United States consumes close to 40 percent of the country’s raw materials and energy and is responsible for about 33 percent of our CO2 emissions, 25 percent of our wood use, and 16 percent of our water use. In 1990, 70 percent of the 2.5 million metric tons of non-fuel materials that moved through the economy were used in construction.
“Further, by one estimate we will attempt to build more buildings in the next 50 years than humans did in the past 5,000. Most of this development will be driven by individuals operating in a market system that does not account for losses of farmland, forests, wetlands, or biological diversity — or for the human need for community.”
So: to students—some thoughtful students—and to faculty—some ecologically sensitive faculty—the university invests in buildings, not people, not the environment. The counter, of course, might well be: how else does the university house its students and the apparatus it needs for learning? How would the critics provide spaces for instruction, for housing, for study, for recreation? Are there alternatives to the buildings, or are the critics beneficiaries of the structures they deplore?
Which brings us to the question of the new information and communication technologies and how to bring their benefits to the university.
Xavier University’s answer is typical: build a building around the new technologies, and have the students come to the building to use them.
From the Chronicle, January 1,2008:
“A $28-million building called the Learning Commons will be erected to house the organization and serve as a center for various educational programs. Users will be able to get technical help, use multimedia software at any one of a bank of computers, view the library’s online holdings, and have their reference questions answered.
“The library, which will be attached to the new building, is being refashioned as simply a warehouse for books.”
The Xavier officials, of course, could not have seen the October 17, 2008 issue of the Chronicle and the story headlines “Colleges Struggle to Keep ‘Smart Classrooms’ Up to Date,” which describes such a “learning commons” shared by the University of Colorado at Denver, Metropolitan State College of Denver, and the Community College of Denver.
“Professors who hold classes there say that years of financial neglect have left the smart classrooms nearly unusable.”
Xavier, then, might find that its $28-million is only the beginning of its commitment to keep its Commons smart and usable.
We need—need desperately—a new Learning Commons: a new Agora.
There are those who point out that we already have such a commons in the Internet itself. It is a worldwide commons that need not be enclosed in buildings: indeed, its possibilities for serving students and teachers and researchers are limited when it is enclosed.
The new Agora of the Internet is classroom, lecture hall, library, and students can take the Agora with them and listen to lectures and read books and engage in dialog with teachers and students who are scattered in time and space.
MIT, Yale, Stanford, Rice have put syllabi and lectures online.
David Wiley, then at Utah State, let unenrolled students take one of his online courses, and gave them his own unofficial certificates to show employers: this as a public service. And Stephen Downes and George Siemens allowed more than 2,000 unofficial students to take their online course “Connectivism and Connected Knowledge.”
There is a new Agora in the process of creation, a new Commons. And it will flourish free of the constraints of buildings, and, if we let learning move to where it is needed, we will enrich the lives of all those who can’t find their way to our buildings, or can’t afford the price of admission.
Harry Keller: "I read that the virus can remain viable on hard surfaces for as long as 12 hours. " ("My Life in LA County During COVID-19: March 22"). Harry Keller: "People are working feverishly on [COVID-19] cures and vaccines. Until they arrive, we might as well be in the world a century ago" ("My Life in LA County During COVID-19: March 20").
John Mark Walker: "If educational communities can continue to push platform integration and content portability, in the future, students may be able to design their own personalized degrees from smaller, modular chunks that cross institutional barriers" ("MOOCs Are Dead. Long Live MOOCs!"). Richard Koubek, provost of LSU Baton Rouge: “Our vision is LSU, anywhere, anytime, and that physical boundaries would not define the boundaries of this campus.... You’re not going to get there incrementally. You have to change the paradigm” ("Successful Online Programs Require a Paradigm Shift"). Bryan A. Upshaw: "Most teachers already have the resources to videoconference. If they have a smartphone, tablet, or computer, then they probably have everything they need!" ("Bring the World to Your Classroom: Videoconferencing").
Judith McDaniel: "The nature of online education is that it removes me, the instructor, from the center of the learning process and allows the students to learn from me and from one another" ("Creating Community: Part 3 – Hard Conversations in an Online Classroom – Heart of Darkness").
Tim Fraser-Bumatay: "Although the format leaves us far-removed physically, the online forum has its own sense of intimacy" (Judith McDaniel, "Creating Community: Part 3 – Hard Conversations in an Online Classroom – Heart of Darkness").
Ryan Kelly: "For me to be able to work with people clear across the country for an extended period of time opened me up to new things" (Judith McDaniel, "Creating Community in an Online Classroom: Part 1 – Getting to Know You").
Daniel Herrera: "As a Mexican American, I know that words of identity are powerful; so to discuss white privilege with my professor and classmates in a face-to-face class would have been terrifying and impossible" (Judith McDaniel, "Creating Community: Part 2 – Hard Conversations in an Online Classroom – Othello"). Camille Funk: "Instructional design is an emerging profession and in the midst of a renaissance. There is a need to structure and develop this growing field" (Stefanie Panke, "New Instructional Design Association in Higher Ed: An Interview with Camille Funk").
JD Pirtle: "Coding is learning to create and harness the power of machines, both near and far.... But coding isn’t really about machines, programming languages, or networks—it’s about learning new and powerful ways to think" (Stefanie Panke, "Wearable Tech on Your Preschooler? Technology Education and Innovation for Children").
John Wasko: "Here is the great thing. You don’t need any special set up or call center or anything like that. Just a smartphone. I use an iPhone 4. Works great. If we can develop mobile techniques to help these students, every university will knock on their door" (Lynn Zimmerman, "Social Media in TESOL: An Interview with John Wasko"). .
Katie Paciga: "It’s always better to use the technology to accomplish meaningful, child-centered goals related to communication — to consume information, to create new messages, and to communicate those messages to others" (Lynn Zimmerman, "Technology in Early Education: An Interview with Katie Paciga"). Lee Shulman: Whereas the traditional approach aims to achieve generalized findings and principles that are not limited to the particulars of setting, participants, place and time, the SoTL community seeks to describe, explain and evaluate the relationships among intentions, actions and consequences in a carefully recounted local situation (summary by Stefanie Panke in "ISSOTL 2013: ‘Doing SoTL Means You Never Have to Say You’re Sorry!’").
Jesse Stommel: "The course (and its participants) inspired our thinking about MOOCification, which basically means leveraging the best pedagogies of MOOCs in our on-ground and small-format online courses and laying the rest to waste."
Sean Michael Morris: "The MOOC has become something manageable, something we we can mine for data, and something that simply isn’t — and never was — all that innovative" (MOOC MOOC! The interview by Jessica Knott).
Curtis P. Ho: "The challenge will be to create and implement authentic learning in an online course. How authentic can learning be if we are confining it to a 15-week semester at a distance?" (A Conversation with Curtis Ho: AACE E-Learn SIG on Designing, Developing and Assessing E-Learning by Stefanie Panke.
Tom Evans: "We are ... using this MOOCulus platform as a learning tool for students taking Calculus at Ohio State.... However, any student, anywhere, can access MOOCulus, anytime, by logging into the site using their Google ID" (MOOCulus for Calculus Fun: An Interview with Tom Evans by Jess Knott).
Curt Bonk: “Today, anyone can learn anything from anyone at any time." "Students want feedback on everything they do. You know what happens when you give feedback on everything they do? You die” (Stone Soup with Curt Bonk: Armchair Indiana Jones in Action by Stefanie Panke). Daniel McGee: "Successful [Calculus I] students appeared to need a unified approach, which emphasized verbal situations, geometric figures, algebraic expressions and the relations between them" (Study Suggests the Need for an Intergrated Learning Styles Approach to Calculus by Jessica Knott).
Kathlyen Harrison and Michael Gilmartin: "We highly recommend [Triptico] for teachers that want to improve interactivity, foster competition, and engage students in the learning process" (Triptico: A Powerful and Free Instructional App).
Bert Kimura: "If paper and pencil testing is absolutely required in a class, it probably shouldn’t be offered as a DE class. Not today anyway" (Remote Proctoring: More Questions Than Answers). Cathy Gunn: "Traditional methods for effecting change at my institution aren’t getting us even to a trickle yet, let alone to thinking about or planning for a wave!" (How Will Traditional Leaders Fare in the Wave of Open Courses?) Janet Buckenmeyer: "It takes more time to design and develop the [online] course. It takes more time to monitor students in an online course.... How are faculty compensated in terms of workload and pay for the additional work an online course requires? How many students should be placed in an online course?" (A Talk with Janet Buckenmeyer on Issues in Online Course Development, by Lynn Zimmerman). Billy Sichone: "My phone has been a valuable asset as I can check the internet for information at any and every time. For instance, I once took an international trip to two countries in a row and the phone was my only source of assignment submissions etc. I did not miss out at all" (A Student’s View of an Open University: An Interview with Billy Sichone, by Stefanie Panke). Julia Kaltenbeck: "Seek ways to build and maintain your community! The community is the single most important success factor in crowdfunding and social payments. To put it simply: No community, no funding" (Julia Kaltenbeck: How Crowdfunding and Social Payments Can Finance OER, by Stefanie Panke). Jessica Ledbetter:
"What keeps me going is that I’m actually creating things I might not find the time to do otherwise. It’s nice to be able to learn with others and see what they’re doing. I always learn by looking at others’ code" (Open Learning at P2PU: An Interview with Jessica Ledbetter, by Stefanie Panke). Susan Murphy: "We are all so afraid that we're going to miss out on something, so we just skim and scan and re-post without really taking time to consider the source. We sometimes forget that there are real people behind the avatars. And that it's worth getting to know more about them" (The Human Face of Twitter: An Interview with Susan Murphy, by Jessica Knott). Jessica Knott: "While a lot of these younger students are pretty gung ho to go forth and innovate technologically, they will be stymied in many cases by an aging infrastructure and restrictive technology rules. Perhaps even by the culture of co-workers who discourage them from using tech in their teaching" (An Interview with Jessica Knott: Teaching an Online Class on Course Development). Emily Hixon: "If a teacher thinks that she/he is going to be able to talk 'at' students and they will learn, she is mistaken. Teachers must be prepared to engage students and use technology to support an interactive, meaningful approach to learning" (Integration of Pedagogy and Technology in Teacher Education: An Interview with Emily Hixon, by Lynn Zimmerman). Parry Aftab: "Unless we can make the technology safer and provide the right skills to use it responsibly and teach cyber-self-defense, we can’t expect students to use it, enjoy it or benefit from it. We owe it to the kids" (Bonnie Bracey Sutton, "Cyberbullying: An Interview with Parry Aftab"). Nancy Willard: "It sure does not help us in transitioning to Web 2.0 if the news is that cyberbullying is at an epidemic level. But it isn’t. And my approach will demonstrate the positive norms of students, which should also translate to greater willingness to also use these technologies for instruction" (Bonnie Bracey Sutton, "Cyberbullying: An Interview with Nancy Willard").
Marc Prensky: "Instead of just spending, and often wasting, billions of dollars to create things that are new, let’s try harder to fix what we have that’s already in place" (Simple Changes in Current Practices May Save Our Schools). Spotlight Archives
By Claude Almansi
John Mark Walker: "If educational communities can continue to push platform integration and content portability, in the future, students may be able to design their own personalized degrees from smaller, modular chunks that cross institutional barriers" (
Richard Koubek
Judith McDaniel
Tim Fraser-Bumatay: "Although the format leaves us far-removed physically, the online forum has its own sense of intimacy" (Judith McDaniel, "
Ryan Kelly: "For me to be able to work with people clear across the country for an extended period of time opened me up to new things" (Judith McDaniel, "
Daniel Herrera: "As a Mexican American, I know that words of identity are powerful; so to discuss white privilege with my professor and classmates in a face-to-face class would have been terrifying and impossible" (Judith McDaniel, "
Cathy Gunn: "Traditional methods for effecting change at my institution aren’t getting us even to a trickle yet, let alone to thinking about or planning for a wave!" (
Educational Technology and Change Journal 