Month: September 2004

I received an email from a student that has started bothering me. The student is enrolled in a “technology for teachers” course at another institution that uses our book. The student seems to have been searching the Internet for resources associated with the book and located our personal development web site (we maintain a protected site that we use to develop material related to the book before we offer the material to our publisher and we also make this material available to those who purchase the book). The student wrote to ask me if I would grant access to the web site because he cannot afford to purchase the book.

I would like to think that I am very sensitive to the cost issue and I have written often about the factors that have created this situation. I also understand the financial difficulty facing some students as they struggle to obtain an education. As a parent, I understand the costs associated with sending a son or daughter to college. I wonder what assumptions students make about those of us who spend some of our time writing. Do they understand that one motive may be to help our own children attend college? Are those assumptions somehow different than assumptions made about the folks who spend some of their time frying hamburgers, building cars, or teaching classes.

I happen to feel that the Internet may allow a cost-effective way to bring down the cost of books. I would like to see short $29 books allowing a fixed time access to a much larger body of online content. Access to the online content might exist for a year. After that period of time, an additional fee would be charged. Reselling the book in this hybrid approach would not allow continued use of the web material and thus deliver a lower quality (but cheaper) product than the original purchase.

The high cost of books is simply not the responsibility of the publishing companies or the authors. We have to make a return on our investment of time or resources on the first sale. Your book store makes all of the profit after that. The book store makes considerably more money for putting the book back on the shelf that I received for writing the book in the first place.

I provided the student a way to access resources online. I should have suggested that he ask the book store for a free used copy.

When we write about integrating technology, we purposefully focus on local projects. We feel this brings a level of reality to our advocacy. It seems a bit unfair to collect cool ideas from many locations and give the impression that this body of work should be produced in any given school.

Attempting to convince future teachers that it is reasonable to expect certain kinds of projects is an important goal. However, it may also be important to recognize the truly exceptional work that is done in a few schools. Consider the following example from Jasper Place High School in Edmonton, Alberta – The Eye.

An advantage of following a few blogs is that you have the opportunity to tap into what collection of people who are willing to scout out topics and events that are interesting. This is great as long as your personal interests overlap in some way with those who write the blogs.

One blog I follow is Andy Carvin’s Waste of Bandwidth. Andy has had some very interesting positions and seems to be able to get to some very interesting events.

Today, Andy reports from the MIT Technology Review Emerging Technologies Conference and describes the keynote presentation of Tim Berners-Lee. The topics range from the origins and future of the web to the MIT Open Courseware Initiative.

I really have to hand it to Andy. He does a great job of describing the events he covers.

Sara Armstrong and David Warlick offer an explanation of what educators mean when they suggest we need to help students develop 21st century skills. The thing I like about this article is that it provides some examples of technology tools that are appropriate to these skills and examples of how the tools would be applied.

Today and tomorrow, the University of North Dakota is serving as host to the Beyond Boundaries conference. This regional conference focuses on the various applications of technology in higher education. I tend to forget that educational technology involves more that instruction/learning and it is different attending meetings with CIOs, registrars, library staff, and university housing people.

Today’s keynote presenter was Dr. Kenneth Green director of the Campus Computing Project. This project attempts to track trends in campus computing based on survey data. An annual summary has been generated since 1995. This seems to be the place university administratives types go to determine how their institutions rank as technology users. So, if you are in need of descriptive data on technology trends in higher ed, here is the resource for you.

One would think the National Center for Educational Statistics would be a good source for current information about technology use in K-12 education. Try a search at this site for “computer” or “technology” and the most recent studies are dated 2003 and are based on data collected in 2001.

So much for “evidence based” decision making.

We are in the process of revising “Integrating Technology …” for the purpose of releasing the 5th edition. In preparation for the revision, a number of faculty members are contacted and paid to offer comments on our existing book. The idea is to use this input to guide our work. It is a great concept in theory. In practice, we find that reviewers have a wide range of suggestions and many recommendations are contradicatory. Some want us to add material on distance education and some want us to cut back the material on Internet applications. Some want us to take out the “learning chapter” to save space and others say it is one of the most valuable chapters in the book. People have different personal priorities and work in situations making salient different issues.

An example – one reviewer noted that we were incorrectly using the terms collaborative and cooperative learning interchangeably. I admit that this is true. In an attempt to remediate my own ignorance, I googled “collaborative versus cooperative learning” to gain a sense of how important this issue is. Sure enough, several documents surfaced explaining the difference.

It appears that cooperative learning is intended to be more restrictive in meaning and applied to instructor designed tasks that ask students to work together in specified ways.

In contrast, collaborative learning emphasizes the group work which may involve sharing of responsibility and direction (e.g., a study group, on-line open forums).

Potentially, we should more carefully use the term cooperative learning when discussing group projects (typically following a structure specified by the teacher) and collaboration when discussing some of the naturally evolving benefits of discussion. When you write a book that is used by teachers early in their college education and also by graduate students, attention to terminology can be an issue. Perhaps the solution is for us to be more careful in how we use the words, but not take up space by explaining the nuances some note among the terms.

By the way, most documents we found on this topic point back to a document by (Pavitz).