Author: grabe

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).

I keep finding out that the Internet has exposed my computers to problems that I did not realize existed. Just as I would like to think I could take some pill to protect me from medical problems, I would like to believe the installation of some software (e.g., an antivirus package) would make my computers immune to everything. Reality continues to intrude on my fantasies.

As a general rule, it is probably better to be aware than naive. Here is good resource – techLearning summary of dangers and solutions to security problems.

The present political process makes a great case for the need to prepare citizens who are “information literate” – who can process information with an understanding of the potential biases of the source.

See CNN analysis of the “flip flop” issue.