Higher Education

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February 22, 2012 | 12:46 PM | By

What’s On the Horizon in Higher Education

Flickr: Dexterwas

How will college life be different in five years than it is today? In its recently released 2012 NMC Horizon Report on Higher Education, New Media Consortium predicts there may be more gesture-based computing, and lots of inter-connected (and Internet-connected) objects packed with useful information.

Video games will become more commonplace in classrooms, and Big Data will drive big decisions on the part of students, faculty, and the foundations and companies in the education sphere.

The Horizon Report crystallizes a lot of what we’re witnessing in education. But one notable category isn’t addressed in this otherwise comprehensive report: how open education resources — mostly free, customizable, content — is disrupting higher ed, allowing teachers to create their own textbooks, and changing state policy on using print books (more on this later.) And in that vein, the legacy of Stanford’s free online classes, which attracted tens of thousands of learner, and the evolution of MIT’s certification of its free online classes, which leads us to question how “informal learning” will affect the value of the traditional college degree.

What the report does focus on are six technologies to watch, categorized in the near, middle, and foreseeable future. The report’s Key Trends enumerates this in its summary:

1. People expect to be able to work, learn, and study whenever and wherever they want to.

2. The technologies we use are increasingly cloud-based, and our notions of IT support are decentralized.

3. The world of work is increasingly collaborative, driving changes in the way student projects Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Culture, Learning Methods, Research, Tech Tools, Higher Education, NMC Horizon Report
February 15, 2012 | 3:30 PM | By

College Students Embrace Meme Madness

By Dan Reimold

College memes are suddenly invading the Facebook streams of students at schools throughout the U.S., Canada, and parts of Europe. As The Cherwell, Oxford University’s student newspaper, explains, the meme is “an idea or behavior that spreads through a culture by imitation. Internet memes follow this principle, humorous images are copied and re-captioned, concisely describing or satirizing the activity of an individual or group.”

Building on its burgeoning popularity in recent years on sites such as Reddit and 4chan and via viral creations like LOLcats and Rickrolling, the Internet meme has been rapidly and rabidly adopted by undergraduates since the start of last week.

A rash of student media reports and social media chatter confirm that undergraduates’ online experiences are now hovering between “meme madness” and full-blown “meme mania.” Last Friday, Syracuse University sophomore Bob O’Brien tweeted, “The ‘College Meme Page’ frenzy is unlike anything I can remember on Facebook. Seems every school is discovering it at once.”

In a recent post, the University of Iowa online student outlet The Hook Up similarly stated, “It’s not often that such a phenomenon takes off running with such fury and so little impetus … Students are now meme-ing like they’ve never memed before.”

Specifically, students are racing to start meme-focused Facebook pages for their schools before someone else claims them. The pages are generally not affiliated with student media or other

Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Culture, Higher Education, Social Media
February 6, 2012 | 7:00 AM | By

Do Students Have Copyright to Their Own Notes?

Flickr: Nazareth College

By Erica Perez, California Watch

California State University and University of California campuses are taking new steps to limit what students can do with their class notes: At least one CSU Chico student recently was reported to judicial affairs for selling notes to a website, while a newly updated UC Berkeley policy restricts how students share their notes with others.

The policies raise questions about whether instructors or students have copyrights to the notes students take in class. While the California Education Code prohibits students and others from selling class notes – and many campuses have policies that also ban unauthorized note-selling – critics say students, not instructors, own the copyright to their own notes.

Some university officials say faculty members have the right to protect their professional reputation – they don’t want inaccurate or low-quality notes to be attributed to them. But others say the university policies are restricting students’ free speech.

“Given the amount of money students are paying to go to school right now, to … confront them with these policies and say, ‘You don’t even have the right to use your own notes any way you want,’ seems to be the wrong message to be sending,” said Jason M. Schultz, assistant clinical professor of law at UC Berkeley and director of the university’s Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic.

The CSU and UC systems have made efforts to shut down private note-selling websites for some time. As early as 1999, the note-selling website Versity.com sparked officials’ furor at UC Berkeley. In fall 2010, CSU sent a cease-and-desist order to NoteUtopia, which allows students to upload course notes, study guides and outlines to a website, then set a price and earn cash for their work.

“There’s a First Amendment issue as well. If I take notes in class, and I want to share them, that’s speech.”

More recently, both UC and CSU have sent cease-and-desist letters to Notehall, a note-selling website owned by Santa Clara-based Chegg.

CSU sent its letter to Chegg in January after at least one student was reported to student judicial affairs for selling notes through the service. CSU Chico’s student newspaper, The Orion, reported Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Learning Methods, Tech Tools, Higher Education
January 27, 2012 | 11:02 AM | By

What Does Your School Know About You?

Flickr:SadieDiane

In the information age, data will follow us from the time we first walk into kindergarten to well past retirement. As data is used to guide us in making all kinds of decisions, from what we consume to what health plan we follow, it’s also becoming a powerful tool in education.

As more schools and colleges use algorithms to determine a student’s path, the Amazon- and Netflix-style practice of data mining will soon be the norm in how schools and students operate.

But that might not be such a bad thing. Just as the two online behemoths — Amazon and Netflix — are able to use software to predict books, music, and movies you might like based on your past preferences, schools are using data to place students not only in their appropriate learning level, but even to recommend what subject to major in.

“What we’ve seen in the consumer and healthcare world that’s made such a huge impact is what happens when you get data to the front lines.”

In K-12 education, it’s happening in classrooms and computer labs in both rich and blue-collar schools. In Covington Elementary, for example, the affluent Silicon Valley community where each fifth-grade student has a laptop and is learning math using Khan Academy videos and quizzes, teachers can track each student’s progress in real time on their iPads. When a student is stuck in one subject area, teachers can help the student one-on-one.

Likewise, at Rocketship’s Los Suenos Elementary school in a working class neighborhood in San Jose, teacher Alana Mednick can track her students’ progress based on how they score on their online computer games in their Learning Lab. And these examples are hardly rare these days.

On the college level, student data is being used for everything from recommending courses to picking majors. Austin Peay State University in Clarksville, Tenn., rolled out a program last year Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Culture, Tech Tools, data, Higher Education
December 26, 2011 | 1:30 PM | By

What’s Your Major? Working Toward the Uninvented Job

This week we feature the most popular MindShift posts of the year.

Flickr:Nazareth College

What kind of diploma will lead to the best jobs? Trends point toward business degrees, but it's anyone's guess.

By Ana Tintocalis

The U.S. unemployment rate is stuck at 9.1 percent. In that light, what are the “hot” majors among college students today? If you ask college counselors, it’s business degrees.

That’s because today’s business degrees cover a wider range of fields than every before — everything from accounting to advertising. But more importantly, business majors are more likely to get jobs after college, even in today’s fluctuating economy.

But as industries like technology, medicine, and science continue to make rapid advancements, an increasing number of college students are also signing up for degrees in engineering, computer science, biomedicine, and biological sciences.

Who’s to know what jobs will exist 10 years from now?

According to Career Builder, the most promising majors will be related to cyber-security specialists, mobile application developers, social media managers, stem cell researchers, robotics technicians and simulation engineers.

These jobs didn’t exist 10 years ago. Who’s to know what jobs will exist 10 years from now?

Cathy Davidson, author of Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the

Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Culture, Higher Education
December 23, 2011 | 9:31 AM | By

Will Informal Learning Carry the Same Weight as College Degrees?

Dave Herholz

You can learn anything you want on the Internet, so the adage goes. But even if that’s true, even if it’s now easier than ever to learn about almost any subject online, there are still very few opportunities to gain formal recognition — “credit,” if you will — for informal learning done online.

In September, the Mozilla Foundation launched its Open Badges Project, an effort to develop a technology framework that would make it easier to build, display and share digital learning badges. These badges are meant to showcase and recognize all kinds of skills and competencies — subject matter expertise as college degrees are meant to indicate for example, as well “soft skills” that aren’t so easily apparent based on traditional forms of credentialing. (We examined some of the technology infrastructure of the Open Badges Project in a story earlier this year.)

Having some way to highlight other skills, competencies, and experiences is important in setting one potential hire apart from another.

When the Mozilla Foundation announced the Open Badges Project, it was in conjunction with the MacArthur Foundation and HASTAC, as “Badges for Lifelong Learning” is the theme of this year’s Digital Media and Learning Competition, an annual contest that supports research of how digital technologies are changing the way we learn and work. On stage at the formal unveiling of the Open Badges Project were representatives from not just Mozilla and the MacArthur Foundation, but from the Departments of Education, Labor and Veterans Affairs, from NASA as well as from other businesses.

When the Open Badges Project was first announced, some educators questioned whether “badges” were a form of gamification of education, just another way, they said, to force learners to Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Culture, Learning Methods, badges, DML, Higher Education, Open Badges Projects