Conversations about all things educational, instructional, and technological in today’s culture and society and higher education.
It strikes me that there are WORLDS apart from what is now being Generation F (Facebook Generation), and the Fortune 500. The very first characteristic held by Gen F is that all ideas compete equally. Seems to me it is the rare organization in which this is true, unless it is one recently formed by younger people.
Review the complete list of 12 characteristics yourself http://tinyurl.com/c4vld5
and see if you can figure out how those of us teaching in MBA programs can help bridge this gap.
If you a fan of the remix culture like I am, you’ll love these two new sites which give you (and students!) the ability to create, mix, remix (audi0, video, powerpoint slides, music, narration, text, etc.) and share, download end embed, all online!
Make and remix posters, with animations, music, or video (or not) and share and embed them online. Check out a recent example from University of Mary Washington student who created a science poster for his psycholinguistics class. (Say good-bye to Death by Powerpoint!)
Take images, video, and royalty-free music and create your own video shorts with lots of pizazz! Files can be shared and downloaded. Check out Animoto’s education section with education case studies and student work.
The University of Mary Washington is certainly leading the way with UMW Blogs in showcasing what is possible in education with a blog publishing platform such as WordPress MU. Other pioneers include Penn State, Harvard, and UMass Amherst, (and of course, The College Blogs at Suffolk University!)
For those who may not have realized the relevance and power of blogs as self-service publishing platforms in higher ed, some good places to start are to explore the Wordcamp conferences (included the just-passed Northeast one) and (UMW) Jim Groom’s blog bavatuesdays, or (Penn State) Cole Camplese’s Learning and Innovation.
Below are some great examples of course blogs from UMW and UMass Amherst. Poke around for admiration and inspiration!
While assessing the recent state of the trend in the educational industry toward making video content more available to a wider audience, I stumbled on some pretty interesting sites on YouTube. These institutions have partnered with YouTube and have their own custom channels. Here are my top 10 in terms of content and design, in no particular order:
http://www.youtube.com/user/carnegiemellonu
http://www.youtube.com/user/MIT
http://www.youtube.com/user/stanforduniversity
http://www.youtube.com/user/USCCollege
http://www.youtube.com/user/ucberkeley
http://www.youtube.com/user/Dartmouth
http://www.youtube.com/user/NorthwesternU
http://www.youtube.com/user/OxfordSBS
http://www.youtube.com/user/HarvardKennedySchool
http://www.youtube.com/user/Northeastern
Yet another great video, Institutional Fear, presented at the 2008 ELI Educause Conference in the Fear 2.0 digi-drama session “Who’s Afraid of Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and the Big Bad CMS?” Session Abstract:
Web 2.0 tools have the power to transform education. Such a transformation requires that faculty, students, and institutions take risks. With those risks comes fear, which is often unarticulated. How do you tackle this fear and make real change? (Join us to face this fear together in a multimedia, interactive miniplay).
The four discussion-provoking videos in the session were created and presented by faculty and staff at the University of California, the University of Texas, the University of Mary Washington, Bryn Mawr College, Oberlin College, and Middlebury College.
For a look at pedagogy and practice, interested faculty might also want to read “Wikis and Podcasts and Blogs! Oh, My! What Is a Faculty Member to Do?” from last fall’s Connect.
In the meantime, enjoy “Institutional Fear”… Do You Fear It?
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If we begin to explore the issues and causes of stagnation in education, the students and the student experience are both central to the discussion. What is the student experience of the classical models of education that exist today? In what ways are today’s students unique, different from the past? Where can we get an insider look? How about a group of 200 Kansas State University students who made a YouTube video on the subject…
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Last fall, Professor of Cultural Anthropology Michael Wesh collaborated with 200 students who surveyed themselves and created this video summarizing “some of the most important characteristics of students today – how they learn, what they need to learn, their goals, hopes, dreams, what their lives will be like, and what kinds of changes they will experience in their lifetime”:
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What say you? Feel free to respond in the comments!
Travel back two years in time, way back to 2006. The read/write web, or “Web 2.0” (also synonymous with “connection, collaboration, and individual expression”), had finally attracted enough mainstream attention for Time magazine to name “You” Person of the Year in their year-in-review January ’07 issue. While the explosion of the read/write web has grown quickly from its humble beginnings, this rising tide of innovation (and opportunity) isn’t slowing, isn’t going to go any slower, and certainly shows no signs of stopping.
Have we caught up with Fair Use, the DMCA, and copyright law? Do we understand these changes, or do we fear them? Do we leverage this new revolution? How about inside the “hallowed halls of our institutions of higher education and learning”? Are we adapting? Or are we stagnating? The following short video was presented at the 2008 ELI Educause conference and more poignantly calls attention to some of these issues:
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Reading the Digital Natives blog as I usually do, I stumbled on an interesting post regarding a survey the group just completed about student opinions and experiences on the usefulness of instructional technology in college courses.
The survey covers all the latest technologies, from simply posting an interactive digital syllabus (with links to resources) to recorded lectures, podcasting, videos, blogs, wikis, and course websites. The overall responses were largely positive, with students who have actually been exposed to and thus used these technologies in their courses giving higher positive ratings to them than those who have not.
Rather than try to summarize it here, I suggest reading the post and viewing the report they have kindly posted for download at the end.
To learn more about the Digital Natives academic research team, visit their wiki pages.