“To better you’re education, you’re always gonna better your status.”

We still rely on myth to fuel the higher education system in this country. We base our policy decisions largely on the perceived truths of yesterday. This Public Agenda report prepared for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation shines a glaring light on the reality of college students’ lives in today’s America.

The number one reason for dropping out of school before earning a two or four year college degree is not being able to manage the stress associated with juggling work and school. The majority of these young adults work an average of 20-hours per week while taking on full course loads. Whether it’s because they’re not managing their time properly, or that tuition fees are too high, or perhaps because they weren’t properly prepared for the requirements of studying at a higher education level, the devastating fact is that not many are able to achieve academic success beyond high school. Since cash buys bread and a diploma can only promise the prospect of a better future, schooling takes the brunt of the downfall of today’s society.

“Many of the young people we interviewed believed that they could not afford not to work for the time it would take to complete a degree. They had to have a paying job to make ends meet. Far from being slackers, as some people imagine, they were often assuming responsibilities and financial burdens that traditional full-time college students do not have to shoulder. It is a test of maturity and perseverance that more affluent students are usually not required to face.” ~ Report 1

The report cites that over the last 25 years, college costs have risen by 400 percent while average household income has only climbed 150 percent, painting a undeniable picture of why higher ed isn’t a priority on middle Americans’ minds.

Location of teaching establishment was also cited as a huge obstacle for those who failed to complete their college studies. Many admitted that they found it difficult to access a college close enough to their home or work that offered classes at times that aligned with their work schedules.

“Among those who did not complete college, two-thirds say they selected their school primarily for its convenient location, nearly 6 in 10 because its schedule worked with theirs…”

Reading through the report, I couldn’t help but refer back to my experiences studying and teaching with educational technology. Why aren’t more students considering blended learning options? I understand that students just starting their college careers find the idea of face-to-face time with instructors comforting, which is why I’m not suggesting everyone take a look at fully online degree programs, but what about mixing a bit of online study with the bricks and mortar approach? Is my experience as a borderless student still out of the norm?

But, you know what? Why don’t we set all the fancy research results aside for a moment? I’ll even put my experiences in my pocket and practice opening my mind. Let’s have a listen to what the students had to say for themselves…

I didn’t realize how archaic email was until I saw what Wave can do! I first heard about it from David Wiley’s blog, and after posting the YouTube video of its unveiling to my Facebook profile I continued reading public reaction to it which led me to Jon Mott’s post in which he notes how closely the timing of the announcement fell to the launch of WolframAlpha. He also comments about how he thinks this might impact learners:

I’ve Seen the Future and the Future is Us (Using Google)

Based on an hour and 20 minute long video, Google Wave appears poised to dramatically improve on the Twitter model. Accordingly, the possibilities for enhanced interactions between learners are encouraging. And the ripples of the Wave (sorry, couldn’t resist) have profound implications. With Wave, entire learning conversations are captured and shared with dynamic communities of learners.

www.jonmott.com

I’ve included a link to the unveiling below.

I’m still wrapping my mind around the possibilities. I’m definitely one of the believers that this will be a huge revolution in the way we use technology to support communication…and…what is education if not the communication of ideas in the name of greater understanding.

We’ve been practicing a few things in the world of educational technology. We’ve been identifying possible uses of technology in education. We’ve been creating research studies that test these uses in practical settings. We’ve raised money to conduct these studies and we’ve been publishing lots and lots of conclusions about what we think the outcomes of our experiments mean. Sometimes we even develop wonderful technology-enhanced tools like games and content management systems that support and even enhance learning but after the studies are done, and the funding is tapped out, where do these tools go? As this video discusses, lots of these tools get ‘parked’. They end up sitting on our office shelves, stored on our external hard drives or perhaps posted on our personal websites. But that’s as far as our contribution goes. Perhaps because there’s not enough money. Perhaps because there’s not enough time. Perhaps because…no one’s listening.

Where are the effective mechanisms that enable practitioners to store the vital information that we’re collecting about what works, what doesn’t, when what works actually works and when there’s no reason to even try?

Science published a special issue this January focusing specifically on education and technology in an effort to stimulate discussion on the subject. It brings to light the ever-growing importance of the long-term goal and continues to question the contribution that standardized tests make within our education system (the one in the US in this case). Progress in our understanding of how technology can work with us as we strive to become more educated, rather than work against us in a misconstrued attempt at updating today’s classrooms for the future is one of the major points addressed in this issue.

How do we share our great ideas? Pit stops are great, but one day soon, we’re going to run out of parking spots…and then what? Will we stop car production all together?

Whether you want your local students to have a way of meeting outside of the classroom, your distance learning students to remotely collaborate in their study groups or for you to conduct seminars online or have one-on-one conferences with your research students, the technology available to us today affords us with many free and easy solutions that connect people, and that allow for the sharing of videos and images as well as text and sound. The types of technologies focused on here are screen capture, screencast and screen share technologies along side video conferencing applications. These types of tools are more and more often being bundled together – so teach yourself what each technology does so that you can decide which ones are important to you.

In this post, I’m not going to go into great detail about the ways in which you could apply these technologies within an educational context. Instead, my intention is to build an evolving list of resources to which you can refer each time you find yourself looking for a new way to connect with your students (or to have them connect with each other).

Because the technologies below can seem similar to one another at first glance, it’s important to have as clear an idea as possible about what you want the technology to do for you. If you’re not sure exactly what it is you’re looking for, browse through the list and start to develop a familiarity with the capabilities of the tools. To help you get comfortable with their features, I’ve included links to demo videos and/or tutorials where they are available.

Just to clarify for those of you who might be unclear about the difference between Screen Capture vs. Screencast vs. Screen Share tools:

Creating a screen capture (a.k.a. ‘screenshot‘ or less eloquently as a ‘screen dump‘) is basically the process of taking a static (still) photo of your screen (great content to add to help documents and other instructional material that mix text with images). A screencast is a way for you to capture moving images (videos) of what you see on your screen and share them with other people so that they can see what you see (useful for demonstrating tools or for giving overviews of resources and course websites to distance learning/remotely located students). Participating in a screen share means to either have access to someone else’s computer or to give access to the other members of your group (lots of security issues arise in this scenario, but some people find the function useful).

Screen Capture / Screencast

Demo Video

Demo Video

Demo Video

Demo Video

Demo Video

Demo Video

Demo Video

Read more about Skitch here

Demo Videos & Tutorials

Read more about sni.ps here

Sample Uses Videos

Video Conference / Screen Share

Demo Video

Demo Videos

Demo Video

Overview

FAQs

Demo Video

About

FAQs

Demo Video

Also see their education program

Tutorials

Demo Video

And remember, if you’re a MAC user, you can easily take quick pictures (screen shots) of any part of your screen by simply pressing COMMAND SHIFT 4 and highlighting the area you want to capture. A .png file of your selection appears neatly on your desktop.

Have I missed a tool you want to share with others? Add a comment and let me know!

“It’s very dangerous to simply stereotype a whole generation, give it a label [and] put it to one side…”

Dr Ian Rowlands

Have you noticed that the concept of ‘information overload’ is becoming less popular? It seems it’s being replaced by the idea of the evolution of a ‘dumbed down society’. Now, this video is of a presentation given at the Open University, UK by Dr. Ian Rowlands of the Centre for Publishing at University College London. During the video, he discusses the idea of the Google Generation and how children who grew up immersed in a technology-rich environment are developing into a ‘new breed’ of student. I just have a question I wanted to release into the blogosphere – a question that came to me while watching the webcast:

Until recently, the argument was being put forth that in today’s world, the PhD is what the Masters degree was 15-20 years ago, and the Masters degree has the perceived value of the Undergraduate degree of the 1980′s. But, if society is ‘dumbing down’, then doesn’t that mean that reflective students are becoming a valuable commodity again? Or…are we becoming too ‘dumb’ to see the value all together?

If all teachers were like Sir Ken Robinson, I wouldn’t have started studying educational technology.

There is so much educational content freely available on the web that it can certainly seem challenging to know where to find the high quality materials from the reputable sources. Very often, when I work on the development of courses, module, programs, workshops, etc. that integrate some level of eLearning into the mix, I inevitably see teachers reach the point at which they realize how many more tools technology could enable them to provide to their students, but at the same time, how much time and energy and effort and know-how it would take to develop their learning resources. That’s my cue to start talking about reusable learning object (RLO) repositories!

Learning objects are quite tricky to define. I attempted to clarify the definition by creating my own learning object about learning objects. Have a look at it below:

In order for teachers to be able to ‘start off running’ when they initiate the development of a new eLearning initiative, I recommend browsing through the plethora of learning resources readily available online. It’s a much more empowering approach than reinventing the wheel. Besides, why don’t we focus on what we’re good at?! Why should an accounting professor be expected to learn the skills required to develop an online module teaching his or her students about the magic that is the balance sheet? Why not just tap into the global educational community and share with one another?

To help make the process of sharing a bit easier, I’ve put together a collection of learning object repositories that provide access to free materials. Have a look at the collection below and see if any of these digital libraries could help make your life a little easier!

Before I end this post, I just wanted to share the learning resource that I came across today while browsing. It’s a video entitled ‘Focus on Educational innovation‘ – part of the MIT World video library. It’s well worth watching.

Particularly Dick Yue’s presentation starting at 34 min 36 sec as he discusses the evolution and impact of MIT OpenCourseWare.

Or Shigeru Miyagawa as he talks about Star Festival – an initiative that injects support, resources and hope into urban schools in American to create the perfect tasting STEW of acceptance and integration! His talk starts at 55 min 29 sec.

And then there’s Henry Jenkins who talks to us about computer games and the extent to which their ubiquity has enabled them (or the gamers that play them!) to infiltrate into the classroom. Are video games trivial? Are they time wasters? Or, is there some pedagogic value to them? Have a look at what Henry has to say starting at 1 hr 12 min 10 sec. In particular, I found his statistics very revealing. For example, did you know that one third of MIT students surveyed admitted playing games that were not part of the instructional activities during classes!!

The question and answer session that starts at 1 hr 36 min 09 sec also broaches some interesting topics like, for example, what the difference is between the online resources for a course actually being taught to MIT students and the resources available through MIT OpenCourseWare for that same course.

Here’s the video below:

From: Virtually Scholastic