Temple University gave 11 faculty members $1,000 each to create a digital alternative to a traditional textbook. The goal of this pilot project was to demonstrate the learning benefits of working with primary sources and other relevant materials and to also help students save money on textbooks.
Kristina M. Baumli, a lecturer in Temple’s English department offered the following summary of the project’s pedagogical benefits:
By requiring students to grapple with primary sources and find their own journal articles, she said, she could teach in a way that emphasized process rather than memorization of facts in a book.
I really don’t enjoy Country Music and I am not one to wax or wain over the “good old days” BUT the message of this song is so significant that I wanted to pass it on.
In an interview with the Chronicle of Higher Education-Wired Campus blogger Jeffery Young, Rafael Reif, MIT’s provost stated:
My point is that for a while I view this as augmenting the education you get on a residential model. And yes, it may threaten, and if it does the residential model has to get better. Our objective is to actually use MITx to even increase further what we do on campus, to make it stronger and to be able to resist and survive and do very well in this potential disruptive situation.
To those who are stuck in the delivery mode of educational content MITx and all other forms of online learning or mobile will be a threat. To those who view online and mobile learning technologies as tools that can be used enhance learning this will be an opportunity to learn from the best and radically improve the academy. Well positioned and implemented mobile and online technologies can shift the delivery of content to outside of class (where it belongs) allowing the instructors and students to use valuable class time to go deeper and explore the application and integration of that content in meaningful ways.
Helping students to assess high volumes of information that are available through many digital means and also helping them make the meaningful connections which are essential to learning are a fundamental part of the roles instructors must play in 21st century learning environments.
In the December quarter, Apple’s iPhone business generated $24.4 billion of revenue. Microsoft’s whole company, meanwhile, from Windows to Office to servers to XBox, generated $20.9 billion.
And if you are really counting just how far Apple is ahead of Microsoft then you appreciate knowing that:
Apple’s business (in Q4) is more than twice the size of Microsoft’s–$46 billion to $21 billion–and more than twice as profitable: $17 billion to $8 billion.
Perhaps the following clip of Steve Balmer “dissing” the iPhone in 2007 will clearly demonstrate just how wrong Microsoft has been when it comes to the Internet…which is obviously a lot more than just email:
What does Apple excelling and Microsoft have to do with Education? A great deal if you consider why Apple has been so successful. Apple’s success isn’t attributed to a just an efficient user interface it can be attributed to the fact that they understand that people want to be able to access EVERYTHING all the time and from everywhere and the iPhone, and now the iPad allow one to do this. All the world’s information can be accessed from the palm of your hand. Microsoft isn’t the only business to miss this point. Research in Motion (RIM) the makers of the Blackberry also missed this point and back in 2008 they release a direct competitor to the iPhone 3G which was a complete miss because it didn’t even have wifi. Back in 2008 I wrote a blog post which pointed out that RIM assumed that Apple’s success was attributed to the touch interface and not seamless web access so they copied that functionality and offered the Blackberry Storm…which failed horribly. It looks like I was right…RIM’s global market share has dropped from around 87% in 2007 to 14% by the end of 2011.
Since some of the world’s most successful technology companies have missed the power of mobile and ubiquitous access to all things digital, there should be no surprise that Academia for the most part is slow to embrace this opportunity as well. Fortunately, there are some academics who see this exciting opportunity to prepare their students for the future. Bill Rankin the Director of Educational Innovation at Abilene Christian University offers the following line of thinking to encourage us to seize the opportunity that we now have before us.
With ubiquitous access to information the greatest challenge of the digital information age is assessing information. A google search of the term “digital age” yields just over 56 million hits. Looking at the 56 million results spending just 5 seconds on each and reading for 16 hours a day, 365 days a year, it would take a person approximately 76 years to look at each of result. This is an overwhelming amount of information is much than a person would have encountered in an entire career 50 years ago. We also know that much of this information will not even be valid or useful. So to reiterate the challenge we face in the digital information age is accessing information.
Then if we imagine our primary jobs as a professors is to serve information, are we helping solve the current informational problem or make it worse?
And given the vast complexity of the informational network, if we insist on our centrality, does that establish or harm our credibility as professors?
If assessing information – and the wisdom & experience that requires – is the central challenge of the current informational age, are professors more or less necessary?
The direction, guidance and mentoring of a caring professor has never been more important. We live in a world filled with so much information and so much of it comes at us noise. Helping our learners filter out the noise and helping them make meaningful connection that lead to learning and growth has never been more important. It has also never been easier to do this.
