Online/Distributed Learning
7 Things You Should Know About
Consider this blog post an advertisement of sorts for a great resource I think anyone interested in educational technology should be reading whenever they get the chance!
Educause Learning Initiative: 7 Things You Should Know About
The “7 Things You Should Know About…” series provides concise information on emerging learning technologies. Each brief focuses on a [...]
The Future of Video in Education
In a New Media Consortium web conference tomorrow entitled The Future of Video in Education, Dr. Marni Baker Stein, Director of Program Development at the College of Liberal and Professional Studies, will be speaking about our innovative use of open source video on the Penn LPS Commons using Kaltura.
Our “revolutionary video project” involved the delivery [...]
3 Tips for Interactive Web Conference Design
Faculty and staff at the College of Liberal and Professional Studies (LPS) have been using web conferencing software for the delivery of live lectures in online courses and web-based orientation and information sessions for the past three years. As more folks at Penn start using web conferencing tools, I wanted to share some of what [...]
Online Workshop Teaching: Shouting down a deep well
On Monday I taught my first hands-on workshop completely online using Penn Libraries’ new Adobe Connect room. I chose to teach Excel Pivot Tables under the logic that anyone interested in pivot tables would be comfortable enough with juggling multiple windows and handling sound problems. This was a good assumption – the seven participants handled [...]
eTextbooks for the iPhone?
Tech blogs were buzzing last week with the news that CourseSmart had just released “eTextbooks for the iPhone“, an iPhone app which allows student and instructor subscribers to access their CourseSmart eTextbook. Seems fewer students want to carry around backpacks full of textbooks. Go figure.
Founded in 2007 and supported by six higher education publishers, CourseSmart [...]
New report on the effectiveness of online learning
The US Department of Education released a new report on 6/26/09 concerning the effectiveness of online learning. This report is a meta-analysis which analyzes the results of prior studies.
The attention-grabbing headline of this report states, “The meta-analysis found that, on average, students in online learning conditions performed better than those receiving face-to-face instruction. The difference [...]
Facebook for Language Practice
Like the social network 2nd Life, Facebook has gained in popularity not only among recreational users but also among educators and their students. Traditionally, members use Facebook to update personal profiles and notify their friends about each other. However, we now see Facebook being used in language classes to create communities of online learners who [...]
Student privacy in a public world
In a previous post, I described some free, commercial tools that instructors and students can use for creating web sites for course projects. But planning a web project requires more than just finding the right technology platform. As an instructor, you need to consider what type of material is – and is not [...]
Product Tutorials Can Provide Project Ideas
Some companies go beyond the norm when they produce tutorials for their products. More than just basic how-to information, some tutorials provide suggestions for applications and instructions for how to accomplish specific tasks using their products. Apple Computer is particularly good at this, and their “Productivity Lab” section of the science website offers short videos [...]
NMC Symposium on New Media & Learning – Online
The New Media Consortium (NMC) is hosting an online symposium March 24-26, 2009 that looks like it will be very good:
The 2009 NMC Symposium on New Media and Learning, the thirteenth in the NMC’s Series of Virtual Symposia, will explore the impact of new media on teaching, learning, research, and creative expression, especially in higher [...]
