education

A comment in the University of Lincoln’s Audio Production course blog demonstrates the value of public blogging in academia:

I am looking forward to beginning this course in September and have been finding these blogs very useful in providing a guide as to what sort of things to expect during my first year. Keep up the good work!

Thanks to Joss Winn for the tip.

From the March 2002 Newsletter of The North Texas Skeptics:

In the madrasa, the religious school, I watched and listened as the instructor related his view of the world to the students and the others present. Politics, personal relationships, nations, and the physical world were interpreted in the light of the speaker’s religious teachings. Hinduism and Buddhism were lumped together with that quaintly American religion called New Age. Pagan symbols invoke demons to do dirty work for cultists, and evolution is the root of much of this evil, the students were told. The speaker eventually got around to the Muslims. They, too, were worshipping a pagan god. Muslims! What kind of madrasa was this?

The author, John Blanton, apparently showed up for a special lecture by Richard Stepanek of the Alpha Omega Institute in Grand Junction, Colorado.

A study sponsored by the WiFi alliance reveals the following:

WiFi and college choice

• 90% of college students say Wi-Fi access is as essential to education as classrooms and computers
• 57% say they wouldn’t go to a college that doesn’t have free Wi-Fi
• 79% say that without Wi-Fi access, college would be a lot harder
• 60% agree that widely available Wi-Fi on campus is an indication that a school cares about its students

WiFi and where they use it

• 55% have connected from coffee shops and restaurants
• 47% from parks
• 24% from in their cars

WiFi in the classroom

• 55% have checked Facebook™ or MySpace™ and sent or received e-mail while using their laptop in class
• 47% have sent instant messages to a friend during class
• 44% used Wi-Fi to get a head start on an assignment before a class was finished

WiFi and linkbaiting statistics

• If forced to choose, 48% would give up beer before giving up Wi-Fi

Survey methodology: “In conjunction with the Wi-Fi Alliance, Wakefield Research surveyed 501 U.S. college students in September 2008. The sampling variation in this survey is plus or minus 4.3 percentage points.”

wp-edu, the WordPress for education mail list has launched. Join up, catch up on the archives, and set it up at your school.

Connect the dots: Boys vs. girls in US colleges and too many men in East Germany.

NPR : Back to School: Reading, Writing and Internet Safety

As students return to school in Virginia, there’s something new in their curriculum. Virginia is the first state to require public schools to teach Internet safety.

The CEO of NH’s first online-only, distance education high school expects about 700 students to enroll in its first semester, to start in January. So says a report at NHPR.

[Update: Keith pointed out that my small disclaimer at the end isn’t clear enough. This post is copied, stolen, cut and pasted in its entirety from Keith’s blog, ISTP Dad. I was glad to learn of the story, and this was meant to be ironic and funny.]

An editorial in the Washington Post is explicit about a topic close to my heart: students think plagiarism is fine, and teachers (high school? college?) realize that there’s not much point in assigning papers if they expect 100% original work.

…the educational system needs to acknowledge what the paper is today: more of a work product that tests very particular skills — the ability to synthesize and properly cite the work of others — and not students’ knowledge, originality and overall ability.

The comments on this editorial are worth a read as well. Not everybody agrees with the sentiment.

(Cut and pasted verbatim from ISTP Dad.)

Back in August Educated Nation offered the following top ten list of web tools for college students:

• Writely
• Soundslides
• Bluedot.Us
• eFax
• PDF Online
• Google Calendar
• Google Spreadsheets
• Bloglines
• Technorati
• mynoteIT

Not to be outdone, an anonymous-but-first-person story at Nextstudent identifies their top ten:

• Book Finder
• MynoteIT
• Ottobib
• Google Docs
• Tada List
• Meebo
• Wikipedia
• Zoho Show
• Google Reader
• Del.icio.us

Rebecca Nesson, speaking via Skype and appearing before us as her avatar in Second Life, offered her experiences as a co-instructor of Harvard Law School‘s CyberOne, a course being held jointly in a meatspace classroom and in Second Life, and open to students via Harvard Law, the Harvard Extension School, and to the public that shows up in Second Life.

Nesson has an interesting blog post about how it all works, but she also answered questions from the audience about why it works:

As a distance learning environment it’s head and shoulders above anything else because of levels and types of interactions possible versus any previous tool.

It’s a poor format for lectures, but a great format for discussions, so it really encourages conversation and discourse.

It’s a community that exists independent of the class meeting. In here we have much more of those liminal times when people are just hanging out. …We have more opportunities for interaction.

They don’t want to engage in chat with their professors in the classroom space, they want to chat with other students in their own space.

— from Eric Gordon’s presentation this morning.

Hey, isn’t that the lesson that smart folks have been offering for a while now: “Nobody cares about you or your site. Really.” How could learning environments not be subject to the same cluetrain forces affecting the rest of the world?

Students love IM. They love Google. They love FaceBook. What does your courseware matter to them?