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IAS > My Day > Categories

3/24/2009

Where are you on the Transformation Continuum?
Jim Vanides, who handles HP Innovations in Education Grants, has recently shared his keynote speech on what he has learned about emerging innovations in teaching with technology in higher education.  You can find it online - a short voice-over vodcast presentation or a .pdf of the presentation.
 
He talks about the "Generation 2020 - the 12 year olds today who by 2020 could be working at a high tech company like HP... or an under/un-employed young adult who uses technology to support their own small business. 
 
He wonders if we have given our professors a portfolio to redesign the learner experience in our classes...  where "teaching, learning and technology intersect" and learning becomes:
  • Engaging – enhances learning outcomes through self-directed, project-based, experiential curricula
  • Personal – customizes lessons to the unique needs and capabilities of the individual student
  • Collaborative – taps the youth penchant for teaming to create interactive and richer learning experiences
  • Connected – extends reach of teaching talent and access to high quality resources
  • Anywhere – supports distance learning to bridge geographic divides
  • Anytime – enables 24x7 learning to reach those balancing work and study

Here's what he learned from the grantees' results:

  1. The bottom line / punch line: when you combine exemplary teaching with the right technologies to create a new learning experience that would not have been possible otherwise, that’s when then magic happens – and student achievement increases.
  2. If you simply add technology to a classroom with no intent to change instructional practices, or where the instructional practices are not optimal (lecturing, for example), then you don’t get the intended effect
  3. If you take the best instructors but don’t equip them, then there is only so far they can go to create rich learning experiences for their students

So where are you on Vanides' "transformation continuum"?  It starts with "I lecture, you listen," moves up to "I talk AND show, and you listen AND watch/transcribe" (also known as Death by Powerpoint), upward from there to students as creators (not just consumers) of knowledge... and on.  Take a look at his presentation of a framework of a transformation continuum - both transformation in teaching and transformation of learning.

Posted at 5:21 PM by Hollingsworth, Randolph | Category: March 2009 | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

3/5/2009

Data-sharing to overlay real space in the classroom and in the hallways - who will design it?
What do you think of using mobile technologies for educational and other student engagement purposes here at UK?  Can we really do it?  Do we have the infrastructure in our network - room in our department budgets - or the culture to design strategies for its use by faculty and staff?  UKIT offers UK Mobile as an optional way to communicate with/among students via phone text messaging - and the Emergency Management folks have their Early Alert... Definitely, use of mobile technologies to access and contribute to NetworkBlue will be critical to its success.
 
Check out what 2 Stanford U students developed (via their company, Terribly Clever Design) and implemented for free - a Mobile Web Client that lets students access their university email, contacts, calendar, class schedules, registration and more.  Duke University has adapted this application suite for their DukeMobile initiative.  There are more mobile applications initiatives around: University of Cincinnati, University of Maryland-Eastern Shore,  as well the now-famous Abilene Christian University which was the first to distribute free iPhones to their incoming freshman class in order to launch their mobile connection initiative.  (NOTE: there is a combination of staff and faculty who lead this effort at ACU - housed within the teaching and learning center - and it is an English professor who is the Director of Mobile Learning Research).  For more see also the Chronicle's Wired Campus series on Mobile College Apps.
 
I'm sure we can roll something out similar here that combines various support services (including the library) and engagement activities (e.g., using NetworkBlue during summer conferences for the incoming freshmen).  My question is:  Are UK faculty ready to design the strategies - and research the effectiveness - of use of mobile technologies in the classroom?
Posted at 9:59 AM by Hollingsworth, Randolph | Category: March 2009 | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

3/2/2009

Why we should read Through the Looking Glass again - running as fast as we can, we're just standing still
Have you read the mathematician and author Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass? The Red Queen seems ridiculous but she speaks volumes of truth to us Kentuckians when she says: "Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that." 
 
In their most recent blog post on iMedia, the KSTC warns us that we are part of a larger national trend backwards.  So, as Kentuckians are running hard to keep up and maybe even become even with the nation's averages, we aren't even standing still - we're falling behind.  Read especially page 10 on Higher Education Attainment (% of adults aged 25-34 with a tertiary degree) of the new report from the European-American Business Council's Information Technology & Innovation Foundation "The Atlantic Century: Benchmarking EU & US Innovation and Competitiveness" (February 2009).
 
There you will see that the US is trending doward - with almost no increase in higher education attainment percentages since 1999 - and that we are losing ground compared to other nations.  Russian, Canada, Japan and South Korea lead the US by nearly 30%. With the lowest in overall growth rate, and of all nations that measure this characteristic of a robust economy, the US is standing still while others are running ahead.  The University of Kentucky must run even twice as hard.
Posted at 10:10 AM by Hollingsworth, Randolph | Category: March 2009 | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)