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Ann writes
Ann’s comments on education, learning, and technology
The High Price of the Achievement Gap
Thomas Friedman has been sounding the alarm about US education for a while, and he notes in his April 21 NY Times article: …the 2006 Program for International Student Assessment that measured the applied learning and problem-solving skills of 15-year-olds in 30 industrialized countries, the U.S. ranked 25th out of the 30 in math and... »
Fair Use Bolstered by Student-Cheating Detection Service
Recently, I had written about some of the problems with the accuracy of the cheating detection service Turnitin which is used by about 6, 000 schools worldwide. There have also been legal issues raised about the intellectual property implications of storing student work in their data base. As reported by Wired, a recent court... »
Geo-Everything
In our latest April dispatch, we talked about two mid-range trends outlined in the Horizon Report with a 2-3 year time to adoption. One is the personal web, which consists of collections of tools, widgets, and services that make it easy to develop and organize dynamic online content. I personally use things like i-Google,... »
A step toward open-access
As someone who teaches evidence-based practice, I am well aware that a major barrier to those outside of academia or a large medical center is access to high quality research evidence. This news as reported by Wired is a small but significant step toward open access: Scientific publishing might have just reached a tipping point,... »
Challenging Plagiarism Detection Software
Inside Higher Ed reported that at this year’s Conference on College Composition and Communication, …a team from Texas Tech University presented data that challenged the plagiarism detection services in a new way. The team found that services that theoretically detect the same sorts of problems actually find (or don’t find) very different examples of possible... »
The Netbook Effect: How Cheap Little Laptops Hit the Big Time
Piggy-backing on our recent podcast on the 2009 Horizon report where we discussed mobile computing and the cloud, this article caught my eye Netbooks prove that the “cloud” is no longer just hype. It is now reasonable to design computers that outsource the difficult work somewhere else. The cloud tail is wagging the hardware dog. via... »
Reflections on Tenure
Spoiler alert: This is a personal reflection on my tenure experience, not an essay on the Rank, Promotion and Tenure process– I do have some thoughts on that which I will save for another time. The decision came last week and the answer was yes–I was awarded tenure. Anyone on a tenure track can surely... »
Student Expectations Seen as Causing Grade Disputes – NYTimes.com
Student Expectations Seen as Causing Grade Disputes – NYTimes.com. This article discusses a phenomenon many of us have experienced: “Many students come in with the conviction that they’ve worked hard and deserve a higher mark,” Professor Grossman said. He attributes those complaints to his students’ sense of entitlement. A recent study by researchers at the University of... »
ELI Conference
The ELI (Educause Learning Initiative) Annual Conference is in progress in Orlando FL. Fritz and I are here to share a poster on our recent research on student preferences in online learning. One of the highlights of the conference is the unveiling of the Horizon Report, a collaboration between ELI and the New Media... »
Still searching for the “magic bullet”
Last year about this time, Fritz and I did a podcast on organizational tools. Over the past year, we both have investigated a number of different tools, from pen and paper to new software. Though we continue to search for the “magic bullet” of organizational bliss, I am happy to say I have made... »
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