Crowdsourced Book-Review Project Puts Critiques Online “One group of students is trying to speed up the review process and make it more interactive by putting a crowdsourced book review online for anyone to critique.”
Study Suggests Many Professors Use Interactive Tools Ineffectively in Online Courses ” a new study suggests that many community-college instructors aren’t taking advantage of those options. Instead, the professors are relying on static course materials that aren’t likely to motivate students or encourage them to interact with each other.”
Quick Look: Researchers Introduce a New Model of “Connected Learning” | MindShift:
“At the Digital Media and Learning conference in San Francisco last week, a group of researchers announced they will examine how social networking, games, and online sharing affect learning, along with the effect of mentoring relationships with peers and adults, especially how it relates to civic engagement and learning in marginalized communities. “
Supreme Court Rejects Student Social-Media Cases | Threat Level | Wired.com: “The Supreme Court declined Tuesday to clarify on what grounds public schools may punish students for their off-campus online speech.”
Carnegie Mellon’s Classroom Salon Encourages Collaborative Critique — Campus Technology:
“Carnegie Mellon’s Classroom Salon Encourages Collaborative Critique”
“America 2049″: Social change via Facebook games – Gaming – Salon.com:
“Human rights organization Breakthrough has created an alternative reality puzzle that hits us where we live: Online “
“AbstractAdopting an interdisciplinary scope, this paper presents a review of research on blogs and blogging within the social sciences and the humanities. It maps out what kind of research has been completed, how it has been performed and what gaps that might need to be filled in this relatively new area of research. More specifically, the paper will analyze all articles on blogs and blogging published until 2009 and indexed by the ISI Web of Knowledge.”: “”
“Abstract:Twenty-first century students are expected to utilise emerging technologies such as lecture podcasts as learning tools. This research explored the uptake of podcasts by undergraduate students enrolled in two very different cognitively challenging subjects in the second year of the nursing programme and in the first year of a business programme. Regardless of the semester, the different content being studied and the statistically significant demographic differences between the nursing and business cohorts, striking behavioural similarities emerged. Students from both cohorts in each semester under investigation spent similar amounts of time studying regardless of gender, age, Internet access and time spent on paid work. The patterns of podcast usage by responding nursing and business students were not significantly different. Non-listeners in both cohorts did not differ significantly from podcast users (listeners) either demographically or with regard to personal access to computers, the Internet and MP3/4 players. Non-listeners utilised lecture notes, text resources and the learning management system in a similar way to listeners. The only significant difference was the longer hours spent in paid work by non-listeners.
These findings reinforce the emerging concept that podcasts are not embraced by everyone. Despite the flexibility and mobile learning opportunities afforded by podcasts, significant numbers of students prefer to learn in face-to-face environments and by reading and/or listening in set study environments.”
As Technology Evolves, New Forms of Online Racism Emerge : “New forms of online racism are emerging as video games add audio-chat features, and as popular online games draw a more global audience.
That was the message of a panel of academics and journalists at this year’s South by Southwest Interactive conference, an annual event that brings together video-game designers, social-media leaders, and cultural critics looking for the latest technology trends.”
Academic-Reference Firm Offers $10,001 for Best New Research Tool – Wired Campus – The Chronicle of Higher Education: “The developers of Mendeley, a research-management tool that has more than a million users, want to put more than 70 million academic papers, reader recommendations, and social-networking tags to new and innovative uses. The company announced Tuesday its ‘Binary Battle,’ a contest for outside developers to build applications drawing from Mendeley’s collected information, with a $10,001 grand prize for the best new application.”