Our March guest bloggers, Randy Bass and Bret Eynon, collaborated on a recent issue of Academic Commons devoted to new media and the technology of teaching and learning. Mr. Bass is assistant provost for teaching and learning initiatives at Georgetown University. Mr. Eynon is assistant dean for teaching and learning at LaGuardia Community College.

How do we move from innovative but often isolated classroom practice to more far-reaching changes in institutions and the field as a whole?

In our first post we called for “an R&D division for teaching in higher education,” because one of the problems in higher education is that we have “no tradition of connecting the edge to the center, no established practices that enable us to turn the individual breakthrough into something more than idiosyncratic.”

Diana Laurillard, in an essay on Academic Commons, takes this further and argues ...

Our March guest bloggers, Randy Bass and Bret Eynon, collaborated on a recent issue of Academic Commons devoted to new media and the technology of teaching and learning. Mr. Bass is assistant provost for teaching and learning initiatives at Georgetown University. Mr. Eynon is assistant dean for teaching and learning at LaGuardia Community College.

If we truly want to advance from a focus on teaching to a focus on student learning, then a strategy involving something like electronic student portfolios, or ePortfolios, is essential.

In an essay in the current issue of Academic Commons, three researchers write that “ePortfolios may be the most likely vehicle to help us make the transition to an academy of the future that is both relevant and authoritative.”

Electronic portfolios mean different things in different settings, some with more or less emphasis on student work,...

Our March guest bloggers, Randy Bass and Bret Eynon, collaborated on a recent issue of Academic Commons devoted to new media and the technology of teaching and learning. Mr. Bass is assistant provost for teaching and learning initiatives at Georgetown University. Mr. Eynon is assistant dean for teaching and learning at LaGuardia Community College.

If anything can be said with certainty about the future of education in a roller-coaster world, it is that we must educate students to deal with uncertainty.

But what does that mean in practice? It means that we must design learning experiences to meet our highest learning goals—goals like the Essential Learning Outcomes listed by the Association of American College and Universities. These are not just practical and intellectual skills (such as critical and creative thinking, inquiry, and analysis) but also elusive and important...

Professors increasingly frustrated by students who use laptops for non-class activities—like updating their Facebook pages—may be heartened by news from the University of Colorado at Boulder. A professor there has found that educating students about the negative effect that frivolous laptop use has on their performance reduces class time spent going walkabout on the Web.

Diane Sieber, an associate professor, teaches writing and ethics to engineering undergraduates. She told the Boulder Daily Camera newspaper that last semester, she identified 17 students in one of her classes who were using laptops most frequently. After the first test, she told them that they did 11 percent worse, on average, than their peers who did not have their faces in their computers as much.

Lo and behold, the number of laptop-nosed students dropped to a half dozen, and the test scores of those who stopped ...

A former nursing student at the University of Louisville sued the institution in federal court yesterday, alleging that it had violated her free-speech and due-process rights by expelling her for her posts on MySpace, where she wrote about her patients, gun rights, and abortion, among other issues.

The former student, Nina Yoder, says that an instructor summoned her to a meeting on February 27 where an associate dean suggested that she might have a gun, and security officers frisked her. The dean, citing concerns with Ms. Yoder’s MySpace blog, then told her she had been withdrawn from all courses and barred from the campus.

In a letter to Ms. Yoder, the nursing school said that she had violated its honor code by identifying herself as a student in “internet postings regarding patient activities.” The nursing school’s honor code holds students to “the highest standards of honesty,...

Computer simulations have introduced some strange problems into reality

Sherry Turkle, the noted professor of social studies of science and technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has a new book, Simulation and Its Discontents (MIT Press). In it she tracks difficulties that arise when simulation—from virtual-reality chambers for nuclear-weapon testing to computer programs for architectural design—becomes integral in our daily and professional lives. Ms. Turkle elaborated on some of these in a conversation with The Chronicle.

Q: You interview various academics and professionals for your book, including architects, nuclear-weapon designers, and physicists. Can you talk about how simulation affected one of those groups?

A: These people talk about losing a sense of it being a real thing. Nuclear-weapon designers began by testing weapons and actually watching...

Our March guest bloggers, Randy Bass and Bret Eynon, collaborated on a recent issue of Academic Commons devoted to new media and the technology of teaching and learning. Mr. Bass is assistant provost for teaching and learning initiatives at Georgetown University. Mr. Eynon is the assistant dean for teaching and learning at LaGuardia Community College.

It has been almost 15 years since Robert Barr and John Tagg published a well-circulated article in Change magazine claiming that we were in the midst of a paradigm shift from “teaching to learning,” set to transform the ways we designed, delivered, and evaluated undergraduate education.

Fifteen years and a next-wave Web later, we are clearly a good piece down that road. Yet this shift leads us to a new set of challenges.

A key to this change is shifting the unit of analysis from blocks of information delivered through...

In the middle of a fiscal crisis, a decision by the University of Massachusetts at Amherst to spend $50,000 to send nearly 30 information-technology staff members to a software-training meeting in California has created a backlash on the campus.

The trip, coming on the heels of a 15-percent hike in student charges, is seen by some as wasteful, reports The Republican. The university is also seeking federal stimulus money to avoid program cuts or layoffs, the newspaper says. UMass recently notified 60 nontenured faculty members that they would not be reappointed next year as the institution struggles with a projected $46-million deficit, The Chronicle reported last week.

But campus officials say the trip is the most cost-effective way to prepare staff members for a coming universitywide software change. UMass is about to upgrade its student-information systems using Oracle...

Our March guest bloggers, Randy Bass and Bret Eynon, collaborated on a recent issue of Academic Commons devoted to new media and the technology of teaching and learning. Mr. Bass is assistant provost for teaching and learning initiatives at Georgetown University. Mr. Eynon is the assistant dean for teaching and learning at LaGuardia Community College.

When it comes to innovations in teaching and learning, higher education seems like the last to know and the slowest to respond. In every other way, we push at the frontiers of knowledge, ask critical questions, take risks. In all other realms of research, practices of peer review, dialogue, accountability, and replication engender innovation. Why is it the opposite for teaching and learning?

The problem is that we have no tradition of connecting the edge to the center, no established practices that enable us to turn the...

Our Wired Campus guest bloggers for March are two leaders in using technology for teaching and learning. Randy Bass and Bret Eynon have collaborated on a new special issue of Academic Commons on this topic. Here, they will share their thoughts on why, in this crucial area, higher education seems to be “the last to know and the slowest to respond,” and they will offer four ways to change this trend for the better.

First, a little about them:

Mr. Bass is assistant provost for teaching and learning initiatives at Georgetown University, where he is also executive director of Georgetown’s Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship and an associate professor of English. In 1998-99, he was a Pew Scholar in the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, and from 2000-2008, he served as a consulting scholar with the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of ...