- Educause has usually struck me as too institutional/corporate to be of much interest for my day-to-day work, but their ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology is unfailingly interesting. Here’s a link to the full 2009 study, and here’s one to a page with my school’s results from the last 2 years. Of possible interest is the number of students who self-report being highly skilled or expert at finding and verifying online information. (Hint: the # is north of 65%. I’m guessing you don’t think 2/3rds of your students are “very skilled” or “expert” at that, at least when it comes to coursework.)
- Trent Batson on teaching in a networked age: Adapting to information technology does not necessarily mean using technology at all, but it does require an understanding of how education has been irreversibly altered.
- For your delectation, two remarkably different attitudes toward copyright. First, a very limited definition of fair use, and, second, the sensible observation that readers have copyright rights.
- With one small modification, this post on “user myopia” becomes a pithy statement of the problems in assignment design: The plain fact is [students] will not read anything you put on the screen.
- A proposal for turning at least some courses into “microlabs”: Micro-labs are a proposed university course architecture which supports and incorporates “web 2.0″ informal learning principles, enabling students to entirely create their own curriculum with the goal of contributing all objects created by learning back to a learning community of practice, and an Internet audience. This course design seeks to harness both the student’s natural (intrinsic) desire to learn and the ease of access to knowledge created by advances in communication technologies.
This weekend, I plan to celebrate the first Saturday in weeks without baseball by going with my kid to a robotics workshop! Here’s our goal (except with less weird flirting):
Update on Saturday: Success!
What are your crazy, hedonistic weekend plans?
Image by Flickr user peyri / CC licensed
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One Response to Weekend Reading
EzraSF - October 24, 2009 at 5:33 pm
Self-reporting is notorious for horribly skewed results because people tend to overestimate their abilities. Behaviorists have to spend hours training observers to provide consistent and objective data. Why would we ever trust a couple sentences on a survey to replace trained observers to measure ability? Measuring student IT ability by survey is akin to a asking a boy his IQ instead of giving a test.