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Turn Your Laptop Into an Earthquake Sensor | Comment

Writing Students and Professors Fight to Keep Theses From Being Freely Available Online | Comment [4]

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ABC News to Open 5 University News Bureaus | Comment [10]

How a Lawsuit Over Electronic Reserves Could Affect Colleges | Comment [5]

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May 9, 2008

Online Physics Simulations

PCWorld points us to a cool, interactive online simulation feature that demonstrates physics principles. It was created by the University of Colorado at Boulder’s department of physics education.

You can rub a balloon on a sweater to create static electricity or “learn about the conservation of energy with a skater dude,” among other experiments. —Catherine Rampell

May 7, 2008

Using Cellphones in the Classroom (Constructively)

While some scholars may question the value of introducing leisure-associated technologies into the classroom, education blogger Steve Dembo offers a short list of ways cellphones can be used to enhance the learning process:

1) Check the spelling/definition of a word
2) Research a topic
3) Look up reference images
4) Pull up maps (even with satellite imagery)
5) Document a science lab with built in digital camera/video
6) Fact check on the fly
7) Mail questions to the teacher that they might be embarrassed to ask
8) Classroom response system
9) Take quizzes
10) Record and/or listen to podcasts

May 1, 2008

Purdue U. Installs New Supercomputer -- in One Day

In a feat of electronic “barn-raising,” 200 people will install a new supercomputer at Purdue University in a single day.

The machine will be the size of a semi trailer when it is installed, on May 5, and it will be able to perform more than 60 trillion operations in one second. It would rank in the top 40 of the current Top 500 list of most powerful supercomputers in the world.

To stoke campus involvement in the installation of the new machine (named “Steele” after a former faculty member), organizers created a movie trailer called “Installation Day,” a parody of “Independence Day.” Here it is:

—Catherine Rampell

April 28, 2008

New Music-Technology Program at Carnegie Mellon U.

Bridging its left and right brains, Carnegie Mellon University is starting a new music-technology program.

Carnegie Mellon is known for its strength in two disparate academic areas—fine arts and engineering. The music-technology program, which will teach students skills such as music-equipment design, will play to both strengths by culling courses from the College of Fine Arts, the Carnegie Institute of Technology, and the School of Computer Science. It will initially admit four undergraduate students and eight master’s students, according to The Tartan, the university’s student newspaper. —Catherine Rampell

April 24, 2008

Free iPhones and New Google Mail on Campuses: Are They Working Out?

Mobile learning and outsourcing e-mail operations are two of the hottest topics in campus IT today. Find out today how one university has fared, when you can have a live online chat with a college official who has handed out free iPhones and uses a variety of services, including email, from Google.

Kevin Roberts has moved his institution, Abilene Christian University, from a home-grown e-mail system to Google Apps for Education, and overseen experiments in group learning using various Google applications. Roberts, chief information officer at Abeline Christian, also has pushed for mobile computing, providing free iPhones to faculty members and students to create and complete course work from anywhere on the campus. How has it worked out? Can his experiences serve as models for other institutions?

See a transcript of a live discussion with Mr. Roberts, which took place today at The Chronicle.

April 23, 2008

Making a Big Point With Your PC Pen

Kenrick J. Mock says he loves recording lectures for his classes using his tablet PC. And the associate professor of computer science at the University of Alaska at Anchorage also loves projecting computational problems using PowerPoint or the writing program OneNote.

What Mr. Mock does not love is the inability to point to a specific part of the problem for his class. “It’s always bothered me that the pen cursor is a tiny little dot,” he writes in his blog on technology and teaching. “The problem is that I like to use the pen to “point” at things as I give the lecture, but it doesn’t help if the class can’t see it.”

He looked, in vain, for a program that would enlarge the cursor. And finally he gave in, remembered he was a computer scientist, and wrote a program himself.

The result is PenAttention, and it turns that minuscule dot into a minuscule dot with a big colored spotlight around it. It’s a little more distracting to write with this kind of cursor, but his class can finally see what he is doing.

The program is free, works on tablet PCs running XP and Vista, and can be downloaded from a link in Mr. Mock’s blog post describing it. —Josh Fischman

April 9, 2008

U. of Houston Study: Students in 'Hybrid' Course Got Better Grades

A University of Houston professor found that students in a “hybrid” version of his course, which involved an online component, got better grades than students who took the course in a more traditional, offline format, according to ScienceDaily.

Brian McFarlin offered two versions of the same class, Kinesiology 3306. In the first, traditional class, he lectured twice a week. In the hybrid version, he gave one weekly lecture, and a second weekly class was administered through announcements, review questions, and quizzes on WebCT (now Blackboard).

Students who took the hybrid class earned, on average, a letter grade higher than students in the traditional class. A report of Mr. McFarlin’s findings, collected over the course of six semesters, was published in Advances in Physiology Education.

More information on Mr. McFarlin’s course results can be found at the university’s Web site.—Catherine Rampell

March 18, 2008

More on Academic Twittering: Breaking Down the Classroom Walls

We’ve had plenty of interest in our coverage of Twitter (and other micro-blogging services) at colleges, and so it’s worth noting that David Parry, who has been a leading experimenter in this area, posted a useful follow-up post yesterday on the AcademHack blog.

Mr. Parry, an assistant professor of Emerging Media and Communications at the University of Texas at Dallas, expands on his philosophy for using Twitter, and offers some fresh pointers to others who have experimented with the service.

For instance, he expands on a point he made during our recent Webcam interview, describing what he means by using Twitter to break down the classroom walls:

“Students attend college where their identity as a student is just part of what they do and who they are. Many of them have jobs, commute to school, etc., and thus the social aspect of the campus life has changed,” he writes. “If this is the case then these ‘new’ ways of socializing such as Facebook and MySpace are where students are forming their learning communities, ones which do not entirely, perhaps only minimally, overlap with their classroom experience. Thus to extend the walls of the classroom, make education relevant to all aspects of students lives rather than just what they do four-five hours a day we need to think of ways to extend the ways we form and foster learning communities.”

Yet many readers gave mixed reaction to Mr. Parry’s basic argument in our most recent Wired Campus post on the topic.

“My experience with using Twitter and anything similar — blogs, Facebook, etc. — for academic purposes is that students just think it is weird, creepy, and geeky in the negative sense,” one reader said. “And they think that it’s inappropriate for me to be invading “their” space. Within two days of telling my students that I had a Facebook page, I was blocked from all of them.”

Thanks to everyone who wrote in — and keep us posted on your own experience with micro-blogging. —Jeffrey R. Young

February 28, 2008

Indiana U. Receives Grant for Development of Virtual World for Children

The Indiana University School of Education has received a three-year, $1.8-million grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation to expand the virtual world Quest Atlantis, which is designed to help foster creativity, social responsibility, and compassion in children ages 9 through 12.

Watch Sasha Barab, the university director of the Center for Research on Learning and Technology, discuss Quest Atlantis.—Andrea L. Foster

February 20, 2008

Play This Video Game, Achieve Inner Peace

It seems an oxymoron: video games and contemplative thought. But Tracy Fullerton, director of the Electronic Arts Game Innovation Lab at the University of Southern California, is developing an online game that she says promotes “spiritual enlightenment.” An early video version of the game, called the Night Journey, features a hazy, black-and-white environment that includes flying birds, barren landscapes, half-formed buildings, trees, and human forms. The soundtrack to the 10-minute video seems to be pure and distorted sounds from nature. Ms. Fullerton said the game is designed to facilitate feelings of exploration, reflection, loss, and birth. She is considering having a museum host the interactive video, which she presented Monday at a game developers conference in San Francisco.

The game is being developed in partnership with Bill Viola, a renowned photographer and video artist. Some of his photos, from all over the world, are being incorporated into the game. —Andrea L. Foster

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