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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]

Educause Issues Statement on RIAA's Methods of Catching Music Pirates | Comment

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 8, 2008

Co-Founder of Second Life Says Academics Are Biggest Trailblazers in Virtual Worlds

Cory Ondrejka, the co-founder of the virtual world Second Life who is now a visiting professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California, said in a speech today that virtual worlds are here to stay, and that professors are among the most active pioneers.

“In my view the academy has been blazing the trail of adoption of virtual worlds far more than gamers or industry,” said Mr. Ondrejka, who spoke at a conference at Case Western Reserve University called Collaboration Technology and Engaging the Campus 2008.

Naturally, the event was broadcast within Second Life, in Case Western’s campus in the virtual world. I attended the conference virtually, and was able to ask Mr. Ondrejka what the biggest challenge for Second Life was in being able to be more than just a passing fad in higher education.

“The challenges with Second Life is it has significant technical challenges for use,” he said, noting that it takes powerful computers and fast network connections for Second Life to function properly. “You can’t assume that your students are going to be able to run Second Life within the school’s network infrastructure.”

He argued that some form of 3-D virtual environment will catch on, though he admitted that it might not be Second Life that wins the race. The reason that the idea is powerful, he said, is that studies show that humans respond to a visual Internet, and that they express greater trust for the people they communicate with when they see a virtual representation of the person. “Learning in a place in 3-D affects us differently than text,” he said.

Mr. Ondrejka said that when professors first build a virtual campus, they usually try to exactly replicate a classroom in Second Life, with desks, chairs, and walls. But then they realize that the world allows different kinds of movement and communication than the real world. “You realize that in a world where you can fly, classrooms aren’t really that useful,” he said. So professors have built new kinds of classrooms online with no roofs. “Suddenly you see this explosion of classroom forms that matches what they’re trying to teach,” he added.

Organizers of the conference set up a booth for The Chronicle in Case Western’s Second Life campus during the event (shown below), and I manned our table between panel sessions and chatted with a couple of conference participants.

At one point my virtual avatar got stuck between a virtual chair and the wall of the booth, however, and I had to reboot my computer to get that sorted out. Luckily that’s never happened to me in real life. —Jeffrey R. Young

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

Social-Networking Site Starts Wikis for Language Education

Not willing to cough up a couple hundred bucks for Rosetta Stone software? Check out italki Knowledge, a free online language-learning, open-textbook site designed for the Web 2.0 crowd.

Founded in 2006, italki is a social network based around 90 different language-learning communities. Starting this month, it is starting wikis for each language intended to serve as open-source textbooks.

For other open-source resources on learning foreign languages, check out Wikiversity’s foreign language learning page or Web German’s Foreign Languages page.—Catherine Rampell

May 5, 2008

Officials Discuss the Importance of Privacy in Online Class Discussions

Arlington, Va. — Holding class discussions online raises privacy issues that colleges are still struggling to work through, said David Escalante, director of computer policy and security at Boston College, during a session today at Educause’s annual conference for campus-security officials, held just outside of Washington, D.C.

If online discussions had been around when today’s presidential candidates were in college, he suggested, their words might be dredged up and used against them now by political enemies. “Can you make a statement in an online forum and not worry that someone’s going to whack you with it later?” asked Mr. Escalante.

He said that many class discussions take place using course-management systems, and that the discussions are usually archived — and sometimes even made public online. Making discussions public that have traditionally happened behind closed classroom doors could hamper freewheeling debate, he said.

He suggested that colleges make sure that online discussions can only be seen by students taking the course. Or that if discussions are made public, that students be allowed to remain anonymous (except to the professor). Even so, however, there’s nothing stopping students in a course from saving all class discussion to their own drives and making it public later.

“Somebody’s going to get badly burned by this,” he said, “because people aren’t thinking about this.” —Jeffrey R. Young

Using Leisure Activities in Education Corrupts Learning Process, Paper Argues

A new paper argues that introducing activities associated with leisure—such as iPods and online discussion forums—into education corrupts the learning process.

The paper, “Learning to Leisure? Failure, Flame, Blame, Shame, Homophobia and Other Everyday Practices in Online Education” by Juliet Eve and Tara Brabazon at the University of Brighton, argues that the “blurring of leisure and learning has corroded the respect that is necessary to commence a scholarly journey.”

Much of the research is drawn from Ms. Eve’s instruction of a virtual seminar course, where she struggled to control students who mocked the lesson plans, “flamed” each other in online discussions, and drew pictures of male genitalia on the site’s virtual blackboard.

“The normative behavior of the group was dictated by their self-characterisation as socializing students rather than learning students,” the authors write.

The paper was published in the Journal of Literacy and Technology.—Catherine Rampell

April 29, 2008

Community College Open-Textbook Project Gets Under Way

The Community College Open Textbook Project begins this week with a member meeting in California.

At the meeting, representatives of institutions around the country will start reviewing open-textbook models for “quality, usability, accessibility, and sustainability,” according to a news release. They will initially review four providers of free online educational resources: Connexions, run by Rice University; Flat World Knowledge, a commercial digital-textbook publisher that will begin offering free textbooks online next year; the University of California’s UC College Prep Online, which offers Advanced Placement and other courses online; and the Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources, which was founded by the Foothill-De Anza Community College District and the League for Innovation in the Community College.

The open-textbook project was paid for by a $530,000 grant to the Foothill-De Anza Community College District from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. —Catherine Rampell

A Class Blog Studies Fair Use

A professor at Case Western Reserve University School of Law has created a nifty blog for students to hash out a debate about a fictional copyright-infringement case.

The blog, What Is Fair Use?, follows students’ arguments about whether the song “K Cera Cera,” created by former members of the band The KLF, infringed on “Whatever Will Be, Will Be (Que Sera, Sera),” a tune made famous by Doris Day. Students, all posting anonymously under the name “Friedman Advocates,” have linked to interesting copyright debates around the Web, as well as parodies, satires, and other controversies involving fair use. You can find music and video mash-ups on the blog, too.

The blog, created by associate professor Peter B. Friedman, supplements a legal analysis and writing class. Each semester the students are given a legal problem that’s used in their writing assignments. Mr. Friedman said this is the first time he’s used a blog to extend class discussion, and the second time he’s chosen a fair-use issue for the course theme (the previous fair-use problem covered Google’s library digitization project).

“Of all the things I’ve tried, the blog has been the most successful in promoting discussion,” Mr. Friedman told the Chronicle. “It’s certainly especially suited to fair-use discussions, since we can post videos.”

He said he has been trying to get in touch with the former members of The KLF—which some believe stands for Kopyright Liberation Front, though the origin is disputed—to hear their thoughts on the fictional case.

—Catherine Rampell

A Sociologist Says Students Aren't So Web-Wise After All

Eszter Hargittai, an assistant professor in Northwestern University’s sociology department, has discovered that students aren’t nearly as Web-savvy as they, or their elders, assume.

Ms. Hargittai studies the technological fluency of college freshmen. She found that they lack a basic understanding of such terms as BCC (blind copy on e-mail), podcasting, and phishing. This spring she will start a national poster-and-video contest to promote Web-related skills.

Q. Why do people think young people are so Web-wise?

A. I think the assumption is that if it was available from a young age for them, then they can use it better. Also, the people who tend to comment about technology use tend to be either academics or journalists or techies, and these three groups tend to understand some of these new developments better than the average person. Ask your average 18-year-old: Does he know what RSS means? And he won’t.

Q. What demographic groups are less Web-savvy?

A. Women, students of Hispanic origin, African-American students, and students whose parents have lower levels of education, which is a proxy for socioeconomic status.

Q. What are the practical implications of your research?

A. Students have difficulty evaluating the credibility of information online. Students have been told Wikipedia isn’t reliable, but they haven’t been told why exactly. Most students don’t know that wikis can be edited at that moment. Their eyes just open up wide when they find out.

Q. Are there implications for workplace readiness?

A. There are positive outcomes for those who know how to work and employ tech information, and those who lack information will confront a different situation. In terms of a link with demographic differences, those people who seem to be more savvy are the ones who tend to be in more-privileged positions. There will be an increase in social inequality if this divergence continues this way.

Q. What are the challenges for colleges that hope to better educate students about Web use?

A. How do you fit this into the curriculum? Is it supposed to be an academic department, or through libraries? How can you legitimately stand in front of a classroom when the students have an assumption that they know more about technology than you? At the beginning of my classes, I tell my students, “I know you don’t think I know as much as you because I’m older. I assure you, I know way more than you guys about this.” And they sort of smile, but by the end of the class they realize I’m right. —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

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