Tag: Classroom

Categories
Digital

Keeping distractions to the minimum?

meZ8vrU

Learning and teaching in a digital age … remove the digital distractions?

To help create such a place, I keep distractions to a minimum. Everything about the interior is designed to promote a pleasant, relaxed, but fully focused atmosphere. There is no glittering or empty decoration. My uncluttered lime-green walls lack even a nail to hang a poster or photograph. As I have previously mentioned in these pages, I dim the lighting, creating restful shadows to encourage self-reflection, vulnerability and openness. There is no intrusive glare of a computer screen or hum of a projector: just 30 or more students, a table with lectern, a whiteboard and markers and our treasured space in which reason and imagination can have free play.

Read full story, with this ironic response, and a retort from an online learning supporter.

Categories
Digital

The Online Classroom?

http://stockfresh.com/image/2779724/online-learning-concept
http://stockfresh.com/image/2779724/online-learning-concept

This looks like a really interesting piece, which I’d like to read in full… but I suspect of interest to a lot of people working in e-learning particularly:

The time comes for most teachers to face something they think they cannot do. Such a time came for me in 1993, when a guest speaker at the college where I had been teaching for 20 years invited the faculty to prepare courses for our then-developing online education programme. Given the enormous advances in technology and the internet, he explained, digital culture would soon reshape and revitalise higher education.

Students would have open access to scholarship. Discussion boards would simulate classroom conversations. Lecture videos would enable students to watch and listen from home, as often as necessary, to absorb, understand and review material. Overcrowding and high costs would no longer prevent access to classes that students required or desired. Everyone, he promised, would connect with teachers through the power of technology. A new day was dawning.

Read full piece, with a really interesting finish:

Although I see the potential value of the virtual campus, and will continue with great enthusiasm to teach at least one online course per semester, I am persuaded that for the time being the place where I do my best work is in the traditional classroom. For me, there remains no substitute for the force and beauty of the feelings I experience within its familiar confines. I also know that the real joy of education for teachers and students alike lies in its ongoing, expansive character. Whatever the format that inspires it, finding ways to broaden and refine our vision of the world will always be the truest gift of learning.

Categories
Digital

Would you ban laptops in your classroom? #HigherEd #TechChat

http://www.sxc.hu/photo/1269437Interesting thoughts from an academic who banned laptops from his classroom:

The problem is not just that laptops provide an outlet for boredom. After all, distraction was just as much a problem in Aristotle’s day as in ours. Laptops also have a negative effect on the more attentive students, many of whom compulsively transcribe every utterance out of my mouth onto their keyboards. I’ve even had some students who type notes and use a digital voice recorder to make sure they don’t miss a word. While this flatters the professorial ego, it risks ruining the whole point of the lecture format. Since we can type faster than we write, this completist exercise in documenting lectures simply becomes a mindless form of data acquisition. The essential skill of discernment, of determining what is important and what is not, gets lost in a world of students turned secretaries, dutifully taking dictation.

Read more: Professor: I Banned Laptops from the Lecture Hall | TIME.com http://ideas.time.com/2013/10/09/why-i-banned-laptops-from-the-lecture-hall/#ixzz2laZajJFd

Categories
Digital

Graduate School entirely on iPads

800px-IPad_2_Smart_Cover_at_unveiling_cropEducation is changing…

Educators across the nation have put Apple’s tablets into the hands of tens of thousands of students. Like many of the devices champions, Dumestre thinks the device has the power to enhance the learning experience like no other.

The new programs are the latest example of how technology isn’t just replacing things like textbooks or lectures, but is even eliminating the need for classrooms. At St. Mary’s, administrators and instructors spend a year working with a consultant to design coursework that takes advantage of the device’s portability and immediacy.

Read full story, and HT to @pmphillips for sending it to me.

Categories
Academic Digital

Check out @timbuckteeth review of 'Now You See It'

Now You See It (Book Cover)I always love the chance to chat to Steve, and see what he’s up to on his blog. He mentioned at ALT-C that he’d reviewed this book, which I’d be interested to read:

Steve Wheeler is convinced that we need new approaches for digitally remastered learners

We are constantly reminded that we live in an age in which digital media, mobile phones and social media are profoundly influencing communication, business, entertainment and learning. Not a day goes by without some mention of Facebook, Twitter or smartphones in mainstream media. The pace of change fomented by these technologies is rapid and unrelenting, giving rise to new and emerging literacies, connections, behaviours and risks. And of course many academics wish to know how these changes will affect university life.

Clearly, technology in all its forms is playing an ever-greater role in the lives of young people. Universities therefore need to pay attention to the impact that the appropriate deployment of digital tools can have on extending, enhancing and enriching the student learning experience, both on and off campus.

Moreover, sustained exposure to such a range of digital media demands a different kind of attention than we have previously required. This is the premise of Now You See It, whose author, Cathy Davidson, may be remembered as the Duke University academic who caused a bit of a stir in 2003 when she promoted the free distribution of Apple’s brand-new iPod devices to an entire first-year population of 2,000 students. There followed an inevitable outcry from more conservative quarters of the academic community, who voiced the opinion that giving students “just another device for listening to music” was a profligate waste of money. Many argued that the iPod had no serious pedagogical application, while an editorial in TheChronicle, the Duke student newspaper, declared: “It is an unnecessarily expensive toy that does not become an academic tool simply by being thrown into a classroom.”

There were no conditions attached to the free iPods, says Davidson. Students were simply asked to think up new learning applications for the device and then to share those ideas with teaching staff. The results of this experiment suggested that Davidson was right and her detractors in the academic community were wrong, for the iPod experiment turned out to be a perfect demonstration of the power of disruptive technology. New learning applications were discovered across all disciplines, and the iPod was instrumental in “flipping” the classroom, devolving from the staff to the students power over where, when and how they could study. These findings were later exemplified in the rapid worldwide success of iTunesU.

Read the full review and purchase the book.