The Tower of Google

Georgia Nugent – President of Kenyon College
Associate provost of Princeton
Prof of Classics at Brown and Princeton
Full Notes: The Tower of Google

Video:  Georgia Nugent

In this general session, Georgia drew on the image of the Tower of Babel from the Bible to help us ask questions relating to how technology should be used in the University. Addressing the news of Google’s goal to digitize the largest library in the world and make it searchable, Georgia takes us back to all the other great leaders of the past and the questions of motive they raise.

How Faculty Like to Learn

Carl Berger
Jeff Bohrer
Cheryl Diermyer

Full notes are found at : How Fac like to Learn

It was great to see some friends from AT present this year! The session contained three parts:

Staff have particular desires for how they want to be trained about Educational Tech (Jeff)

• Face-to-Face was number one
• Workshops were also preferred
• On their own, requesting links to content and resources from the IT department

Principles of Adult Learning (Cheryl)

• Training should be relevant to the right-now felt need
• Training needs to apply to real work
• Students like to have control over how,when,where of the training

The new kind of Student-Faculty (Carl)

• Combination of the two roles
• Called “Millennial Instructors”
• Rated themselves as experts in education, research and personal use of technology

From Today’s CMS to Tomorrow’s Learning Support System

Full notes are at: The Future of CMS

Full video is at: Media Site Video – CMS

Malcolm B. Brown, Director of Academic Computing, Dartmouth College
Joel M. Smith, Vice Provost and Chief Information Officer, Carnegie Mellon University
Carolyn Lee Windham, Student, North Carolina State University

So far, we have only created a powerful piece of infrastructure. Next we need to explore how this can be used to transform teaching and learning.

The Net Gen commandments – Carolyn
Carolyn comicly delivered these ten commandments as a representative of the Net Gen. Here are the highlights:

• The last time I was picking up a phonebook, it was propping up my door (I find information on-line)
• Blame it on MTV or videogames, but text makes my eyes cross (Use media)
• I left busywork behind with finger-paint (don’t just use on-line tools because it is hip)

The Once and Future CMS – Malcolm
Malcom delivered a clear argument that the next CMS (CMS 2.0) will relate to our version 1 CMS the same way Web 2.0 relates to Web 1.0. At the same time we see a pattern that web 2.0 engages learners in the process, which has educational benefit.

“The person who is learning is the person who is doing” Prof Chris Jernstedtand

This means that it is really a matter of better teaching practices to make the shift to more web 2.0 looking CMSs

So what does this mean in practice for the next CMS?

• Enable mashups
• Enable tagging/bookmarking
• Content Management – Faculty is only one with control
• Collaboration and team tools
• Themes not just courses
• Peer tutoring collaborations
• Facebooks, not portals
• Social note taking – like subEthaEdit

What problems are we trying to solve with CMS anyway? – Joel
In this message, Joel stated that the CMS we use was developed to solve the headache of faculty administrative tasks more than the student side of learning. We are using a tool for admin and grading to solve all of our problems. To see past ths undersight we must expand a number of our mental models:

• Expand the mental model of “Course” – Knowledge and learning need to cross over the bounds of courses
• Expand the mental model of “Management”
• Expand the mental model of “System” – Integrate with enterprise systems more like tools that rely on authentication more than anything else
• We need to expand the overall toolset so we aren’t using a hammer (the CMS) to solve all problems

Formative and Competency-Based Assessment of Learners in a Longitudinal Curriculum

Mary Y. Lee, Assoc Provost; Dean for Medical Educ, Tufts University

The group at Tufts built a web based system for managing learning assets (images, document, etc.) and allowing contribution for medical students.
Honestly, I was a bit bored during this session and had a hard time extracting what translates from this particular project into the broader scope of teaching and learning. I also thought the title was very misleading as assessment was not discussed in much detail.

Here are the complete notes nonetheless:  Formative and Competency-Based Assessment

The Acceleration of Technology in the 21st Century: the Impact on Education and Society

Full notes are at : Ray Kurzweil
Ray Kurzweil – Developer of the scanner, the first OCR, print to speech, text to speech, first synth

• In 1999 received the national medal for technology
• Invention Hall of fame
• 12 doctorates
• Honored by 3 US presidents

This was a session that left many people speechless. It was definitely a moment of “you had to be there.” Though the conclusions sound crazy, the clarity of Ray’s models of prediction as demonstrated during the first part of his presentation built a trust that made the audience at least hold an open ear.

Here are the bullet points:

Information and technology growth can be predicted.

In general, by taking into account each development has the on the creation of the next, we see Exponential models are highly dependable for predicting how progress will take place in a given field. This holds true for:

• Biology
• Economics
• Technology
• Genome studies and modeling the human brain

What does this result in?

Growth in factors of millions over the period of 25 years for computational device processes, nano technology and our ability to understand the information systems of biology and the brain.

So what will the world look like in the future?

2010: Computers disappear

1. Images writen on our retinas
2. High bandwidth connection to the Internet at all times
3. Electronics embedded in the environment, clothing, eyeglasses
4. Full immersion Virtual Reality
5. Augmented reality (adding computer generated images to what you naturally see with your eyes)
6. Virtual personalities as the primary interface to electronic devices
7. Effective language technologies

2029: In intimate merger

1. $1000 CPU = 1k times the power of the human brain
2. Reverse engineering of the brain complete
3. Computers pass the Turing test
4. Nanobots
   1. Neural Implants without surgery
   2. Full VR with 5 senses – Be someone else – “Experience beamers”
   3. Intimate connection with non-biological forms of intelligence

Average Life expectantly has been increasing in a predictable way as well. According to his models, in 15 years, life expectancy should increase more than a year every year. So if you can hang in for 15 more years…
I’ll leave it there. What do you think?

The best online instructional practices – Hussein Adbul-Hamid (U of Maryland)

Full notes are available from Best instructional design principles
Example Findings from study of 140 courses and 120 faculty

Each of these are associated with 10-20% increase in success outcomes and a 5-12% reduction in withdrawal rate:

• Providing Continuous feedback
• Incorporating learning modules
• Drawing from experience and introduce students to cultures and subcultures
• Providig opportunities for collaborative learning
• Encouraging multiple approaches to solving problems
• Encouraging goal incorporation into course

Implications to Design and Instructions

• Create clear course objectives and expectations
• Create well-structured content and intellectually challenging design
• Utilize Real-life application, incorporating different backgrounds, encouraging students to challenge their own assumptions.
• Build on the diversity of the students
• Carefully design assignments and activities
• Use structured textbooks and learning modules
• Train faculty to help students interact with the designed content while focusing on learning.

Creating Effective Online Interactions

Full notes can be found at: Effictive online interactions

Verbal intimacy (Baker 2003, Freitasm, Myers and Avtgis 1998, Gorham 1988, Hutchins 2003) creates a higher percieved cognition and affective learning. It can be defined by:

• Initiating discussions
• Asking questions
• Using humor
• Using self-disclosure
• Addressing students by name
• Using inclusive pronouns (“we are going to….”
• Responding quickly and frequently
• Praising others (not blowing sunshine)
• Conveying attentiveness and engagement

However, in the study presented by the presenters, the only measurable difference between a group taught in a VI way vs. a non-VI way was that the Non-VI group accessed online resources (documents and discussion posts) more. The scores, hits to the site and amount posted were the same.

How does video compare with Audio for content delivery with VI in mind?
ADL (Navy?) How different types of media effect learning
Tallen-Reynolds 2006 – Multimedia

Teaching Economics through Gaming

Robert Brown, Nora Reynolds (Manager), John McGlen (AV) Full notes are available from ECON via a videogame Video Commercial for the Economics Game Why use games? • Intrinsically motivating • Challenging • Student Controlled • 70% of college students play games • Built in application of principles • Gaming embeds the best teaching ideals

Lessons Learned:

• Storyboarding is VERY important
• It took longer than expected
• Next time, they will get external funding
• Needed more coders, they were a bottleneck

Online vs. Paper Evaluations – David Ernst (U of Minnesota)

Full notes are available by downloading: David Ernst – Evaluations

Main Outcomes of the study:

• On a 1-7 scale, there were more 1,2,3 and 7s for online evals than paper in EVERY question.
• 21% less people completed online assessments
• The averages of the 1-7 ratings were similar between the online and paper even though the online was more polar.
• Online DID reduce cost, better accessibility and increase students perception of anonymity
• Past research supports that online open-ended questions had larger responses than in a paper format.

Vinton G. Cerf – Google Chief Internet Evangelist

Vinton was an excellent way to kick of the annual EDUCAUSE in Dallas. I have attached the Tuesday Morning Notes – Cerf, but here are the highlights.

Full video is available here: Mediasite – Uncovering Computer Science

New Internet Statistics

• There are about 400,000,000 servers
• There are 1,000,000,000 users
• There are now 2,500,000,000 mobile devices
  • How does this influence how we are designing content?
• Asia is the main source of Internet use
  • What Will the influx of languages mean for the content on the Internet

Computer Science may be an oxymoron

• We have only a few real CS theories, but much of our work is done through brute force solutions
• Many of the most important things (how long it takes a program to run, does it have bugs, security issues) we do not have working theories in place for
• Some solutions to the security problems we are facing are growing, such as digital certificates that will protect the DNS system created back in 1979

Information Decay (when digital files will not be accessible in te future because the software that made them is not available) is a real problem.

User Driven / Self Service ways of thinking have changed the way we look at things

• Will the amazon culture effect Education?
• Net neutrality may take this power away

We need a new national program to boost interest in CS, Engineering and Tech

• CS enrolments are droping
• Global warming may be a new challenge that can invigorate our education system like sputnik did.