Search DU CTLAT Blog

Wednesday, February 16, 2011

How to Create Your Own Social Networking Community


Kristi Hines at the Social Media Examiner creates a useful guide to How to Create Your Own Social Networking Community. This thorough tutorial addresses the following topics:
•The Pros of Creating Your Own Community
•The Cons of Creating Your Own Community
•What You Must Do to Have a Successful Community
•Platforms for Your On-site Community
Great Alternatives to Creating Your Own Community
Share/Bookmark

Harvard Education Letter Articles 2009-2011


Teaching 21st Century Skills: What does it look like in practice? by Nancy Walser
• Content Type Journal Article
• Pages 1-8
• Authors
o Nancy Walser
o Lucy Hood
o Gerald C. Leader
o Journal Harvard Education Letter
o Online ISSN 1943-5053
o Print ISSN 8755-3716
o Journal Volume Volume 24
Journal Issue Volume 24, Number 5 / September/October 2008
_______________________
Learning Across Distance: Virtual-instruction programs are growing rapidly, but the impact on "brick-and-mortar" classrooms is still up in the air by Kristina Cowan
• Content Type Journal Article
• Pages 1-8
• Authors
o Kristina Cowan
o Letitia Stein
o Ben Levin
o Journal Harvard Education Letter
o Online ISSN 1943-5053
o Print ISSN 8755-3716
o Journal Volume Volume 25
Journal Issue Volume 25, Number 1 / January/February 2009
_______________________
Improving Teaching and Learning through Instructional Rounds by Lee Teitel
Beyond the Discipline Handbook: An interview with George Sugai on how schools can implement a positive approach to managing student behavior by Mitch Bogen
• Content Type Journal Article
• Pages 1-8
• Authors
o Lee Teitel
o David McKay Wilson
o Mitch Bogen
o Journal Harvard Education Letter
o Online ISSN 1943-5053
o Print ISSN 8755-3716
o Journal Volume Volume 25
Journal Issue Volume 25, Number 3 / May/June 2009
_______________________
Unleashing the "Brain Power" of Groups in the Classroom: The neuroscience behind collaborative work by Nancy Walser
Once a Teacher, Always a Teacher? Specialized roles offer new promise for retaining and developing talent by Susan Moore Johnson
• Content Type Journal Article
• Pages 1-8
• Authors
o Nancy Walser
o Lucy Hood
o Susan Moore Johnson
o Journal Harvard Education Letter
o Online ISSN 1943-5053
o Print ISSN 8755-3716
o Journal Volume Volume 26
Journal Issue Volume 26, Number 3 / May/June 2010
Share/Bookmark

The Southern Education Foundation (SEF) Project Minority-Serving Institutions (MSIs)


Share/Bookmark

Harvard Education Letter: Five Easy Ways to Connect with Students


Volume 27, Number 1 - January/February 2011

By H. RICHARD MILNER IV

Five Easy Ways to Connect with Students

In theory and rhetoric, the notion that teachers must build relationships with students is logical and well accepted. In my work in schools, I rarely, if ever, hear practitioners contest the idea that relationship building is a critical aspect to their success with students in any classroom or school.

The question, however, is how do teachers and other educators build those relationships? Further, how do educators sustain them—especially during times of conflict—in order to maximize learning opportunities?

At its root, building relationships with students is about meeting students where they are, attempting to understand them, and developing connections with them. From the outset, it requires that teachers are willing to find the good and the worth in students. All students possess positive characteristics and attributes, but these are sometimes overlooked and undervalued. To make these important connections, teachers may have to refocus and sharpen their lenses for thinking about students, especially when they have known students only in a negative light. Teachers have to ask themselves: “Am I prepared to recognize talent, potential talent, intellect, skill, excellence, and ability when they emerge in an unexpected social context or with an unexpected group of students?”

Teachers should feel empowered and poised to take advantage of the many micro- or classroom-level practices that can assist them in learning about and cultivating relationships with their students. Here are five that I recommend in particular:

1. Interview Your Students. Teachers sometimes spend infinite amounts of time talking about students to their colleagues or to students’ parents but minimal time actually talking to students themselves. This strategy suggests that teachers engage in conversations with students themselves to learn from and about them. Teachers can then incorporate this learning into the class curriculum and teaching. In my university classroom, I utilize this strategy. For instance, when I learn of a student’s interest in a particular aspect of education, I remain mindful of that area of interest. When I am reading journals and books, or when I am engaged in research projects, I often make copies of writing or related information that may be of interest to that student and share the materials with him or her.

2. Give assignments that allow students to share their experiences and interests. In language arts, assignments might include journal writing or essay writing. In social studies, assignments might include family history projects or local community-studies projects. In mathematics or science, assignments might include student-constructed word problems or community-based inquiry projects where students investigate the effects of environmental realities on health, crime, and/or poverty in their community.

3. Encourage classroom discussions that let students be the center of attention. Teachers should not always be at the center of discussions but should allow students to share events and experiences from home and their community. Students should be allowed to share whatever information they feel comfortable discussing. When I taught high school English, I used to facilitate what I came to call “rap sessions” that allowed students to have conversations with each other about what was happening in their lives inside and outside of school. The students developed topics that they wanted to discuss, and we selected a few that allowed them to debate issues or just to share their perspectives on a particular theme. The experience was inundated with learning opportunities: it allowed students to think about and construct a position; it allowed students to develop counter-positions; it helped students learn to substantiate their positions, listen to others, and build coherent narratives; and it provided students space for voice and authority in the classroom. These discussions gave students an opportunity to develop their own voice and perspective and allowed me to gain more knowledge about them.

4. Attend extracurricular activities featuring your students. It means something to students when teachers take time out of their schedules to visit an activity they are involved in. I shall never forget the time my third-grade teacher attended my football game at a city park. Needless to say, I played at my highest capacity that game, and I remember feeling a great sense of pride that my teacher had supported me in this way. In the third-grade classroom, I remember putting forth more effort after this experience and looking at my teacher with an intensified level of respect. It is important for teachers to attend students’ activities—such as their plays or sporting events—even when they are not on duty as coaches, chaperones, directors, or sponsors. Teachers from elementary through high school should feel a sense of responsibility to be present at events that help complete students’ educational experiences such as those connected to extra-curricular activities.

5. Visit a site in your students’ community. When teachers immerse themselves in a student’s community, they get a first-hand view of the student’s life outside the learning environment. I recall that my mother, who owned a beauty salon in my community, saw my second-grade teacher every other Thursday when my mother styled her hair. Moreover, other teachers who taught my sister, me, and many of my friends also received services from my mother’s beauty salon. Of course, I am completely confident that there were conversations about me and my academic performance during those appointments when my mother styled my teacher’s hair. My second-grade teacher was building knowledge about me, the community, and other students in the community because my friends’ parents also visited my mother’s shop for services.

These activities are not complicated but take time and planning. Yet they have great potential to help teachers deepen their knowledge about students, build important relationships with them, and develop curriculum and instructional practices that are meaningful to students.

H. Richard Milner IV is associate professor of education in the Department of Teaching and Learning at Peabody College, Vanderbilt University. This article was adapted from Start Where You Are, But Don’t Stay There (Harvard Education Press, 2010).
Share/Bookmark

Inside Higher Ed: Google's Gadfly


February 16, 2011
“Uncomfortably familial.” That is how Siva Vaidhyanathan, a professor of media studies at the University of Virginia, describes the relationship between higher education and Google — a company that has, in a little more than a decade, evolved from pet project of Stanford doctoral students to chief usher of the information age.

The company’s founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, first explained their game-changing PageRank algorithm — which, drawing on the principles of peer-review (swapping citations for hyperlinks), propelled Google past incumbent search leaders AltaVista and Yahoo! — in an academic paper in 1999. Later, Page and Brin would rely on university largesse in the early days of the Google Book Search project, when major research libraries allowed the company to scan huge portions of their collections for free.

In return, Google has given higher education Google Scholar, which provides a popular bridge to otherwise obscure academic research; Google Apps for Education, which enables universities to use the company’s e-mail and communications tools, and its huge server capacity, for free; and, of course, Google Book Search — which, despite its discomfiting monopoly, gives scholars a more comprehensive body of digitized literature than has ever existed. “Google,” Vaidhyanathan observes, “is an example of a stunningly successful firm behaving as much like a university as it can afford to.”

But as is often the case with cousins, the genetic differences between higher education and Google are more striking than their similarities. Beneath the interdependence and shared hereditary traits, tensions creep. And like an awkward Thanksgiving dinner, Vaidhyanathan’s new book, The Googlization of Everything (And Why We Should Worry) (University of California Press), provokes these tensions to the surface.

The Virginia professor, who is not afraid to confess his affection for the ease and usefulness of Google, nevertheless distrusts the company’s basic motivations as it vies for our intellectual inheritance. “Google has fostered a more seamless, democratized, global, cosmopolitan information ecosystem,” he writes. “Yet it has simultaneously contributed to the steady commercialization of higher education and the erosion of standards of information quality.”

Google does not reward our impulse to know, Vaidhyanathan argues; it exploits it by making it appear as though knowing is easy. “The ways that Google structures, judges, and delivers knowledge to us exacerbate our worst tendencies to jump to erroneous conclusions and act on them in ways that cause harm,” the professor writes. Meanwhile the company keeps collecting, on behalf of its advertisers, the wealth of personal information that we feed it in exchange for this flattery, then pats its own back all the way to the bank.

Vaidhyanathan’s point is not that Google has scammed us. He attributes the ascension of Google to a “public failure” — negligence by public stewards to preempt the privatization of knowledge and learning in the switch from analog to digital. In other words, we should have seen this coming. Did Google’s academic bloodlines lull higher education into passively supporting Page and Brin as they quietly absconded with the family jewels? Perhaps, but Vaidhyanathan is less concerned with how we got here than where we are and where we’re going. Accordingly, he proposes a sprawling effort by libraries and like-minded institutions that would essentially give Googlers a public option. “The future of knowledge — and thus the future of the species — depends on our getting this right,” he writes.

Inside Higher Ed caught up with Vaidhyanathan, whose Wikipedia page credits him with coining the term “Critical Information Studies,” though it does not cite its source.

Q: You admit early on that your book has an “overtly political” agenda: greater government regulation of Google. When a company exerts such control over public goods — like, say, a digital archive of 130 million books comprising the entire living history of human thought — oversight by public authorities becomes necessary, you argue. One might counter that public institutions are potentially just as compromising. To the extent that regulation would transfer power over the basic infrastructure of knowledge and learning from Google to the government, might we simply be trading the hazards of commercialization for the hazards of politicization?

A: While I argue that we should consider — not fear — the prospect of regulating Google, I stop short of prescribing much in the way of specific regulation. My goal is to convince readers that Google is already highly regulated, so it's dumb to say that Google should remain unregulated. More importantly, I want to raise the prospect of whether Google and the Internet in general are properly regulated. That, to me, is the grown-up way to approach the question. Right now Google is haphazardly and clumsily regulated. Copyright stops Google and others from doing clever, useful things. Antitrust is too toothless to provide serious competition in online, search-based advertisements. Most important from the perspective of the values important to a democratic republic, Google's search standards are opaque and potentially corrupt. That's why the European Union is examining them. I don't believe Google's search results are corrupted. I do believe they very well could be in the near future. And there is no guarantee that the next company that governs search would be named Google. As to the direct questions about whether the transfer of authority from firm to state would "simply be trading the hazards of commercialization for the hazards of politicization," I say exactly! Politicization means that citizens battle over competing visions of the good. That's what we are supposed to do in a democratic republic. Fundamentally, we must recognize that some things are too important to be entrusted to unaccountable private actors. There may be hazards. But they are our hazards.

Q: As you write, it is not just our institutions that are being “Googlized”; so are our minds and habits. Some surveys have suggested that nearly half of college students use Google as their primary research tool. “Googlized” students have poor memories and inflated expectations about how much effort it takes to dig up definitive answers. A Greek chorus of tsk-ing academics has all but declared this a preamble to the Twitter-apocalypse. Are they right?

A: I don't subscribe to the "Google is making us dumber" position. I think Google is allowing us to be differently smart. I also refuse to bracket off my students as some exotic tribe that behaves and reacts differently than I do or my mother does. We are all in this crazy environment together. The challenges we share are much more important and interesting than the differences we might demonstrate across age groups. So yeah, Google is my primary research tool. It's also my mother's. Collectively, our dependence on Google is not a problem because it allegedly weakens our faculties. It's a problem because Google bakes biases into its algorithms. And we fail to recognize that fact. Most of the time, we can't even discern what they are. Most of the recent changes in Google's search algorithms make Google much better for shopping and much worse for learning. That could make us collectively dumber, but not individually. That's why we need a fresh approach to how we manage our information ecosystem. The same service cannot serve wisdom and wealth equally well. I'm sorry. What was the question? I got distracted by YouTube for a moment...

Q: At a digital scholarship conference last fall, I watched Daniel M. Russell, a senior research scientist at Google in charge of “user happiness,” give an academic audience a demonstration of what treasures lie in the depths of Google’s trove — a facsimile of Stravinsky’s score from “Sacre du Printemps,” a 3-D model of the Notre Dame Cathedral, unemployment data for Santa Clara County over the last 20 years — before lamenting that most students have no idea how to find them. The implication was that Google has created this rich, open vault that students love to use but which colleges are failing to teach them to use effectively. To what extent can better training and education realistically solve this problem?

A: Well, I am not sure training is the gap here. Google keeps rolling out cool features and services faster than we can fold them into our habits and curricula. A couple of weeks ago Google unveiled a really cool high-definition tool to explore major art works in museums. Every day I plan to use it to show my daughter some of her favorite works. But every evening I forget to do that because I just can't get out of the tangle of links connecting YouTube videos.

Google has not figured out how to connect with the right faculty in the right numbers for many of its services. But it's not really Google's fault. Perhaps each university should assign a librarian to be the Chief Google Officer so she or he could hip faculty to the newest, coolest things.

Q: Lest our readers assume that your book is a frothing, techno-phobic screed penned by a dyed-in-the-tweed academic who lives to prove that any large, profitable company is necessarily sinister and exploitative, I should mention that you actually have some quite nice things to say about Google in these pages. What is the greatest contribution Google has made to higher education and/or intellectual life?

A: Google made the Web usable. Before this clean and useful search tool, using the Web well meant starting at a trusted point and following trusted links. That's why it is called a "web." With decent search one can just drop down into a new part of the Web, skipping over the useless and icky parts. Google actually cleaned up the Web — or at least our experience of it. Not long ago simple searches for double entendres like "facial" would yield anything but links to the cosmetic spa treatment. Google's biases — what it calls standards — effectively hide the most troublesome links deep in the search results. You can find the yucky stuff by searching for exactly what you might want. But you are unlikely to stumble upon bad stuff accidentally. This is a great service, but one with real costs at the margins.

Beyond that, Google Docs is a major service to higher education. It's the easiest and most dependable way to allow multiple authors and editors to work on a document together. It lacks the useless gizmos that infect Microsoft Office. I use the Google Docs presentation software to run slides for class because it's simple, dependable, and can host embedded YouTube videos. Did I mention that I spend too much time on YouTube? That said, I believe it's incumbent on universities to ensure maximum user confidentiality and data security for any Google product. I don't believe universities have been strong or effective negotiators for their students' and faculties' interests when it comes to using Google services. There should be a collective set of best practices for when universities deploy third-party services that collect user data.

Q: Your book culminates with a proposal for an alternative to Google’s “hyper-commercialized, data-mined, advertising-directed” model — working title: the Human Knowledge Project. Contrary to Google, this project would set the agenda for the creation of a information system that is public, comprehensive, civic-minded, and strong enough to outlast its colorful, colossal counterpart. How plausible is it that a confederation of relatively cash-poor and fractious public institutions might actually shoulder the resolve and unity of vision to field a more stable alternative to Google? Does any part of you fear that what “the Googlization of everything” has taken from humanity, humanity lacks the will to reclaim?

A: The Human Knowledge Project would be a 50-year public, global plan to design, legislate for, enable, and fund a global digital library service to deliver the best information to the most people. It's as feasible as it is desirable. In other words, if we don't do it it's because we don't really want it. States are only as cash-poor as they choose to be. States are only as incompetent as they are designed to be. The fractured nature of public discourse could be the source of strength for such a project as long as we all agree on the terms of debate and the over-arching goal: that no child growing up in Sweden should have better access to better information than a child growing up in Rwanda would have. If we don't agree to that, then we should not pursue the Human Knowledge Project. If we do agree, then let's start a political campaign for it. Let's figure out the steps we need to take. Let's change the laws we need to change. Let's raise the money we need to raise. The goal would not be to oust or push Google. The goal would be to build what we want and need without resorting to cheap, short-term fixes. If anyone should "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible," it should be the world itself.

For the latest technology news and opinion from Inside Higher Ed, follow @IHEtech on Twitter.

— Steve Kolowich

Share/Bookmark

Smart Classroom CampusTechnology


Student Research: Can Googling Replace $168 Intro to Psych Textbook?
By Dian Schaffhauser 02/16/11

Students are taking the battle against high-priced textbooks into their own hands. This week, 11 University of Cincinnati seniors in the psychology program presented at an Educause event a comparison of the content of traditional college texts, one of which costs $168, to content they found for free on the Web.

The research effort was undertaken as part of the Digital Bookshelf Project, the University System of Ohio's effort to make textbooks more affordable.

For the latest research project, which took place in fall 2010, the students compared the value and educational quality of two current textbooks with the draft of a new textbook they found free online, along with what they could find through online search engines. They worked under the guidance of Charles Ginn, an associate professor of psychology at U Cincinnati.

"For our generation raised on the Internet, online searches for class materials often replace purchasing the textbook," said Libby Cates, one of the student researchers. "So, our primary research question was: Can students depend on what they find when they Google key terms? Secondly, we wanted to see what benefits are delivered through textbooks in their various forms."

They found that materials from Wikipedia were accurate and thorough, though "perhaps excessively thorough for an introductory course," they reported. "These summaries were equal to or exceeded those found in the two textbooks."

Students also found that the free e-textbook and lower-cost print materials all provided similar learning support. They recommended a combination of digital and print materials as being most supportive of student learning.

The Digital Bookshelf Project has brought together psychology departments across the state to offer students electronic textbook choices from major publishers. The goal of the project is to work with the publishers and university bookstores to provide students alternatives to standard texts.

The latest research follows on a project that investigated what format students would prefer for their text. For the 2010 academic year, 50,000 of Ohio's 70,000 introductory psychology students have had a low-cost digital option available for the textbook of their instructor's choice.

About the Author
Dian Schaffhauser is a writer who covers technology and business. Send your higher education technology news to her at dian@dischaffhauser.com.
Share/Bookmark

University Business: Court Orders Halt To SUNO-UNO Merger Study After Suit Filed By Cleo Fields


The Times-Picayune
2/16/2011


A Baton Rouge district court has ordered a temporary halt to the study of whether to merge the University of New Orleans and Southern University at New Orleans after a former state senator challenged the constitutionality of Gov. Bobby Jindal's appointments to the Board of Regents.

The temporary restraining order issued Monday by the 19th Judicial District Court prevents the Regents from doing any work on the study until a preliminary hearing can be held Feb. 24. The matter has been assigned to Judge Timothy Kelley.

A suit filed by former state Sen. Cleo Fields, D-Baton Rouge, and former state Rep. Willie Hunter, D-Monroe, charges that the racial membership of the Regents violates a state constitutional requirement that the board's makeup "should be representative of the state's population by race and gender to ensure diversity."

None of the governor's 15 appointees to the higher education policymaking board are racial minorities, and only four are women. Louisiana's population is 37 percent minority and 51.6 percent female.

http://www.nola.com/politics/index.ssf/2011/02/court_orders_halt_to_suno-uno.html
Share/Bookmark