WIA Report: Weekly Newsletter August 23, 2011
Tuesday, August 23, 2011
Epicenter: 5 Reasons Why E-Books Aren’t There Yet
By John C Abell June 3, 2011
2:00 pm
Categories: Books, Internet Culture & Etiquette, Media
The LMS and the adolescence of web learning
Lisa’s (Online) Teaching Blog: a weblog experiment by Lisa M. Lane, dedicated to the principle of Pedagogy First!
Educause: 7 Things You Should Know About LMS Evaluation
At many institutions, the current LMS is five or more years old. In that time, the teaching and learning context might have changed considerably, and other products, including open-source options, have emerged, raising the question of whether an institution should conduct a complete evaluation of its LMS strategy. The LMS serves as the linchpin of an institution’s teaching and learning enterprise, and as such it should provide maximum value and flexibility for the faculty. The examination of the LMS forces an institution to take a hard look at its teaching practices, to educate the faculty that the LMS can be more than a “course website,” and to invite them to use the full spectrum of teaching tools it provides. If a decision is made to replace the LMS, such an undertaking can bring with it a steep learning curve. As changes in education delivery and redefinition of student needs continue to reshape the modern campus, colleges and universities might find themselves adapting to pedagogical changes more frequently than in the past.
The "7 Things You Should Know About..." series from the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) provides concise information on emerging learning technologies. Each brief focuses on a single technology and describes what it is, where it is going, and why it matters to teaching and learning. Use these briefs for a no-jargon, quick overview of a topic and share them with time-pressed colleagues.
In addition to the "7 Things You Should Know About…" briefs, you may find other ELI resources useful in addressing teaching, learning, and technology issues at your institution. To learn more, please visit the ELI Resources page.
The Ultimate Guide to Twitter Marketing
Gabrielle Conde at Copyblogger has put together The Ultimate Guide to Twitter Marketing. This mega-guide to using the popular microblogging tool for promotion and marketing contains 100 resources which are organized into the following sections:
• What is Twitter?
• Setting up your Twitter account
• New twitter users start here
• What’s up with the whole #hashtag thing?
• Twitter vocabulary
• Why you need to be on Twitter
• Big companies are doing it …
• The government is doing it too …
• What you need to know
• What the heck is a retweet and how do I do it?
• The Twitter mindset
• How to get Twitter followers
• Brand management on Twitter
• Lean, mean Twitter marketing strategies
• Prospecting on Twitter
• Craft eye-catching Twitter headlines
• Managing Twitter
• Twitter security
• Twitter social proof
• Avoid being an annoying twit
• Don’t stop there
4 Tips to Maximize Your Twitter Marketing
Charlene Kingston at the Social Media Examiner suggests 4 Tips to Maximize Your Twitter Marketing. If you’re looking for ways to leverage the power of Twitter for marketing and promotional purposes you’ll want to check out this quick post.
• #1: Define your business goals and objectives
• #2: Create your conversation strategy
• #3: Organize your community with Twitter Lists
• #4: Keep expanding your Twitter community
The Chronicle of Higher Education: Want to Be a Good Researcher? Try Teaching!
August 11, 2011
By Dan Berrett
Graduate students in the sciences who both teach and conduct research show greater improvement in their research skills than do those who focus exclusively on laboratory work, says a report to be published in the August 19 issue of Science.
The report, "Graduate Students' Teaching Experiences Improve Their Methodological Research Skills," is notable for being among the first to examine gains in the actual research skills of graduate students rather than what they report about themselves.
The findings run counter to the conventional wisdom underlying the training and rewarding of graduate students in the sciences, which tends to view teaching as a distraction from research. And the report arrives amid an intensifying national debate about the proper balance between teaching and research by college faculty.
"Students who both taught and conducted research demonstrate significantly greater improvement in their abilities to generate testable hypotheses and design valid experiments," writes the lead author, David F. Feldon, an assistant professor at the University of Virginia's Curry School of Education. "These results indicate that teaching experience can contribute substantially to the improvement of essential research skills."
To carry out their study, Mr. Feldon and his colleagues gathered two sets of research proposals from 95 beginning graduate students in STEM fields—science, technology, engineering, and math—at three universities in the Northeast from 2007 to 2010. About half of those students taught, on average, one undergraduate course. The other half had no teaching responsibilities.
All of the graduate students submitted research proposals at the beginning of the academic year and provided revised versions at the end of the year.
Mr. Feldon's team used a rubric to rate several various aspects of the students' research skills, including the context of the proposed study, framing of the hypotheses, attention paid to the validity and reliability of study methods, experimental design, and selection and presentation of data for analysis.
The graduate students who both taught and did research scored higher on those measures, the study found. The results suggest that those students exhibited both superior methodological skills and greater improvement in those skills compared with their peers who focused on research alone.
"The findings resonate with people," Mr. Feldon said in an interview. "Of the people I've spoken to about this study, half said, 'Of course that's what you found.' The other half said, 'There's no way that can be true. Your data must be wrong.' Everyone's got an opinion on this, but there's been little data."
Myths and Assumptions
Much of the existing scholarship on the relationship between teaching and research has focused on how research influences teaching, and not the reverse.
While Mr. Feldon, who studies educational psychology and science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education, points in his paper to evidence that research enhances teaching, this conclusion has not always been settled. In 1996, John Hattie and H.W. Marsh, researchers who at the time were at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and the University of Western Sydney, in Australia, respectively, surveyed the scholarly literature on teaching and research for the Review of Educational Research and found no relationship between the two. "The common belief that research and teaching are inextricably entwined is an enduring myth," they wrote.
That "myth" is one of the reasons graduate students in the sciences are often divided into two camps, observes Mr. Feldon. The more-promising scholars starting graduate school tend to receive generous fellowships and grants, which allow them to focus on research without the distraction of teaching undergraduates. The other group is assigned the job of teaching, and their research has long been thought to suffer as a result.
The assumption that teaching diminishes research quality is reflected widely in graduate programs in the sciences, says Mark R. Connolly, a researcher at the Wisconsin Center for Education Research, at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, who heard a preliminary presentation of Mr. Feldon's findings. Science-faculty members are rewarded largely on the basis of their research, notes Mr. Connolly. That reality naturally leads faculty members to place more value on time spent advising their graduate students on research than on teaching.
Mr. Connolly's own research draws on his interviews with graduate students in STEM fields as they start their academic careers. Those students said they feared that they would not get good jobs if they didn't focus enough on research. "Interest in teaching is considered a signal of failure as a researcher," he says they told him.
The most significant aspect of Mr. Feldon's findings, says Mr. Connolly, is that they are based on data that track the development of actual research skills instead of those that are self-reported. "They're looking at demonstrated competency," he says. "It gets away from these assumptions that teaching is inimical to research. In fact, they're complementary."
Mr. Feldon cites two reasons that teaching seems to improve research skills. The first is that a graduate student who teaches, for example, 20 undergraduates how to develop a laboratory study ends up practicing those same skills him or herself. "It's a straight practice effect," he says. "You're getting more opportunities in more situations."
The second reason is that people who have to explain to someone else how to carry out a task are quicker to develop their own abilities to do that same task.
Teaching's benefit to research depends on a certain kind of educational experience, Mr. Feldon continues. The educational experience for both instructor and student must involve what he calls "active inquiry," the investigation of open-ended questions, in which students must figure out which areas deserve exploration and what data to collect.
Teaching and research in the social-science disciplines would probably have a similar dynamic, he says. That assertion finds some support in a paper by William E. Becker, now a professor emeritus of economics at Indiana University at Bloomington, and Peter E. Kennedy, now a professor emeritus of economics at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, which was presented at the American Economic Association's annual meeting in 2005.
Their paper described the results of a qualitative study of the relationship between teaching and research among economists who were known as accomplished researchers. About 50 percent of the respondents could provide specific examples in which their teaching of undergraduates had led directly to the publication of research. Thirty-five percent could not cite a specific example but said teaching had played a positive role. The remaining 15 percent didn't volunteer a case in which teaching had helped their research.
A Wider Debate
Mr. Feldon's report comes at a time when some policy makers and politicians are questioning the proper relationship of teaching to research, and whether the greater emphasis on research has harmed the teaching of undergraduates.
This debate has been most visible in Texas., where the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a think tank aligned with Gov. Rick Perry, a Republican, has advanced what it calls the Seven Breakthrough Solutions. One of those recommendations is to divide colleges' budgets for research and teaching, with the goal of "increasing transparency and accountability by emphasizing teaching and research as separate efforts in higher education, and making it easier to recognize excellence in each area."
To many in academe, that recommendation advocates the severing of the research and teaching functions of faculty members. This was sufficiently alarming to the Association of American Universities that its president at the time, Robert M. Berdahl, sent a letter last year to Texas A&M University officials warning that adopting the proposed solutions would threaten the American research university. "Separating research from teaching and oversimplifying the evaluation of faculty does violence to the values that have produced the American universities that are envied and emulated across the globe," Mr. Berdahl wrote.
Many of those who support the proposed solutions have backed away from the document or have said it is not intended to be followed in its entirety. The proposal's architect, Jeff Sandefer, a board member of the policy foundation and co-founder of the Acton School of Business, says he never meant to suggest that teaching and research should be separated entirely—just that they should be measured and rewarded individually.
Mr. Sandefer finds the results of Mr. Feldon's research unsurprising. "The great researchers aren't, to me, super narrowly focused on the answers," he said in an interview. "They're excited by great questions. Teaching is really about getting students to struggle with and explore those questions."
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eLearners.com: 3 Simple Time Management Tips for Students Studying Online
What time-management methods work best for online students? Nicoline Jaramillo, who is an online graduate student studying psychology at Capella University, has a lot to manage. As a full-time student, wife, mother of four, and a U.S. Army officer serving at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, she needed a way to keep an entire household informed of each other's activities. "Each year, as the children get older and my responsibilities increase at work, I find myself revisiting my time management strategies."
She'd tried a number of high-tech solutions, but found a basic approach worked best. "I keep a wall calendar at home by the front door. It highlights family events, appointments, and social engagements," shares Jaramillo.
Start a new term with these back-to-basics time management tips:
1. Establish small, daily tasks for coursework and household chores, which, over time, help you accomplish long-term goals and stay on top of ongoing assignments.
2. Avoid working on multiple tasks at the same time, which can lead to errors and difficulty concentrating.
3. Turn off the electronic gadgets that may lead to distraction, such as smart phones, computer tablets, and the TV while you're studying.
Stay On Target
Want to improve your ability to stay focused? First consider how you currently spend your time each day. Identify activities that may keep you from achieving your goals as well as.
Strike a Balance
Finding a healthy balance between work and life is one thing, but adding school to the equation may be unfamiliar territory for you. Communication with those closest to you can.
University Business: Valuing A Liberal Arts Education In A Jobs-Focused World (Opinion)
The Hartford Courant
I gritted my teeth and clicked the mouse to transfer the last installment for my daughter's fall college tuition.
I'm pretty much OK with that because a college education still pays off, handsomely. The median annual earnings of a college graduate are still about $20,000 more than what a high school graduate takes in, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
Over a lifetime, census figures show, the typical college graduate earns about $550,000 more than a high school graduate. That's comforting because as a journalist, it's essential to raise financially independent children.
But as life grows more complicated and higher education too often remains rooted in 19th and early 20th century ideals, along come disruptive thinkers such as the founder of PayPal, Peter Thiel, who has gotten a lot of attention for questioning whether colleges are truly about learning. MORE
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