NEW YORK (Reuters Life!) – Contrary to popular belief, the Internet and mobile phones are not isolating people but enhancing their social worlds, according to a U.S. survey.
The survey was sparked by a 2006 study by U.S. sociologists who argued technology is advancing a trend seen since 1985 — Americans becoming more socially isolated, their social networks shrinking, and the diversity of their contacts decreasing.
By Belinda Godlsmith
Read Routers
Doug Ruschman knows that his job is as much about understanding how college students think as it is about knowing how technology works.
Ruschman, director for web services at Xavier University, a medium-sized Jesuit university in Cincinnati, is realistic when assessing his customers’ psyches. He knows that students today have been raised in a world where access to information is instantaneous, and that downtime — even a small amount — might turn them off permanently.
Karen D. Schwartz
Read Ed Tech
In more EDUCAUSE news, Moodlerooms, introduced its joule Learning Management Platform today. While Moodle is well-known open source technology in educational circles, many institutions lack the time or internal expertise to fully leverage its capabilities. Moodlerooms has filled the gap, providing Moodle implementations in a variety of settings. Now, however, many of the features that users either built themselves or found via third parties are integrated into the company’s joule platform.
By Christopher Dawson
Read Education Technology
While students and faculty seem to agree on the importance of technology in education, the two groups do not agree on how well it’s being implemented. According to new research released Monday, only 38 percent of students indicated that their instructors “understand technology and fully integrate it into their classes.” Students also rated that lack of understanding as “the biggest obstacle to classroom technology integration.”
By David Nagel
Read Campus Technology
Orlando, Fla. — Online education is a runaway best seller. Its growth rate — 12.9 percent — dwarfs the overall pace of academe’s student expansion. More than 25 percent of all students may have taken at least one online class this year, according to a speculative estimate suggested at a distance-education conference that wraps up here today.
by Marc Parry
As a female professor, are you called rude and abrasive while your male colleagues who make similar statements are simply labeled assertive? Has your department head discouraged you from taking an assignment, saying that because you have children you might not be able to handle it?
By Robin Wilson
Dear Colleagues:
National Distance Learning Week 2009 is coming, and I wanted to take a moment to encourage your participation to promote and celebrate the tremendous growth and accomplishments occurring today in distance learning programs in your organization, on your campus and in your community. We want to help tell people about what you are doing [...]
The ease with which information can be spread through the Internet has exacerbated tensions among those who pay for, conduct, and publish scientific research. Many journals still require subscription or per-article payments for access to the research they publish, which often leaves the public, who funds a significant percentage of the research, on the wrong side of a pay wall. So far, however, there’s been little evidence that the public has been interested enough in research to engage in the sort of widespread file-sharing that plague other content industries. But a new study suggests that may just be because nobody’s looked very carefully.
By John Timmer
Read Ars Technica
Nearly 12 million post-secondary students in the United States take some or all of their classes online right now. But this number will skyrocket to more than 22 million in the next five years, according to data released recently by research firm Ambient Insight.
By David Nagel
Read Campus Technology
However, for the average school that has rolled out Google Apps, asking students to list their social networks on their profiles, thereby opting in to Google crawling their external profiles, as well as their friends outside the domain just leaves me with a bad taste in my mouth. From a guy who would probably trust Google with his first-born, this is probably a red flag.
By Christopher Dawson
Read Education IT