Breathing Life Into the Lecture Hall

Clickers? Engaged professors? Powerpoint presentations?

Check out this interesting article from the Washington Post

Nearly 200 students sat in the large lecture hall, staring down at their professor, Edward F. Redish, holding pencils at the ready to take notes in Fundamentals of Physics. It looked like a traditional lecture course, but appearance is where the tradition ended.

Instead of spending 50 minutes putting students to sleep by lecturing about position, velocity and acceleration, Redish, a University of Maryland professor, kept the students awake by getting them actively involved in the lesson — all 192 of them.

He called on his students by name, having taken and studied their pictures. He frequently directed students to solve a problem with their neighbors or register opinions with a “clicker” system that, within seconds, calculates the answers and shows him the response. Sometimes he performs an experiment or shows part of a movie. And if he sees someone doing a crossword puzzle, he is liable to walk over and help out.

This is Redish’s version of the time-honored college lecture course, which is undergoing significant change at some universities because of technological innovations and the desire to hold the attentions of the highly structured 21st-century student.

“Lecturing is not good for children and other living things,” said Redish, who spent 25 years in theoretical nuclear physics and now researches how students learn physics. “They don’t really learn very much in a lecture.”

Once, all professors spent entire classes talking nearly nonstop while students furiously scribbled notes. Today, a growing number of professors are abandoning that tradition, saying there are better ways to keep students focused and learning. Continue reading Breathing Life Into the Lecture Hall…

OpenCourseWare Goes Statewide

This from Inside Higher ed:

In the six years since the Massachusetts Institute of Technology unveiled its OpenCourseWare program, a handful of individual institutions – among them Johns Hopkins, Michigan State, Rice, Tufts and Utah State Universities – have posted their course materials online to promote the (literally) free exchange of knowledge and information. “It’s very much one school here, one school there,” says David Wiley, director of Utah State’s Center for Open and Sustainable Learning and an associate professor in the department of instructional technology. “It’s just not the kind of thing that was going to go on scale if we waited for everyone to do it individually.”

So a new statewide initiative, led by Utah State, takes a different tack. The “Utah OpenCourseWare Alliance” Web site launches today with materials from 105 courses at seven Utah colleges – and with taxpayer monies funding the enterprise. “It’s a way,” Wiley says, “”to get some direct value back to people who fund higher education.” Continue reading OpenCourseWare Goes Statewide…

A Meeting Of The Minds?

Wow, can this really make a difference? The Ed Department is giving a huge chunk of money (over two million!) to the Association of American Colleges and Universities, the American Association of State Colleges and Universities, and the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges in order for them to find a way to finally have a standard for measuring how students learn… I can’t wait to hear what comes out of this. Read the full story at InsideHighered.com

Building A Better Sakai

Worth reading at the original posting (here) for the very interesting comments this post is generating..

“Colleges are keen to support Sakai, the open-source course-management system that has emerged as an alternative to Blackboard. But the software has been plagued by “fairly serious usability problems,” says e-Literate, and attempts to fix them have been “sporadic and fragile.”

Now there’s reason to be optimistic, e-Literate says: The nonprofit Sakai Foundation, which oversees the software’s development, is jump-starting a project intended to make Sakai more user-friendly. The project was devised this year but was put on hold while the foundation searched for a new executive director.

Michael Korcuska has now filled that slot, and the initiative, which is to last for six months, is back on track. Five institutions — Charles Sturt University, in Australia; Indiana University at Bloomington; The John Hopkins University; the University of Cambridge, in England; and Yale University — are expected to participate.” —Brock Read
The Chronicle Of Higher Education Sept 19, 2007.

Minority College Enrollments Edge Higher

From Inside Higher Ed.com Sept. 20, 2007

The number and proportion of minority students enrolled in American colleges both continued to grow in 2004, according to the American Council on Education’s annual report on the status of minorities in higher education. But the group’s data-filled study also showed that the rates at which black and Hispanic Americans enroll in college continues to lag their white peers significantly.

“Minorities in Higher Education 22nd Annual Status Report: 2007 Supplement,” which the council released Wednesday, represents a slight change in practice by higher education’s umbrella group. Citing the relatively small change that occurs from year to year in most of its indicators, the group decided that rather than release a full-blown report every year, it will switch to a biennial schedule, publishing a supplement updating heavily used tables in the odd years, with this year’s being the first. The next full version of the report, the 23rd Annual Status Report, will come out in 2008. See all the numbers here.

The changes in data may rarely be monumental, but they are still notable, and closely watched. The table below shows that the numbers of college-enrolled students from all minority groups continued to grow faster between 2003 and 2004 than did the number of white students at the undergraduate and graduate levels (though not in professional schools):

Books for checkout!

LHR has many books that are available for you to checkout. These publications cover such topics as instructional design, assessment, library marketing, and more. These books are only available to Library employees, so they aren’t listed on Roger. Please take a look at the attached file to see a list of available titles, or go to the training website at http://libnet.ucsd.edu/training and look for the listing under Training & Education Resources. All checkout requests should go to Katie Spencer.

pdf available here

Google Reader Goes Multi Lingual, and Loses The Labs Label

Read the break up letter on the google reader blog.

A Worldwide Test For Higher Education?

From Inside Higher Ed Sept. 19

For much of the last year or two, debate has raged among American higher education officials and state and federal policy makers about the wisdom and practicality of creating a system that would allow for public comparison of how successfully individual colleges and/or programs are educating their students. Many college leaders have rejected the push, which has emanated primarily from the Secretary of Education’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education and the U.S. Education Department, on the grounds that the nation’s colleges and universities — two-year and four-year, public and private, exclusive and open enrollment — and their students are far too varied to be responsibly and intelligently measured by any single, standardized measure (or even a suite of them).

But the thirst among politicians and others seeking to hold colleges and universities more accountable for their performance is powerful, and it is not merely an American phenomenon. Proof of that can be found in the fact that the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development has convened a small group of testing experts and higher education policy makers Continue reading A Worldwide Test For Higher Education?…

Dumping The ‘Ol Org Chart

This post from the Librarian In Black Blog on a SirsiDynix webinar she attended (”Dump the Org. Chart: Get `Er Done!: Management for a 2.0 Library.”)is very interesting!

Just One More Reason We Can Tell Our Students It’s All Worth It..

Research just published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute finds that those with a higher education are less likely than others to die from cancer.