CampusCE is pleased to announce its partnership with AdReady to provide a powerful digital display advertising platform, enabling higher education marketers to successfully reach and convert digital consumers. In tandem with CampusCE’s EMS automated registration, payment processing and conversion optimization tools, the CampusCE | AdReady partnership provides a fully integrated front-end for getting the most out of your institution’s digital presence.
via Campus Technology So who cares if the people who patch the servers disappear from campus? Honestly, even IT people don’t care that much about these mundane operational tasks. That’s not the concern. The larger issue is that IT departments in general, and CIOs in particular, can and should be playing a strategic role in the future of universities for the next decade if universities themselves are to meet their own missions.
It’s a cliché to say that technology is changing our lives, but that doesn’t make it any less true. Many of us believe GPS, Google, and a strong cell signal are basic human needs. Our personal lives have been transformed by social media (if you don’t believe it just ask any politician)). And many of us require constant assistance from our Android or iPhones just to navigate our daily professional commitments.
Despite this, the ways in which we create and distribute knowledge at the university utilizes tools that would have been familiar to scholars in the Middle Ages. Classroom lectures, books, and printed journals are still the dominant tools of our trade. [Continue Reading at Campus Technology]
via The Atlantic If a college student today stepped into a time machine and traveled back to Plato’s Academy of ancient Athens, she would recognize quite a bit. Sure, it might take some time to master ancient Greek and the use of stylus on wax, but she would eventually settle into a familiar academic routine. Senior scholars across a range of subjects like astronomy and political theory would lecture, pose questions, and press answers to a small group of attendants. Junior attendants would listen, answer, and defend responses.
That a class in 2011 resembles a lecture from 2,300 years ago suggests that two millennia of technological upheaval have only brushed the world of academics. Some professors use PowerPoint, and many schools manage their classes with online software. But even these changes don’t fully embrace the potential of Web, mobile, and interactive technology.
“The present resistance to innovation [in education] is breathtaking,” Joel Klein writes in The Atlantic this month. The former chancellor of the New York City Department of Education was writing about public high schools, but he might as well have been talking about universities. Despite college costs rising faster in college than any institution in the country including health care, we have the technology to disrupt education, turn brick and mortar lecture halls into global classrooms, and dramatically bring down the cost of a high quality education.
Entrepreneurs like to say there is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come. Is education innovation that next big idea? [Continue Reading at The Atlantic]
via Campus Technology As a cultural anthropologist and researcher in the modern discipline of digital ethnography, Michael Wesch likes to ask the big, complex questions: How do we find meaning and significance in the digital age? How is technology affecting society and culture? How are social media changing teaching and learning practices? But as a teacher, an associate professor of cultural anthropology at Kansas State University, he likes to ask his students one small, simple question at the start of each year.
“I ask, How many of you do not actually like school?” he said. “Almost invariably almost half raise their hands. Then I vary the question slightly. I ask, How many of you do not like learning? And I get no hands. These are people who like learning, but they don’t like it to be institutionally created for them. Clearly something’s wrong here.” [Continue Reading at Campus Technology]
via Higher Education Management Higher education in the 21st century is increasingly characterized by student mobility and flexibility. More than half of today’s college graduates, not to mention those who never graduate, attend two or more institutions on their degree journey. Yet most degree programs are written “from the bottom up”.
Faculty members craft the sequence of courses, from basic to advanced, as if the student were going to be in the same institution for his or her entire career. That curricular structure leads to heavy discounting of credit for transfer students with learning achieved in other settings. Specifically, institutional transfer policies and general-education requirements pose enormous obstacles to including all learning on one transcript and counting that learning towards the degree. [Continue Reading at Higher Education Management]
via CampusTechnology Kuglin emphasized the ease-of-use of these tools and used them on the spot to assemble an ad hoc, cloud-based tutorial, complete with an audio file.
“These are tools that live outside the campus,” Kuglin said. “Where is all of this content? It’s actually in a data farm out in San Francisco. It’s not on this machine. I can go to any of your machines, and as long as you are connected, I could continue doing this presentation. I don’t need my laptop anymore, just a device that’s connected to the Internet. We need to get used to that idea.”
Kuglin lead his audience through several presentations created in the cloud with SlideRocket. “Those of you who are responsible for your online learning environments are already beginning to see a new model emerge here,” he said. “The cloud-based presentation package is surpassing and supplanting the PC-based, PowerPoint world. This is a huge, huge step forward.”
“Teachers need to stop saying ‘hand it in’ and start saying ‘publish it,'” he added.
To the inevitable question from his audience about objections raised by campus IT about the security of the cloud, Kuglin said, “I understand that it’s an issue, but we cannot continue to hide behind the safety issue, not if we want to offer competitive educational services. The old paradigm was university computer, university employee, university network. Boom, boom, boom; we’re secure. But the old days are gone.” [Continue Reading at CampusTechnology]
via The Chronicle – More Partnerships Between Colleges and Industry Could Produce a Better-Prepared Work Force Despite years of talk, the higher-education and industry sectors of the United States still don’t collaborate enough to ensure that students are adequately prepared for jobs. And the mismatch between what employers expect and what students learn in college or vocational schools could have dire consequences for the nation’s economy, according to several speakers at the New Work Era Summit hosted here by The Atlantic.
To achieve what is considered full employment—a 5-percent unemployment rate—in 2020, the economy would have to add 21 million jobs. Participants in the summit, which included college and business executives, said that employers increasingly report that they have trouble filling some positions because they cannot find qualified applicants.
The event on Tuesday coincided with the release of a report called “An Economy That Works: Job Creation and America’s Future” by McKinsey and Company, a consulting firm. The report found that the U.S. labor force will grow steadily, reaching 170 million by 2020, but that “too few students will obtain college degrees, too many will have no more than a high-school diploma, and the number of Americans without even a high-school diploma will rise.” [Continue Reading at The Chronicle]
via Osher Lifelong Learning Institute National Resource Center The Governor of Louisiana, Bobby Jindal, signed a proclamation designating the first week in August as Lifelong Learning Week in Louisiana. Members of OLLI at Louisiana State University have been getting the word out by asking restaurants, churches, doctors’ offices, retail and industrial companies, etc. to post the announcement flyer at their places of businesses. The idea for such a state proclamation came from OLLI at the University of Denver who managed to get a proclamation made last year in the State of Colorado. Congratulations to Doreen Maxcy and all the staff and members of OLLI at Lousisiana State University! (Available for download: Louisiana Lifelong Learning week flyer.) [Continue Reading at OLLI National Resource Center]
via ReadWriteWeb BitNami, Cloud.com and Zenoss have released the results of its 2011 Cloud Computing Outlook survey. You can request a copy of the report here. Only 20% respondents have no plans to develop a cloud computing strategy, but there was a clear preference for using dedicated hardware instead of public cloud infrastructure. Virtualization is very popular, and the biggest benefit respondents perceive in cloud computing was hardware savings. [Continue reading at ReadWriteWeb]
via Mashable Over the past decade or so, the Internet has become a huge source of information and education, especially for those who might be short on time, money or other resources. And it’s not just crowdsourced data collections like Wikipedia or single-topic blogs that encourage individual learning; huge corporations and nonprofits are making online education and virtual classrooms a very formal affair these days. [Continue reading at Mashable]