[EAS]Teaching with Technology

pjk pjk at design.eng.yale.edu
Thu Mar 28 23:42:30 EST 2002


Mail*Link¨ SMTP               Teaching with Technology

Dear Colleagues -

The latest issue of CIT INFOBITS, on my 'short list' among the 20-odd
e-newsletters I get, is devoted to the pros and cons of teaching with
technology. It is worth your attention in a moment of reflection.
(You still do have such moments, don't you?)

All best,  --PJK

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|  Peter J. Kindlmann     |  Prof.(Adjunct), Director of Undergrad.  |
|  Dept. of Elect. Engrg. |  Studies and the Morse Teaching Center   |
|  Yale University        |  tel.(203)432-4294, fax (203)458-3803    |
|  New Haven, CT 06520    |  email: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu          |
|        http://www.eng.yale.edu/EE-Labs/morse/about/pjk.html        |
 --------------------------------------------------------------------
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Date: 3/28/02 1:51 PM
From: kotlas at email.unc.edu

CIT INFOBITS	March 2002		No. 45		ISSN 1521-9275

About INFOBITS

INFOBITS is an electronic service of The University of North Carolina
at Chapel Hill's Center for Instructional Technology. Each month the
CIT's Information Resources Consultant monitors and selects from a
number of information and instructional technology sources
that come to her attention and provides brief notes for electronic
dissemination to educators.

......................................................................

"No Significant Difference" Revisited 
Recent Articles on Teaching with Technology
	-- Adopters and Optimists
	-- Skeptics and Pessimists
Higher Education Institutions and the Corporate Model
Recommended Reading

......................................................................

"NO SIGNIFICANT DIFFERENCE" REVISITED

For many years Thomas L. Russell, Director Emeritus of the Office of
Instructional Telecommunications at North Carolina State University,
has compiled quotations from research reports, summaries, and papers to
demonstrate that using technology to deliver instruction is no better
and no worse than other methods. Richard Clark, in his article "Media
Will Never Influence Learning" (EDUCATIONAL TECHNOLOGY RESEARCH AND
DEVELOPMENT, vol. 42, no. 2, 1994, pp. 21-29), advised researchers to
"give up your enthusiasm for the belief that media attributes cause
learning." Now Thomas R. Ramage (Associate Vice President, Parkland
College, Champaign, IL) revisits the issue in "The 'No Significant
Difference' Phenomenon: A Literature Review" (E-JOURNAL OF
INSTRUCTIONAL SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY, vol. 5, no. 1, April 2002) and
attempts to answer the question "Does technology impact learning?" The
article is available online at
http://www.usq.edu.au/electpub/e-jist/docs/html2002/ramage_frame.html

Russell's website, "The 'No Significant Difference Phenomenon'" is
available at http://teleeducation.nb.ca/nosignificantdifference/
His research has also been published as THE NO SIGNIFICANT DIFFERENCE
PHENOMENON (Montgomery, AL: International Distance Education
Certification Center, 1999). For more information, go to
http://www.idecc.org/IDECCorderform.pdf

e-Journal of Instructional Science and Technology (e-JIST) is published
by the Distance Education Centre, University of Southern Queensland,
Toowoomba, Queensland 4350, Australia; Web: http://www.usq.edu.au/dec/
Current and back issues of e-JIST are available at no cost at
http://www.usq.edu.au/electpub/e-jist/ 

......................................................................

RECENT ARTICLES ON TEACHING WITH TECHNOLOGY: ADOPTERS AND OPTIMISTS

"Commonsense Ideas from an Online Survivor" by Herman D. Lujan
EDUCAUSE REVIEW, vol. 37, no. 2, March/April 2002
http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/erm0222.pdf

"Many myths surround technology and its role in teaching and learning.
One myth is that online instruction requires big bucks. It does not. .
. . Another myth concerns the view that online instruction is great for
the pre-academic experience . . . but that online instruction cannot
serve 'real education' well." In this article Lujan debunks these and
other myths of online education.

EDUCAUSE Review [ISSN 1527-6619] is a bimonthly print magazine which
explores developments in information technology and education. EDUCAUSE
Review is published by EDUCAUSE, 4772 Walnut St., Suite 206, Boulder,
CO 80301-2538 USA; tel: 303-449-4430; fax: 303-440-0461; email:
info at educause.edu; Web: http://www.educause.edu/
Articles from current and back issues are available on the Web at
http://www.educause.edu/pub/er/erm.html


"Online Education Must Capitalize on Students' Unique Approaches to
Learning, Scholar Says" by Michael Arnone
THE CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION, March 4, 2002
http://chronicle.com/free/2002/03/2002030401u.htm

In a recent interview, Nishikant Sonwalkar, principal educational
architect at the Education Media Creation Center at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, says "online learning provides tremendous
opportunity for providing pedagogical choices to learners that cannot
be provided by a single professor or teacher in a classroom situation.
Online education provides a unique opportunity to use multiple
representations of knowledge in terms of media. At the same time, it
also provides opportunity to sequence this knowledge in a way so that
it makes more pedagogical sense, by providing different learning
strategies."

The Chronicle of Higher Education [ISSN 0009-5982] is published weekly
by The Chronicle of Higher Education, Inc., 1255 Twenty-third Street,
NW, Washington, DC 20037 USA; tel: 202-466-1000; fax: 202-452-1033;
Web: http://chronicle.com/

......................................................................

RECENT ARTICLES ON TEACHING WITH TECHNOLOGY: SKEPTICS AND PESSIMISTS

"High-tech teaching could be 'suicidal,' scholar says" by John Sanford
STANFORD REPORT, February 11, 2002
http://www.stanford.edu/dept/news/report/news/february13/gumbrecht-213.html

Speaking at the Stanford University Center for Teaching and Learning's
"Award-Winning Teachers on Teaching" series, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht,
Albert Guerard Professor of Literature, said, "I think this
enthusiastic and sometimes naive and sometimes blind pushing toward the
more technology the better, the more websites the better teacher and so
forth, is very dangerous -- [that it] is, indeed, suicidal."

Stanford Report is published daily by the Stanford University News
Service, 425 Santa Teresa Street, Stanford, CA 94305-2245 USA; tel:
650-723-2558; email: stanford.report at forsythe.stanford.edu; Web:
http://www.stanford.edu/dept/news/report/


"Philosopher's Critique of Online Learning Cites Existentialists (Mostly
Dead)" by Michael Arnone 
THE CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION, March 15, 2002
http://chronicle.com/free/2002/03/2002031501u.htm 

Hubert L. Dreyfus, a professor of philosophy at the University of
California at Berkeley, "argues that the Internet's promise of
extending and improving human interaction through the digital medium
isn't everything it's cracked up to be. . . . To prove his point, Mr.
Dreyfus calls on existentialist philosophers from the 19th and 20th
centuries, most of whom never saw a computer or heard of the Internet."


"Oversold and Underused: Why Faculty Don't Use Computers in the
Classroom" by Larry Cuban 
AFT ON CAMPUS, March 2002
http://www.aft.org/publications/on_campus/march02/technology.html

While affirming that most academics make great use of computer
technology in their writing, research, and communication, Cuban argues
that "University promoters of computers for instruction need to
downsize their expectations for deep changes in pedagogy or seriously
examine other factors that influence how professors teach." He believes
that "[t]raditional forms of teaching seem to have been relatively
untouched by the enormous investment in technologies that universities
have made in recent decades."

AFT On Campus is published eight times a year by the American
Federation of Teachers, 555 New Jersey Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20001
USA; tel: 202-879-4400; email: online at aft.org; Web: http://www.aft.org/
Current and back issues are available at no cost at
http://www.aft.org/publications/on_campus/index.html

......................................................................

HIGHER EDUCATION INSTITUTIONS AND THE CORPORATE MODEL

"As institutions of higher education throughout the US and abroad have
adopted the corporate model, 'efficiency' and profit have been
emphasized, while students have been redefined as 'customers,'
'consumers,' and 'clients.' In reality, what we are currently
witnessing, as the result of this corporate paradigm, is the
destruction of American higher education." In "Higher Education and the
Corporate Paradigm: the Students are the Losers" (WORKPLACE, issue 4.2,
February 2002) Zuleyma Tang-Martinez (professor of Biology and Women's
Studies, University of Missouri, St. Louis) argues that this model
leads to putting the requirement of profit before the needs of
students, creates a threat to the tenure system, and promotes distance
education as a cheap path to degrees. The article is available on the
Web at http://www.louisville.edu/journal/workplace/tang-martinez.html

Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor is published by a "collective
of 50 scholars in critical higher education" on a website hosted by the
University of Louisville (Kentucky, USA). For more information and back
issues, link to http://www.louisville.edu/journal/workplace/


Tom Moore, dean of Babson College's School of Executive Education,
writes: "The popular notion of a new graduate entering 'the real world'
points to the fact that we commonly view academia and the corporate
environment as two disparate, almost polarized communities. The
perception may be that universities focus on theory while businesses
concentrate on practice. And to combine the two--to influence academic
curriculum on behalf of corporate needs--has traditionally been frowned
upon as a corruption of pure academic purpose." In "Tailor-Made
Degrees: Customized Corporate Education" (SYLLABUS, vol. 15, no. 8,
March 2002, pp. 30-1, 33), Moore describes how Babson created a school
that can be customized to meet individual corporation's needs while
students benefit from both e-learning and face-to-face instruction
experiences. The article is available online at
http://www.syllabus.com/syllabusmagazine/article.asp?id=6135

Syllabus [ISSN 1089-5914] is published monthly by 101communications,
LLC. Annual subscriptions are free to individuals who work in colleges,
universities, and high schools in the U.S. Contact Syllabus Press, 345
Northlake Drive, San Jose, CA 95117-1261 USA; tel: 408-261-7200; fax:
408-261-7280; email: info at syllabus.com; Web: http://www.syllabus.com/


In his book, HIGHER ED, INC: THE RISE OF THE FOR-PROFIT UNIVERSITY
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), Richard S. Ruch
writes, "I must confess that until a few years ago I thought that all
proprietary institutions were the scum of the academic earth. I could
not see how the profit motive could properly coexist with an
educational mission. While I did not know exactly why I believed this,
I was certain in my conviction that non-profit status was noble, just
as the profession of education is noble, and that to be for-profit
meant to be in it for the money, which was corrupting and ignoble."
Based on his subsequent experiences with for-profit colleges and
universities, Ruch re-examines these assumptions.

The first chapter of the book is available online at
http://www.press.jhu.edu/press/books/titles/s01/s01ruhi.htm

......................................................................

RECOMMENDED READING

"Recommended Reading" lists items that have been recommended to me or
that Infobits readers have found particularly interesting and/or
useful, including books, articles, and websites published by Infobits
subscribers. Send your recommendations to carolyn_kotlas at unc.edu for
possible inclusion in this column. 

Co-author (and Infobits subscriber) Alfred Bork recommends this new
book:

TUTORIAL DISTANCE LEARNING: REBUILDING OUR EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM
By Alfred Bork (Department of Information and Computer Science,
University of California, Irvine) and Sigrun Gunnarsdottir (Research
Department, Iceland Telecom, Reykjavik)
New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers, 2001
ISBN 0-306-46644-9
More information: http://www.wkap.nl/prod/b/0-306-46644-9

"The book begins with the problems and goals of learning. It considers
possible forms of distance learning, looking at the variables involved,
current examples of distance learning, and possible future forms
including examples from science fiction. It then investigates student
interactions, considering both frequency of interactions and the
quality of each interaction. Programs developed in the Educational
Technology Center at the University of California, Irvine, illustrate
the critical idea of tutorial learning with computers. Production of
tutorial learning material and costs for a student hour of learning is
discussed. The book ends with suggestions for future progress."

Chapters 1-3 (in PDF format) are available for downloading at no charge
at http://www.wkap.com/tdl/

......................................................................

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