Villanova Talk on Technology and Students

I had the pleasure of presenting a talk on "Technology and Students - Mix, Match or Miss?" at the Villanova Teaching and Learning Strategies Symposium on May 13, 2010. Topics covered included screencasting, wikis, games and Second Life, with a particular focus on student response to these technologies.

My host, Carol Weiss, did a fantastic job of putting together a panel afterward with several students and myself to discuss educational technology with the Villanova faculty. Everyone seemed to genuinely want to find better ways of teaching and learning while expressing a healthy skepticism of new technologies. I agree that there is no panacea in this field but there are some tools that can be very useful for certain educational objectives. I tried to show them what kind of approaches have worked for me and how students have responded.

Technology and Students: Mix, Match or Miss?

View more presentations from Jean-Claude Bradley.

Opening Up Education Review in Nature

My review of the new book "Opening Up Education" has appeared in Nature today [Bradley, J.-C. Nature 457, 151-152 (8 January 2009) ]. The entire book is freely available online by MIT press. In addition, Nature has agreed to make my review freely available. Given the topic, this is very satisfying.

Education is changing. The ethos of openness that increasingly pervades activities from journalism to software to finance is being adopted by the educational community. The series of essays in Opening Up Education offers examples, opportunities and thoughts on the use of shared and freely available resources in education. The book is arranged in three sections: software, content and pedagogy.

more...

Future of Education Room in FriendFeed

I have created the FriendFeed room Future-of-Education as a means of gathering and sharing information about the future of education to assist a task force at Drexel seeking to create an environment to nurture new educational initiatives.

At the first meeting last week I shared my thoughts about the growing importance of openness in both education and research. I invite other members of our task force and any others from around the world to share relevant information and thoughts.

Hopefully I'll be able to liveblog one of our upcoming meetings on FriendFeed. This has worked very well at recent conferences - see for example the Southampton Open Science Workshop. More info on this after I discuss it with the committee.

City of Pods

This has been a productive week with setting up Drexel Island on Second Life. We have settled on a pod tree structure to house departments and faculty in the College of Arts and Sciences. Eloise helped with the pods and Beth and I selected most of the content. The chemistry pod has a list of recent student awards, some images of our equipment and a 3D Bunsen burner and molecule.



The faculty pods are arranged like leaves hovering above the departmental base pods. There are plenty of spaces that we'll populate as we get more faculty involved. For my pod, I have my picture, a link to my organic chemistry class wiki, my research wiki and an example of a quiz obelisk. Other pods have desks. I think that this would be a nice arrangement for virtual open houses where prospective students could visit a few professors from each department in their pods.

The library is now also set up with this pod city framework, organized by guides to literature and databases. There are teleports connecting the chemistry department pod (slurl) to the chemistry resource pod (slurl) in the library section. I think that this type of navigation is important to leverage our resources and make the island as useful as possible to students and faculty.

I ran a Second Life workshop on Friday for CoAS and assisted more faculty from English and Math to set up their avatars. Already we have had participation from Enrollment Management, Drexel E-Learning and the iSchool in the main building. It looks like Nursing is next...

Here is a presentation that I used this week with some representative screenshots: