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.

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