NMC New Media Blogs

As the media start to tell stories of 'twitter quitters' and imply that it is limited to celebrity gossip, isn't it time to provide some short case study examples of how it can actually be used effectively in educational and media contexts. Why not post your favourite effective practice?

An interesting first example  is that of colleagues at Sheffield Hallam University in England  who used it to get a better picture of student study habits as part of a study to plan and develop new learning spaces on campus.

I interviewed Liz Aspden who worked on the project for our podcast series earlier this week. Here it is , bit of echo on the skype call at one point, sorry about that. 

LiveScribe is a great tool that utilizes some great emerging technology in the form of audio capture and handwriting digitizing. Larry Johnson showed off LiveScribe at the NMC Director's meeting and everyone was quite impressed. I had seen this technology some time before but it was not yet Mac compatible and so I had left it in the back corner of my Delicious tags before Larry refocused my attention on it. Its is very cool technology for those who take lots of notes and also like to record the audio heard when taking these notes. It has impressive handwriting recognition too I might add. I have been surprised by how well it picks up words in my bad handwriting. Although it does seem to have issues with underlined words. It will recognize a word that is not underlined but the same word underlined is not found in searches.   

Have you ever seen a theater into a theater? Strangely enough it is eating form iPod messages and receiving mails from our latest added Newsfeed that we usually coop with the strange world of outfields. And when you find out that fresh things involves topics from discussion about mapping and digital population ethics, nothing better than a theater shows it off. Throwing ourselves into part of an ancient building, made new by SLT and its prolific Virtual Shakespeare Consortium. SLVT partly indicates how groups are latest initiatives for digital humanities to find themselves into a proper shpere and a recognition of which partly redeem fragmentation of ethic whatsoever.

For those of you who are familiar with HASTAC, this group always has some absorbing things going on out on the Web. Of particular interest to NMC members will be a discussion starting on April 6th called Mapping the Digital Humanities. You can read about the moderators and a blurb about what is covered here. It should be interesting. Its worth joining in if you are currently doing mapping work that is tied to the Humanities (or not). I think it fits quite nicely with the Geo-Everything portion of this year's Horizon Report.

Keene

mapping

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The second annual Technology Day conference will be held Friday, April 17th in the John E. Reeve’s Conference Center at the Fashion Institute of Technology, Seventh Avenue at 27th Street.

Register now by visiting: http://www.fitnyc.edu/techday 

Just as the Kindle 2 news begins to fall off the "what's new" radar, a report at TechCruch says a Kindle academic version is in the works. It may be a mad rumor, but if it is true it could throw another wave of disruptive technology into the classroom. Things could get very interesting. Be sure to check out the comments as well.

education, education, ereader, gadgets

While this is only one study of one class, the results are provocative and provide fodder for discussion. Researcher Dani McKinney at State University of New York found that students who only listened to podcasts of a lecture and did not actually attend the class did considerably better on tests than the students who went to class but did not use the podcasts. There are a number of variables that could affect a study like this, but nevertheless, it is quite compelling. I think it definitely is a study that sheds some light on where 21st century Higher Ed is heading and should be grounds for ripe conversation on campuses. McKinney plans on expanding this study to cover more than one class over a semester's time so it will be interesting to see these results for comparison. The physical walls of the classroom are definitely being torn down and the sledgehammers are being carried by students.