EastBaySchools.Net

In Kevin Carey's article, What Colleges Can Learn From Newspapers' Decline, which originally appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education, he makes a compelling argument that Internet influences similar to those that have impacted the newspaper business may also influence institutions of higher education.

See:
http://www.educationsector.org/analysis/analysis_show.htm?doc_id=870993

In his article, Carey states:

Some people will argue that the best traditional college courses are superior to any online offering, and they're often right. There is no substitute for a live teacher and student, meeting minds. But remember, that's far from the experience of the lower-division undergraduate sitting in the back row of a lecture hall. All she's getting is a live version of what iTunes University offers free, minus the ability to pause, rewind, and fast forward at a time and place of her choosing.

If schools are going to move to a 1 to 1 model, they will have to find that happy medium between the expensive Apple notebook and the
non-functional Kindle book reader.

This is what I was thinking about. I am glad someone else came up with it.

By Bob Kaehms at 2009-06-12 22:31 | Bob Kaehms's blog | login or register to post comments | read more

Community Earth from piergiu on Vimeo.

I found this site while doing some work for a client. This seems
to be a great alternative to requiring students to buy calculators:

Here's a scientific calculator:

My daughter recently sent me a link to Randy Pausch's last lecture,
a well known and inspiring talk that is circulating the internet.

For those who may not have seen it yet, and don't know about Randy,
he is a wonderful educator that has been involved with Virtual Reality since the early 90s, inspiring a generation of innovation.

While I've linked to the talk below, I think a very interesting project that has been created under his guidance, and should be underscored, is the Alice project, that uses a 3D environment to teach students programming.

See www.alice.org for details.

Recently one of the teachers that I am supporting with moodle wrote me to inform me that moodle had failed miserably during a class quiz.

She enjoys it so much that she has made it central to her classroom management. However, my initial assumptions for supporting Moodle were to use it in a asynchronous mode - mostly for posting class notes, and providing a space for students to work from home.

For those of you that want to skip this article, the general consensus is that for realtime class activity of 30-40 students,
you should consider finding a computer with at least 4 gig of memory. Moodle can be a memory hog. For the rest of you, read on.

I am writing this from a school 2.0 web conference, where I just gave a simple lightening talk. Literally ran in off the bus (BART), 5 minutes before the talk... ran down the street the wrong way to realize that the front door was right at the BART station.

Not sure how the talk went, but it was fun meeting so many teachers that understand the importance of collaborative learning.

One interesting new tool is a new product for realtime online collaboration that has an interesting use in the classroom... "view", spelled "vyew".... http://vyew.com/content/

This is a very insightful interview with Tim O'Reilly
on Web 2.0 and Open Source. His insight is remarkable.

http://audio.edtechlive.com/OReilly.mp3

Solution for todays school?

... smaller class size where students can interact
more fully with adults, and not technology.

In terms of the value shift of commodity software,
his insight is that the shift is towards more valuable
databases. In essence, companies are learning to harness
our collective intelligence.

Final thoughts for teachers... have fun, and do what you have passion for. For students... find those teachers who are passionate about what they teach. Doesn't matter what it is, but you will learn more and enjoy learning, when the instructor brings a passion into the classroom.