Prof. Ilchuk was using iClicker PRS in her Core and Russian courses last semester. Here is her story:

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Interaction and engagement are often limited by class size and human dynamics (a few students may dominate the conversation while most avoid interaction). Interaction and engagement, both important learning principles, can be facilitated with clickers. Clickers can also facilitate discipline-specific discussions, small work-group cooperation, and student-student interactions. Clickers—plus well-designed questions—provide an easy-to-implement mechanism for enhancing interaction. Clicker technology enables more effective, more efficient, and more engaging education.

Read more here…

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Napster, Udacity, and the Academy
a blog post by Clay Shirky in November 2012

Shirky studies the effects of the internet on society and holds a joint appointment at NYU, as an Associate Arts Professor at the Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) and as an Associate Professor in the Journalism Department. He is also a Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, and was the Edward R. Murrow Visiting Lecturer at Harvard’s Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy in 2010.

Link to the full post:  http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2012/11/napster-udacity-and-the-academy/

A few highlights…

• Every college provides access to a huge collection of potential readings, and to a tiny collection of potential lectures. We ask students to read the best works we can find, whoever produced them and where, but we only ask them to listen to the best lecture a local employee can produce that morning. Sometimes you’re at a place where the best lecture your professor can give is the best in the world. But mostly not. And the only thing that kept this system from seeming strange was that we’ve never had a good way of publishing lectures.
  
• MOOCs expand the audience for education to people ill-served or completely shut out from the current system, in the same way phonographs expanded the audience for symphonies to people who couldn’t get to a concert hall, and PCs expanded the users of computing power to people who didn’t work in big companies.
• Open systems are open…anyone who has watched a piece of open source software improve, or remembers the Britannica people throwing tantrums about Wikipedia, has seen how blistering public criticism makes open systems better…And once you imagine educating a thousand people in a single class, it becomes clear that open courses, even in their nascent state, will be able to raise quality and improve certification faster than traditional institutions can lower cost or increase enrollment.

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The main portal for the Wikipedia Education Program on English Wikipedia, where you can learn how to get started and connect with volunteers who can help.

Get more information  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Education_program/Educators

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21st century skills, Critical Thinking, Digital Footprint, Innovation,Leadership, STEM education

by Dr. Ellen Cavanaugh, Duquesne University

Read blogpost  http://www.ellencavanaugh.com/2012/10/28/assigning-wikipedia-entries-for-a-college-classroom/

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Watch Megan John from Concordia College present her poster “The Benefits of Traditional vs. Wikipedia Research Assignments for Introductory Psychology Students” at the APS 25th Annual Convention in Washington DC.

Watch the video http://www.psychologicalscience.org/index.php/publications/observer/obsonline/the-benefits-of-traditional-vs-wikipedia-research-assignments-for-introductory-psychology-students.html

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Cheryl L. Moy, Jonas R. Locke, Brian P. Coppola, and Anne J. McNeil

Department of Chemistry and Macromolecular Science and Engineering Program,

University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109-1055

Read article http://www-personal.umich.edu/~bcoppola/publications/68.JCEWiki.pdf

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LAPTOP U
Has the future of college moved online?
MAY 20, 2013  BY NATHAN HELLER

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/05/20/130520fa_fact_heller?currentPage=all&mobify=0

This article poses different viewpoints on MOOCs. The one passage that resonated with me was on page 14 where Peter Burgard (Harvard professor of German) discusses how MOOCs will cause the slow demise of higher education. Here is the quote:

“Imagine you’re at South Dakota State,” he said, “and they’re cash strapped, and they say, ‘Oh! There are these HarvardX courses. We’ll hire an adjunct for three thousand dollars a semester, and we’ll have the students watch this TV show.’ Their faculty is going to dwindle very quickly. Eventually, that dwindling is going to make it to larger and less povertystricken universities and colleges. The fewer positions are out there, the fewer Ph.D.s get hired. The fewer Ph.D.s that get hired—well, you can see where it goes. It will probably hurt less prestigious graduate schools first, but eventually it will make it to the top graduate schools. . . .If you have a smaller graduate program, you can be assured the deans will say, ‘First of all, half of our undergraduates are taking MOOCs. Second, you don’t have as many graduate students. You don’t need as many professors in your department of English, or your department of history, or your department of anthropology, or whatever.’ And every time the faculty shrinks, of course, there are fewer fields and subfields taught. And, when fewer fields and subfields are taught, bodies of knowledge are neglected and die. You can see how everything devolves from there.”

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Massive Open Online Courses, aka MOOCs, Transform Higher Education and Science
March 13, 2013

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=massive-open-online-courses-transform-higher-education-and-science

There is reason to hope that this is a positive development, says Roy Pea, who heads a Stanford center that studies how people use technology. MOOCs, which have incorporated decades of research on how students learn best, could free faculty members from the drudgery of repetitive introductory lectures. What’s more, they can record online students’ every mouse click, an ability that promises to transform education research by generating data that could improve teaching in the future. “We can have microanalytics on every paper, every test, right down to what media each student prefers,” says Pea.

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When we think of spam and phishing, we usually think of it as unwanted email filling our inboxes. Did you know spammers and phishers also use text messaging & SMS? Often, these messages will purport to come from the phone company or a popular email provider such as Google telling you you need to reply to a message to re-activate your account or to verify that your account has not been compromised. If you reply, any number of thing can happen from you being automatically signed up for unwanted services (and charged) to you being asked to verify your identity and password, or both! One common theme seen in these messages is as follows:

User #93848: Your Gmail account has been compromised . Reply to this message with  SENDNOW when you are able to verify your account.

As always, NEVER reply to these messages or click any link they may contain! With the proliferation of smartphones, some links may contain malware.

Here is a list of common US providers and their methods of contacting them about spam:

AT&T Wireless – http://www.att.com/esupport/article.jsp?sid=KB115812&cv=820#fbid=0gUs6DsD-dU

Sprint – http://support.sprint.com/support/article/Block_and_report_fraudulent_text_messages/case-gz982789-20120420-003932?question_box=MA:spam&id16=spam

T-Mobile – http://support.t-mobile.com/docs/DOC-2747

Verizon Wireless – http://support.verizonwireless.com/faqs/Features%20and%20Optional%20Services/spam_controls.html

When in doubt, you can usually find your text message online. For example, to verify if the above message was a smishing (SMS + phishing) message, I Googled the message (without the User #93848:) and here is what I found!

Have you received suspicious texts in the past? Post them here so others can see more examples of what these messages look like!

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