UNC-Chapel Hill | Information Technology Services

TL Infobits - May 2007

Issue 11
ISSN: 1931-3144

Teaching the "Net Generation"
Technology and Change in Educational Practice
Email: Too Much or Not a Bother?
Help Digitize Books from Your Desktop
Recommended Reading

TEACHING THE "NET GENERATION"

The April/May 2007 issue of Innovate explores and explains the learning styles and preferences of Net Generation learners. "Net Generation learners are information seekers, comfortable using technology to seek out information, frequently multitasking and using multiple forms of media simultaneously. As a result, they desire independence and autonomy in their learning processes."

Articles include:

"Identifying the Generation Gap in Higher Education: Where Do the Differences Really Lie?" by Paula Garcia and Jingjing Qin, Northern Arizona University

"MyLiteracies: Understanding the Net Generation through LiveJournals and Literacy Practices" by Dana J. Wilber, Montclair State University

"Is Education 1.0 Ready for Web 2.0 Students?" by John Thompson, Buffalo State College

The issue is available at http://innovateonline.info/index.php. Registration is required to access articles; registration is free.

Innovate: Journal of Online Education [ISSN 1552-3233], an open-access, peer-reviewed online journal, is published bimonthly by the Fischler School of Education and Human Services at Nova Southeastern University. The journal focuses on the creative use of information technology (IT) to enhance educational processes in academic, commercial, and governmental settings. For more information, contact James L. Morrison, Editor-in-Chief; email: innovate@nova.edu; Web: http://innovateonline.info/.

The journal also sponsors Innovate-Live webcasts and discussion forums that add an interactive component to the journal articles. To register for these free events, go to http://www.uliveandlearn.com/PortalInnovate/.

TECHNOLOGY AND CHANGE IN EDUCATIONAL PRACTICE

"Even if research shows that a particular technology supports a certain kind of learning, this research may not reveal the implications of implementing it. Without appropriate infrastructure or adequate provisions of services (policy); without the facility or ability of teachers to integrate it into their teaching practice (academics); without sufficient support from technologists and/or educational technologists (support staff), the likelihood of the particular technology or software being educationally effective is questionable."

The current issue (vol. 10, no. 1, 2007) of the Journal of Educational Technology & Society presents a selection of papers from the Conference Technology and Change in Educational Practice which was held at the London Knowledge Lab, Institute of Education, London in October 2005. The papers cover three areas: "methodological frameworks, proposing new ways of structuring effective research; empirical studies, illustrating the ways in which technology impacts the working roles and practices in Higher Education; and new ways of conceptualising technologies for education."

Papers include:

"A Framework for Conceptualising the Impact of Technology on Teaching and Learning" by Sara Price and Martin Oliver, London Knowledge Lab, Institute of Education

"New and Changing Teacher Roles in Higher Education in a Digital Age" by Jo Dugstad Wake, Olga Dysthe, and Stig Mjelstad, University of Bergen

"Academic Use of Digital Resources: Disciplinary Differences and the Issue of Progression Revisited" by Bob Kemp, Lancaster University, and Chris Jones, Open University

"The Role of Blogs In Studying the Discourse and Social Practices of Mathematics Teachers" by Katerina Makri and Chronis Kynigos, University of Athens

The issue is available at http://www.ifets.info/issues.php?show=current.

The Journal of Educational Technology and Society [ISSN 1436-4522]is a peer-reviewed, quarterly publication that "seeks academic articles on the issues affecting the developers of educational systems and educators who implement and manage such systems." Current and back issues are available at http://www.ifets.info/. The journal is published by the International Forum of Educational Technology & Society. For more information, see http://ifets.ieee.org/.

EMAIL: TOO MUCH OR NOT A BOTHER?

A couple of recent articles discuss people's aggravation with the masses of email that they receive and how they are curtailing or eliminating it altogether:

"The supposed convenience of electronic mail, like so many other innovations of technology, has become too much for some people. . . . So some say they're moving back to the telephone as their preferred means of communication." ("E-Mail Reply to All: 'Leave Me Alone'" by Mike Musgrove, The Washington Post, May 25, 2007, pg. A01; http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/24/AR2007052402258.html)

"More university professors are joining the ranks of those who have given up or severely curtailed their use of e-mail as a medium for personal -- and most of all -- private correspondence. They have had enough with electronic spam, come-ons, nonsense and smut-vertisements" (Paul McCloskey, "Academics Joining Ranks Declaring 'E-Mail Bankruptcy'," Campus Technology, May 29, 2007; http://www.campustechnology.com/article.aspx?aid=48289).

Conversely, "Spam 2007," a Pew Internet & American Life Project paper released this month, reports that "37% of email users said spam had increased in their personal email accounts, up from 28% of email users who said that two years ago. And 29% of work email users said spam had increased in their work email accounts, up from 21% two years ago. Yet fewer people say spam is 'a big problem' for them."

The report is available at http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_Spam_May_2007.pdf.

HELP DIGITIZE BOOKS FROM YOUR DESKTOP

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology is used to transform scanned book pages into searchable text. However, the accuracy of this method is dependent on the clarity of the characters being scanned. Fuzzy or indistinct printed texts are not always rendered correctly. Human proofreading of scanned texts can correct OCR errors, but it is labor-intensive and expensive. "Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have discovered a way to enlist people across the globe to help digitize books every time they solve the simple distorted word puzzles commonly used to register at Web sites or buy things online. The word puzzles are known as CAPTCHAs, short for 'completely automated public Turing tests to tell computers and humans apart.' Computers cannot decipher the twisted letters and numbers, ensuring that real people and not automated programs are using the Web sites." (Associated Press, May 24, 2007)

According to the project website, "Each new word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is given to a user in conjunction with another word for which the answer is already known. The user is then asked to read both words. If they solve the one for which the answer is known, the system assumes their answer is correct for the new one. The system then gives the new image to a number of other people to determine, with higher confidence, whether the original answer was correct." The results are then used to correct the word in the scanned texts.

For more information about the project and to participate, go to http://recaptcha.net/learnmore.html.

Recommended Reading

"Recommended Reading" lists items that have been recommended to me or that Infobits readers have found particularly interesting and/or useful, including books, articles, and websites published by Infobits subscribers. Send your recommendations to kotlas@email.unc.edu for possible inclusion in this column.

An excerpt from:

Knowledge Economy, Development and the Future of Higher Education: Reclaiming the Cultural Mission
by Michael A. Peters
(Book is part of a series: Educational Futures: Rethinking Theory and Practice)
Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, 2007
288 pgs.
ISBN 978-90-8790-070-0 hardback
ISBN 978-90-8790-069-4 paperback
E-book: http://www.sensepublishers.com/catalog/product_info.php?products_id=287

Ubiquity magazine has received permission to publish an excerpt (Introduction and Chapter 11) from this new book by Michael A. Peters, professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of Glasgow. The excerpt is available at http://www.acm.org/ubiquity/views/v8i18_peter.html.

Ubiquity associate editor A. Triptahi writes of it: "Prophetically, almost thirty years ago Jean-François Lyotard forecast the end of the modern research university based on Enlightenment principles. He envisaged the emergence of technical institutes in the service of the information-rich global multinationals. This book reflects on the post-war Western university and its discourses charting the crisis of the concept of the modern university. First, it examines the university within a global networked economy; second, it adopts poststructuralist perspectives in epistemology, politics and ethics to appraise the role of the contemporary university; third, it introduces the notion of 'development' in a critical fashion as a way of explaining its potentially new regional and international learning roles; fourth, it analyzes the rise of global science and the disciplines in the context of the global economy; and, finally, it raises Lyotard's 'logic of performativity' and the assessment of research quality within a neoliberal economy, linking it firmly to the question of freedom and the republic of science."

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