Many institutions waste millions of dollars per year powering inefficient machines, outdated cooling systems, and improvised clusters of servers stored in lab closets and back rooms.

The 2008 ResNet Survey seeks to develop a longitudinal view on certain topics from the 2005 survey, assess technology and other changes in residential student computing support since that time, and take a peek into the future as to what issues might be over the horizon. The results offer an assessment on the present status of student computing in higher education, assist you in understanding your program's present status and how it aligns with other residential support programs, and provides insight into potential future challenges.

Presentation at the 2008 EDUCAUSE Center for Applied Research (ECAR) Symposium, December 4, 2008, in Boca Raton, Florida, by Paul N. Courant, University Librarian and Dean of Libraries, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. Information technology ought to be an unambiguous boon to scholarship and teaching. It makes it easier than ever to find and to use prior work, to obtain comments and criticism (constructive and other­wise), and to provide high-quality copies of original material to broad audiences, including students. Yet there is widespread concern that traditional scholarly methods are put at risk by easy searches online. The stakes are very high. Scholarly method is more important than ever when some answer to almost any question is quickly available online. And if we are able to combine old values and methods with the best of new technologies, we can transform teaching, learn­ing, and the academy generally for the better. Both the best and the worst of times look to be available. What will it take to choose the best?

How to Cite This Work: Courant, Paul N. "Scholarly Practice in the Digital Age." Presentation at the 2008 EDUCAUSE Center for Applied Research (ECAR) Symposium, Boca Raton, FL, December 5, 2008, available from http://www.educause.edu/ecar.

http://www.oldroads.org/pastblogs/pastsingles2009/Google_Earth_projects.htm

Several students in a Lawrence University class produced projects using Google Earth. Professor Martyn Smith describes:

A perpetual worry of mine in teaching Islam is that students will think about it as a system of doctrinal points and not as a social system embedded in a time and place. This project requires students to engage with Islam in particular places.. and along the way to gain some familiarity with the geography of Islam. When I first used this assignment I required students to examine a particular city in the Islamic world, but this time I opened it up considerably and allowed students to follow their own interest so long as it was the kind of inquiry that could be plotted on a map.

For example,

One thing we can count on is that things change constantly. Whether youre new to higher education IT or youre a seasoned professional, we each face change in our workplace everyday. The technology itself changes and changes the way we work and learn. Disruptive technologies have an impact on our business processes. Students' needs and perspectives change. The consumerization of IT changes what we provide and how we provide it. Cyberscholarship is changing the way we can do research. Environmental issues bring critically important change. Our use of and provision of technology make us key change agents at our institutions. This panel will bring together distinguished leaders in the arenas of teaching and learning, infrastructure and enterprise systems, and e-research and e-scholarship to examine key changes, impacts, and directions for the successful integration of change in our work.

By sheer web search accident, I stumbled on to Andy M’s Yahoo Pipe for putting your twitter followers locations on a map:

The numbers ar enot a count per country, but a number on the list of 100, and you can pop from one pin to the next in a cheap world tour.

Note that it maps 100 of your followers, so no hopes Scoble et al for popping 25000 pins on a map. And I am not sure if these are the 100 most recent or just the random way twitter lists your followers.

And although it says you can embed this in your blog, doing so with JavaScript requires plain text insertion of your username and password, a definite no no unless you like eating phish. You can make it a iGoogle widget.

This is less of an interest in using this Pipe and more of a reminder (note to self, not a freaking resolution) to learn more about Yahoo Pipes (so I can more partly understand what the hell Tony Hirst cooks up in his kitchen),

cc licensed flickr photo by danielgenhart.com

There is joy in Mudville this morning (=my inbox and some people claim it is not worth it to check email first thing, phooey), as in response to my battle with Icelandair a trace of humanity has been detected- they are offering to refund my money for unused tickets due to their delays (which they say still do not exist, but I shall no longer quibble…, well not too much).

To quote:

Dear Mr. Levine.

I refer to our previous communication and apolgise for the delay in getting back to you.

I am really sorry that you missed your connecting flight from Boston and I reiterate my sincerely apologise for any inconvenience and additional expenses caused.

Having checked our records, flight FI631 blocked in at 6:13 on November 29 and we do not have any records of bags being delayed that evening. Please note that when travelling on through tickets the tickets can not be issued unless the connection time is legal. The minimum connection time between flights is decided from the airport authorities and after the delivery of your luggage the connection time you had left still was legal. Mr. Levine I am sure that you are able to appreciate that we would not be in a position to refund your expenses caused as neither our flight nor your luggage was delayed.

Since your tickets were issued on Icelandair paperwork we are willing to authorize a refund on unused coupons and ask you to please send the original unused coupons to the address below and for my attention. The amount will be around USD 400- This is done on exgratia basis and without prejudice.

Once again, I would like to extend my very sincere apologies for the inconvenience caused and annoyance caused on this occasion. I do very much hope that you will not be deterred from travelling with us again.

Yours sincerely,

Harpa Johannsdottir

So we would not be in a position to refund your expenses means they are not willing to refund the $900 I had pay out of pocket for a USAirways flight to get home, but they are going to give me $400 for the tickets I bought from them that I did not use.

They are returning what they had previously pocketed.

I am happy with a partial victory… I cannot say if the blog helped or persistent emails, but it is worth it to keep barking at the door until someone pays attention.

http://www.gaapweb.com/news/1327-Ernst-Young-to-use-PS3-for-virtual-meetings.html

Several companies are exploring using the PS3 Home service as a virtual worlds platform for meetings. Portsmouth University is working with Ernst & Young, Merrill Lynch, and Microsoft to try "virtual worlds to reduce costs on office space and travel, as well as their carbon footprints."

Managing director of Advanced Workplace Associates, Andrew Mawson, said: "...Audio and video-conferencing solutions have emerged but the use of virtual worlds may offer the next evolution in overcoming the tyranny of distance - a more realistic and learning-enhanced environment."

Home has some advantages as a platform, according to Ars Technica:

online communities are a cheap solution to the problem of virtual meetings. Given the relative simplicity and low entry cost of Home compared to similar products, Sony's product has potential as a meeting place. It offers key functionality desirable in an enterprise-minded solution, like voice chat and an easily-customizable, private online environment in the Clubs feature that can be managed with a standard set of relatively inexpensive hardware.

(via Ars Technica)

I just started working within a remote dba services  project. This is caused by general strategy of our faculty to outsource all IT operations to offshore companies. This allows us to save money for the major faculty activities. This is very interesting to work with people 10 000 miles away and have very good cooperation. Because of ITIL practices uses it does not matter were the Service desk is situated and we covered whole 24 hours with support because of time zone differrence. I hope that our faculty will eventually outsource at least half of overall IT operations. Will write up here in comments about successes and fails in this start-up project.

A little experiment- not looking to see who can name the pattern (that is easy).

Since I have made a commitment to take the umbrella concept of open education more seriously, this will be the first post in an occasional series in which I express my concerns about open education as a way of working through the issues. It is also part of an occasional series of posts about or inspired by the book . In this case, I would say “inspired by” is the correct phrase, because although the concern I want to talk about was triggered by the chapter ”A Harvest Too Large? A Framework for Educational Abundance”, the authors are clearly aware of the concern I raise here (as are a number of the other chapter authors in the book). My issue is more with the naive formulations of open education that I often see floating around in the blogosphere.

Specifically, I’m afraid that the popularization of “open education” will further reduce our already stunted notion of what the verb “to educate” means until its meaning disappears altogether.

Let me start with a few stories. When I was in my early twenties, I made a little money on the side teaching adults who thought they were tone deaf how to sing. (I somehow got it in my head that this would be a good way to meet women. It wasn’t.) I never did meet anyone who was actually tone deaf. However, I did meet a number of people who had never learned to hear pitch. Hearing pitch—whether one note is higher or lower in relation to another—is something that comes instinctively to most people. But some people just don’t naturally notice whether a pitch is higher or lower. There’s nothing wrong with them biologically; they are physically capable of registering the distinctions. They just never make the connection on their own. Invariably, I could teach them how to focus their attention, hear pitch, and then sing in tune. What struck me as odd, though, was how many people went through their lives believing they had a permanent disability (albeit a minor one) when they were just missing one piece that was entirely learnable.

I went through a similar experience with a college buddy that wanted me to help him write his philosophy paper. Actually, he wanted me to rewrite for him a paper written for an American Cinema class by one of his fraternity brothers so he could turn it in for his aesthetics of film class. I agreed to help him, but only if we did it my way. My friend was a clever guy, and I was confident he could learn to write a decent paper on his own if I could just help him find the missing link in his process. I started by making him tell me in his own words how the topic of the paper he was…remixing related to the essay question his professor had asked. As he explained it to me, I had him write it down. That was his topic paragraph. We then went on to the first example. I asked him how that example proved that his idea was true. He explained it to me. I made him write it down. We had our second paragraph. At which point, the training wheels came off. I told him he would have to repeat this process with the other examples, and that he could do this without me. He looked at me like I had just invented anti-gravity. “You mean, all I have to do is say how the examples relate to my idea and I’m done? Who knew it was that easy!” He got a B- on the paper. Obviously, my friend’s problem wasn’t as difficult to diagnose or fix as those of the “tone deaf” singers. In fact, somebody clearly should have helped him solve this problem some time in the 15 years of schooling he had before he approached me. But the point remains that there was a gap that could be closed through an educational intervention—once it was correctly identified.

There are probably lots of people who have these sorts of blind spots. One of mine is visual awareness. I don’t notice things even when they are right in front of my face. I have no fashion sense, and little consciousness of what clothes I put on my body in the morning (never mind fashion sense). But I have been surprised to discover that I can take decent pictures and even make decent movies when I focus my attention. There’s nothing wrong with my visual faculties. I just don’t naturally know when or how to use them.

Unfortunately, some people’s limitations fall right into the critical path of academic progress. Not just progress in a particular discipline or skill, but any academic progress. I recently spoke with a relative who had gone through four majors at six different colleges before she was able to graduate. What finally made the difference was a teacher who helped her see that she was going to run into tough spots in any academic program and she wouldn’t pass until she developed a set of skills including (but not limited to) help-seeking behavior. It never occurred to her that there was a productive way to engage her teachers—that she could learn her way through the tough spots. It took until her mid-forties before somebody finally told her. I have written before about Purdue University’s use of academic analytics to help teach students exactly this lesson (or, at least, to teach them that they need to learn this lesson). Their success demonstrates that there is a high correlation between the lack of this very teachable skill and students just barely fail school. It also demonstrates that good diagnostics are a key part of ensuring a successful education. 

This brings me to Open Education and the chapter in question. Authors Batson, Pharia, and Kumar start out by making a great point about how we need to make a mental transition from thinking about education in terms of the economics of scarcity to the economics of abundance:

The manifesting nature of learning via the Internet, open education, starts with abundance—abundance that will only multiply over time. Philip Slater, an anthropologist and author of In Pursuit of Loneliness, saw the post-war abundance in America as a root cause for the “revolution” of the 1960s, when baby-boomers, enjoying the wealth of their parents, who had grown up during the depression, could not understand their scarcity-based beliefs….Their poverty assumptions—lie low, hide your wealth lest it be stolen, do not display emotions, life is full of danger—enraged their Dionysian offspring. “Let’s celebrate life, not suspiciously guard our riches” was translated into “don’t trust anyone over 30,” to paraphrase Slater. We now appear to be facing the same cultural fissure 40 years later: Open educational resources (OER) are so abundant that the scarcity-based assumptions of educators are challenged.

It’s the enraging part that worries me. Open education is often expressed as something along the lines of “we don’t need no stinkin’ teachers.” With all that great content freely available online, we’ll just teach ourselves (and maybe each other). Forget those fuddy-duddy pedants; they just get in the way. Indeed, even the chapter authors themselves postulate a hypothetical “Peer-to-Peer University” in which cohorts of students “come together and learn the material for a course” built around open educational resources. The peer-to-peer model, when it is not couched very carefully, invites the assumption that “learning the material” is a straightforward, Gradgrindian process of information transmission. In fact, knowledge transmission is always mediated by perceptual and cognitive processes that are not straightforward and tend to be ideosyncratic. 

Open educational resources will not, by themselves, obviate the need for a teacher as diagnostician. This is a skilled job. You wouldn’t know it from the kind of training most teachers get in the U.S. at our schools of education, or for professors who don’t get any pedagogical training at all, but it is. Furthermore, this is a skill that is not needed in just rare educational cases but rather every day in the classroom, because the vast majority of learners need this diagnostic help at some point or other and the ones most at risk need it in a serious way. Some of this can be done by untrained peers, but a lot of it can’t (at least, not reliably so). My worry is that popularization of open education will move us from the widespread neglect of this critical pedagogical skill set to the outright abandonment of it. 

At the moment, teaching skills are still essential and scarce resources. I won’t have a high comfort level with open education as anything more than a supplement around the edges of traditional channels for formal education until that issue is addressed head-on.

Related posts:

1. Open Source in Education Post Series on Terra Incognita
2. White Paper: Open Source is Good for Education
3. SocialLearn: Bridging the Gap Between Web 2.0 and Higher Education

Many educators are exploring how they can use Second Life and other virtual world environments to teach online courses or to augment regular courses with online materials. This presentation will explain what Second Life is, how it can be used for educational purposes, and what the faculty and IT support staff are doing at IUP to support the use of virtual worlds for teaching. IUP has four islands in Second Life and is planning to expand. IUP is the fourth most visited higher education site in Second Life.

MergingArts has a good audio interview with Inigral CEO Michael Staton. Michael makes some good points about the nature of sites like Facebook that raise questions about a number of academic social networking efforts. Essentially, he argues that people don’t want to mix their work and social spaces. There’s an almost ontological separation of the two. Unlike, say, chat, which isn’t a “space” per se, Facebook is a “place” where people hang out. They’ll go there to check out what’s happening when they have a little free time, like a dorm floor lounge or a favorite pub. This is very specifically not what people want to do with work spaces, and they don’t want them mixed.  Most people don’t go to the office to hang out in their spare time. So how can social networks enhance work-like endeavors such as formal education?

Inigral’s answer is to carry the work relationships over into the social space. If we make friends with and hang out with the people we work with, we will probably feel better about our work, try harder to please our colleagues, be less afraid to ask for help from them, etc. Other efforts that focus on embedding social networking tools directly into an academic space like an LMS may have a tougher time of it. It’s not obvious that current-generation social networking tools will transfer to direct work tasks in the way that, say, presence awareness and chat do. There’s definitely some more thinking to be done in this area.

On a related note, Inigral has posted a survey regarding how new media is being used in higher education. If you have something to contribute in this area, please go on over and participate.

Related posts:

1. Yahoo! News - Social Issues Surround Social Software
2. Oracle’s Work with Fluid on Accessibility
3. Blogging as Parallel Play