Florida college looks to become eBook pioneer

iPads will be among to eReader choices for Daytona State College students.
iPads will be among to eReader choices for Daytona State College students.

An all-eTextbook campus won’t just make Florida’s Daytona State College the envy of the education-technology world. The program will also save academic careers cut short when students can’t afford their books, pushing Daytona officials to find an electronic alternative and perhaps serve as a model for higher education.

Daytona State, a 35,000-student institution and a former community college, has been moving toward a “100 percent” eBook campus since 2009, using electronic texts in English, computer science, and economics courses, said Rand Spiwak, Daytona’s chief financial officer and executive vice president.

Daytona’s eBook initiative would allow students to buy electronic texts for about $20 apiece, Spiwak said, and the books would be accessible on any web-enabled eReader. The college would make affordable eReaders available to students or students could read their books on one of the thousands of on-campus computers.…Read More

How to use higher education’s ‘new toy’: Social media

EDUCAUSE panelists encouraged attendees to search for social media staff on campus.
EDUCAUSE panelists encouraged attendees to search for social media staff on their own campus.

Campus technology officials in charge of social media efforts have come to a consensus: There are no social media experts, so keep experimenting with your school’s tweeting, linking, and posting until you’ve struck the right balance.

Using social media to communicate with students in the online arenas they most prefer—Facebook and, to a lesser extent, Twitter—was a focal point at the annual EDUCAUSE conference in Anaheim, Calif., where 6,700 campus technology staff came together this week to discuss the latest in educational technology.

Robin Bradford Smail, known as a disruptive technologist at Penn State University, said during an Oct. 12 EDUCAUSE session that campus technology officials have to find and maintain a balance between being passive on Facebook and bombarding students with constant posts.…Read More

Report: Campus technology budgets on the mend

Community colleges are lagging behind other institutions in higher education's economic recovery.
Community colleges are lagging behind other institutions in higher education's economic recovery.

Campus technology chiefs are still seeing their department’s budget trimmed, but in far smaller numbers than in 2009, as a nationwide survey suggests that higher education is slowly beginning to recover from the national economic downturn that has downsized IT staff and shelved programs in recent years.

About four in 10 campus technology officials reported budget cuts this fall, down from 50 percent in 2009, according to the 2010 Campus Computing Survey, published by the Campus Computing Project, an organization that examines technology’s role in colleges and universities.

The news is even better for private, nonprofit colleges and universities, where only 24 percent of campus technology officials saw their budgets slashed this year, compared with 56 percent in 2009.…Read More

The best way to avoid data loss on campus

A misplace USB can be a nightmare of college IT officials.
Misplaced portable storage devices can be a nightmare for campus technology officials.

Misplaced USB drives or other portable storage devices account for several of the most recent security-breach instances in higher education. And campus technology chiefs have a simple solution for preventing such data loss from occurring, security experts say: Transport files on the web, where campus technology officials can track them.

Colleges and universities, like corporations and government agencies, see Social Security numbers, birth dates, account numbers, and other sensitive information stolen every year after an employee reports a portable storage device missing.

New York University’s Langone Medical Center reported in August that patient records, home addresses, and other information had been lost on a missing USB drive that contained diagnostic test results for about 250 patients. And at Rice University last month, more than 4,000 students and staff members had their Social Security numbers compromised when a portable storage device was reported stolen.…Read More

New software turns paper into an inexpensive digital tablet

Livescribe's Echo smart pen aims to help students take complete and accurate notes.
Livescribe's Echo smart pen aims to help students take complete and accurate notes.

Livescribe has promoted its digital “smart” pen as an educational tool not just for capturing and recording class notes, but also sharing these notes online in a technique known as “pencasting.” Now, the latest version of the company’s smart pen, called the Echo, adds more digital storage capability, and new software enables the pen to stream all notes taken live, in real time, to a computer—turning special dotted paper into an inexpensive digital tablet.

In a recent demonstration for an eCampus News reporter, company founder and CEO Jim Marggraff showed how the technology could be useful for instruction.

As a user jots down notes on the special paper, these notes are recorded in the pen’s memory and also streamed live to a computer, where they can be displayed for an entire class to see in real time. (For now, the pen must be connected to the computer via a USB cable.)…Read More

Viewpoint: Having bad data often isn’t a ‘technology problem’

Campuses are producing high-quality data, but much of this information is not being used.
Campuses are producing high-quality data, but much of this information is not being used.

I have worked with many different schools on reporting and institutional research projects. The common question I am asked from Information Technology (IT) and Institutional Research (IR) offices is, “What tool should we be using to pull data from our system?”

People continue to struggle to get the information they need out of their institution’s administrative systems. In their minds, the problem—and answer—always seems to be the technology.

I have seen schools that have been successful with a variety of reporting tools, ranging from Microsoft Excel to the most advanced business intelligence (BI) and statistical analysis tools. I have also seen many schools fail with the exact same tools.…Read More

Online education ‘convert’ honored for excellence in distance ed

Schafer said she has learned 'lots of little tricks' to capture her students' attention online.
Schafer said she has learned 'lots of little tricks' to capture her students' attention online.

Ruth Schafer thought she would miss the look of understanding register on a student’s face during her move from the traditional to the online classroom. But after being recognized as Missouri’s top distance educator, Schafer said the virtual setting made her find new ways to explain lessons in unmistakable detail.

Schafer, an adjunct English instructor at Drury University in Springfield, Mo., was awarded the Missouri Distance Learning Association’s (MoDLA) Educator of the Year award July 27 after five years of teaching composition fundamentals, expository writing, and business communications at the 3,500-student school.

Web-based teaching wasn’t Schafer’s first choice, but Drury officials told her that online courses were the only available position when she applied to the university in 2005.…Read More

Has Microsoft brought the future of computers to campus?

Students can scan interactive maps on Microsoft Surface.
Students can scan interactive maps on Microsoft Surface (photo courtesy of Microsoft).

A developer of educational software since the 1960s, Brown University Computer Science Professor Andries van Dam has seen education technology trends come and go, but he’s recently zeroed in on Microsoft’s interactive desktop computer as a model for the future computer.

van Dam, a co-founder of Brown’s Computer Science Department, specializes in what he calls post-WIMP computer interfaces, meaning machines that don’t use the traditional windows, icons, menus, and pointers that have come to define the modern computer.

After working on Microsoft’s Surface, a table-sized computer that recognizes hand gestures and objects and allows multiple people to use the product simultaneously, van Dam said the multimodal interface will prove valuable to higher-education researchers examining how their institutions—and the general population—can move away from the antiquated point-and-click computing experience.…Read More

Study suggests Wikipedia is accurate … and a little dull

Eight out of 10 students say they use Wikipedia for background knowledge.
Eight out of 10 students say they use Wikipedia for background knowledge.

Wikipedia enthusiasts may have a new way to argue their case to professors skeptical of the online encyclopedia: Cancer researchers said in June that Wikipedia was nearly as accurate as a well-respected, peer-reviewed database, although the wiki entries were a bit more boring.

Yaacov Lawrence, an assistant professor in Thomas Jefferson University’s Department of Radiation Oncology in Philadelphia, examined 10 types of cancer and compared Wikipedia’s information to statistics in the National Cancer Institute’s Physician Data Query, a peer-reviewed oncology database.

About 2 percent of the information from both web-based resources differed from textbook sources, Lawrence found. Lawrence used algorithms to judge the readability of each cancer entry, and based on word length and sentence length, the Wikipedia entries were much more difficult to comprehend.…Read More

Viewpoint: Digital learning tools fulfilling their promise

College students are more easily able to communicate with young professors accustomed to technology.
College students are more easily able to communicate with young professors accustomed to technology.

A recent Student Watch survey conducted by the National Association of College Stores (NACS) found that while most students still prefer textbooks to eBooks, sales of digital learning products are expected to quadruple by 2012 “if content is made more interactive and faculty become more comfortable using it.”

That first condition has already been met; the most recent digital products on the market have become far more interactive, customizable, and engaging in just the past year.

New learning platforms are not just more interactive or intuitive, they also provide a pedagogical road map that allows instructors to tailor their assignments and exams while giving individual students more options in how they approach and pace their own learning.…Read More

Oops! We could not locate your form.