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Comment: Students: Share your views (Score 1) 81

by jyosim (#39019609) Attached to: Rethinking the Social Media-Centric Classroom
This article is part of a series at The Chronicle of Higher Education, and as the next part of it, we're asking students to share their views on teaching via short video comments. The info: Today, professors are letting students pass virtual notes in class on Twitter. They're trying "clickers" that turn classrooms into game shows. They're videotaping their classes to let students watch lecture reruns to help cram for the test, or share the knowledge with the world on YouTube. They're monitoring how many minutes students spend reading online textbooks to see who needs help. The Chronicle is putting together a multimedia feature exploring the state of the college lecture, and how technologies point to new models. While some enthusiasts see the high-tech changes as a much-needed upgrade to an education model that is more than a thousand years old, others see dangers ahead. Is all that gear a distraction? Is academic freedom threatened when Web tools and video make public the once-sacred space of the classroom? If you're a current college student, fire up your laptop’s Web cam, or your smartphone's video camera, and let us know whether your professor's lectures are boring, inspiring, or something in between. Would you rather something more interactive happen in class, or should lectures stick around for the long haul? Please don’t name your professors, and you don't have to give your name if you prefer not to. One view often left out of the current debates about teaching is that of the student, so your input can help shape the conversation among college leaders. We’ll feature the best videos on our Web site, and I’ll show some of the clips at a talk I'm giving at this year’s SXSW interactive festival in Austin, Texas. Just post your video to YouTube or other video-sharing site and headline it LectureFail?, or send the clip directly to jeff.young@chronicle.com. We'll be taking submissions until the end of February. More details here: http://chronicle.com/article/Lecture-Fail/130085/
Software

Tech Companies Expand 'Student Ambassador' Program->

Submitted by jyosim
jyosim writes "Tech companies are trying to win the hearts of minds of college students with swag and free pizza, and they're hiring more 'student ambassadors' to do it. These days the student reps — low-paid product evangelists — are getting more and more access to new products and the ability to influence software features."
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News

Copyright Rebellion - Profs Fight Content Lock-Up->

Submitted by
jyosim
jyosim writes "The digital age was supposed to put information at our fingertips. Books and data and images on an Internet browser would be just a click away.Instead, scholars are being denied access to millions of books. Images are not being distributed. Two major universities face lawsuits by book and video publishers for using digital copies in courses. And the U.S. Congress has placed behind the wall of copyright many items that used to be in the public domain, all because of aggressive new tactics by publishers. The Chronicle of Higher Ed has a special report on how fed-up professors are pushing back, in court and on campus, to keep teaching and research from being starved of material."
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News

The Supercomputer Speed Race, & Why It Should ->

Submitted by
jyosim
jyosim writes "With big money and competitiveness at stake, smarter—not faster—supercomputer designs may be winners. The villain: the Top500 Supercomputer list, the most popular measure of a computer's worth. Experts say that with today's more complex machines, it's no longer measuring the right thing, and it could lead to dead-end designs. Or is that sour grapes, now that China is winning the Top500 speed race for the first time ever."
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Privacy

Campus Gossip Sites Are Back (Spawn of JuicyCampus->

Submitted by
jyosim
jyosim writes "Students have more ways than ever to post anonymous attacks on classmates, thanks (or rather, no thanks) to new and expanded online forums promising to be bigger and juicier than the infamous JuicyCampus, which drew fierce protests from harassed students before it shut down earlier this year. New sites inspired by the controversial original have new features, like letting people post embarrassing pictures or videos as well. Look for more lawsuits this fall — are these examples of free speech that should be protected or should the law changed to help stop the nastiest cases of online harassment."
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Social Networks

Are E-Mail Lists Dying? Or Can They Be Upgraded?->

Submitted by jyosim
jyosim writes "Some e-mail lists are now 15 years old — ancient in Internet time. Traffic is down, and some say they are dying a quiet death. But a few major lists, some of which have more than 100,000 subscribers, are trying to add RSS and social-networking tools to their list Web sites to keep the discussions relevant — and alive. Possible image here: http://chronicle.com/photos/v55/i40/5540.5-infotech.jpg"
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Sci-Fi

Tech Scholars Play Extras in 'Star Trek' Movie->

Submitted by
jyosim
jyosim writes "Henry Jenkins, an MIT professor who studies Star Trek fans, thought it was some kind of joke when he got an e-mail from a Hollywood casting director asking him to be an extra in the new Star Trek film. But a few weeks later he was getting fitted for a Klingon costume. Star Trek's director, J.J. Abrams, also invited another scholar to appear in the film — Randy Pausch, the Carnegie Mellon University computer-scientist who, while struggling with cancer that would eventually take his life, became a celebrity for a "last lecture" he gave in 2007 about achieving his childhood dreams."
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Social Networks

Prof Spams Computer Clubs Seeking YouTube Hits->

Submitted by jyosim
jyosim writes "A professor in Sacramento recently e-mailed (some would say spammed) student computer clubs at several colleges promising to compose an original song for them if they would score him 1,000 views on his YouTube videos. The professor's videos — which he says are part of an unusual research project — are of him dressed as an aging rockstar singing about viral videos — and in one, he serenades a prostitute in Amsterdam. At least one of the clubs objected to the e-mail, saying the move was insulting and clueless. "We feel that the method used in this 'experiment' lacks the necessary rigor to have any meaning," said an officer for the Computer Science Club at the University of Waterloo, in Ontario in a letter to top officials at Sacramento. "Proper 'viral' media is spread not through e-mail spam and incentive but through word of mouth, and studying 'viral' media by attempting to create artificially 'viral' content is bound to lead to meaningless results." The letter also said the professor had behaved unethically by involving human subjects (like the club members at Waterloo) without approval from the university's institutional review board."
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It's no longer a question of staying healthy. It's a question of finding a sickness you like. -- Jackie Mason