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The Online School other pages What about the classroom? | Assumptions and attitudes What's the minimum I have to do? | Where to start? faculty needs assessment

How geeky do teachers have to be?

The hardest task for many teachers is changing their assumptions and attitudes. Next is knowing where to get started. But what about the classroom?

And then there's the Big Question. How much are you going to have to change? Answer: as little as possible, remembering that you trade power for ease of use. The more you have of the one, the less you'll have of the other, sort of like a seesaw.

If you want the maximum ease of use that the Internet can provide, you will need a minimum degree of geekiness, which is becoming expected of professionals and other college-educated people.

For an investment of time going up some learning curves and changing some of your work processes, you can gain more power to help students learn. Semester after semester, I find that the learning exhibited by the students keeps me committed to this pedagogy.

If you want to manage your own web server, Ricci Street can get you started and point you in the right direction.

Signs of the times

MIT's OpenCourseWare

The idea behind MIT OpenCourseWare (MIT OCW) is to make MIT course materials that are used in the teaching of almost all undergraduate and graduate subjects available on the web, free of charge, to any user anywhere in the world. MIT OCW will radically alter technology-enhanced education at MIT, and will serve as a model for university dissemination of knowledge in the Internet age. Such a venture will continue the tradition at MIT and in American higher education of open dissemination of educational materials, philosophy, and modes of thought, and will help lead to fundamental changes in the way colleges and universities engage the web as a vehicle for education.

MIT OpenCourseWare will provide the content of, but is not a substitute for, an MIT education.

Who Needs Paper? Not Iowa College
by Katie Dean
Wired, August 6, 2002

Students at an Iowa college can forget the quintessential experience of pulling all-nighters at the library poring over stacks of books.

For one thing, there's no library. For another, there are no books. ...

Instead of a library, the school has a resource center equipped with computer workstations that can access the Web, e-books and online journals. The resource center also houses several meeting tables, audio-visual materials and a few paper magazines -- but no books.

The school plans to be an entirely paper-free campus.

What about the students coming at us from the high schools and colleges?

Born Digital: Children of the Revolution
Wired, September 2002

We learned to crawl alongside the PC. We came of age with the Internet. Early-adopting, hyperconnected, always on: Call us Children of the Revolution, the first teens and tweens to grow up with the network. It takes a generation to unlock the potential of a transformative technology – we are that generation. From IM to MP3 to P2P, we lab-test tomorrow’s culture. While others marvel at the digital future, we take it for granted. Think of it as the difference between a second language and a first. And imagine the impact when full fluency hits the workplace, the shopping mall, the living room. In the past, you put away childish things when you grew up. But our tools are taking over the adult world. Check it out: The technology is trickling up.

I'm trying to give us a fighting chance of keeping up.

Techniques / Features

The technical geeky part is the least of it. After you have developed an accurate mental model of information and networks, then you have to figure out how to use them. After several years of trial and error, I can assure you that using the Internet to supplement the classroom is a never-ending learning experience. We don't even have names to call some of this stuff.

course guides
new media textbooks
the virtual classroom

Models

I haven't developed it yet, but I would like to expand this Online School section with information about organizations, software, and standards. Stay tuned.

IMS. Instructional Management Systems
LMS. Learning management systems

Sources

Where do we get the stuff we need to extend the classroom to the Internet? We need content, that is, information about the student competencies we are trying to develop.

We also need computer code so that we don't have to write our own. This includes everything from HTML to JavaScript to Java applets, all of it free.

Finally, we need services to link to or provide. This includes the reference services available through the College library to services

Higher Education

Analysis of the higher education business model on Port 80's Boardwalk

Over the past 800 years, higher education has developed an enduring and resilient and adaptable business model by putting the customer -- the faculty -- at the center and driving out fear with academic freedom and tenure.

What do you think?

The Ground Zero Bistro discussion forum is a good place to ask a question and to see what questions others are asking.