Technology and Learning
The Annenberg/CPB Project
The Annenberg/CPB Project helps colleges, universities, high schools and community
organizations use telecommunications technologies to improve learning for all students.
The Project begun in 1981 at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting with funding
from the Annenberg School of Communications, and was joined by the Annenberg/CPB Math and
Science Project. The Annenberg/CPB Project has influenced individuals' and
educational institutions' use of public television and video, and has pioneered the use of
computer and information technologies to make education more accessible for all students.
The web site includes links to educational technology strategies.
Association for the Advancement of
Computing in Education
Headquartered at the University of Virginia, the AACE runs conferences and workshops on
educational computing, publishes several journals, and sponsors various affiliated groups,
such as the Society for Information Technology and Teacher Education (SITE) and the
division on Educational Telecommunications (ED-TELECOM).
"Auditing Classes at M.I.T., on the Web and Free" by Carey Goldberg
This article, published in the April 4, 2001 issue of the New
York Times, describes the Massachusetts Institute of Technolgoy's new 10-year initiative,
OpenCourseWare, which will create public Web sites for almost all of its 2,000 courses and
post materials like lecture notes, problem sets, syllabuses, exams, simulations, and video
lectures. MIT intends to post virtually all its course materials on the Web, making it
generally available at no cost. The materials are not for-credit courses; rather, they
comprise one electronic set of courses that will allow students to see how they flow into
each other, to search the whole repository, and to move from one to the next through
cross-references.
Center for Academic
Transformation at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
The mission of the Center for Academic Transformation is to serve as a
source of expertise and support for those in higher education who wish to take advantage
of the capabilities of information technology to transform their academic practices. The
Center includes a Leadership Forum, sponsored by Blackboard, Inc., Eduprise, SCT,
SMARTHINKING, and WebCT, that produces a monthly electronic newsletter written by Carol
Twigg and Bob Heterick of EDUCOM, The
Learning MarketSpace, which provides assessment of and thinking about issues and
developments concerning the nexus of higher education and information technology.
Center for Technology in Learning
Created in the early 1990s, the Center for Technology in Learning (CTL) studies issues
of how to effectively use technologies to support learning. The Center was established
within SRI's Policy Division, where it is closely allied with ongoing education and health
research programs. SRI was founded as the Stanford Research Institute in 1946 to promote
and foster the application of science in the development of commerce, trade and industry
for the prosperity of mankind. It is now one of the world's largest independent, nonprofit
research, technology development and consulting organizations.
The Collaboratory
Project, Northwestern University
Funded by a grant from Ameritech, the Collaboratory Project is establishing an
easy-to-use, network-based collaborative environment to support education, which enables
education, research, cultural, nonprofit, business, and industry communities in the
greater Chicago region to work together to share information, resources, and expertise.
The Collaboratory Project is part of Northwestern University's Information
Technology organization and works with individual teachers, school project teams, and
multi-school collaborations in the Chicago schools, suburban school districts, and
districts throughout Illinois. In addition, the project works with museums, libraries, and
cultural institutions to develop innovative, web-based educational resources.
EDUCAUSE
EDUCAUSE is an association that emerged from the consolidation of two organizations,
CAUSE and Educom, on July 1, 1998. Existing at the intersection of higher education
and information technology, EDUCAUSE has as its mission to help shape and enable
transformational change in higher education through the introduction, use, and management
of information resources and technologies in teaching, learning, scholarship, research,
and institutional management. EDUCAUSE focuses on the management and use of computational,
network, and information resources in support of higher education's missions of
scholarship, instruction, service, and administration. This organization attempts to
bridge the academy and industry.
The Gateway to Educational
Materials
Sponsored by the the U.S. Department of Education's National Library of Education, The
Gateway to Educational Materials is a special project of the ERIC Clearinghouse on
Information & Technology. The NLE and the U.S. Department of Education have
created this database of Internet-based educational materials in order to provide
educators with quick and easy access to their growing consortium of institutions'
collections of educational resources such as lesson plans, activities, and curriculum
units.
History Matters
A project of the American
Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning of the City University of New
York and the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, History Matters
assists social studies and history teachers at high schools and colleges around the world
by providing a non-commercial starting point for exploring the web and offering an array
of teaching resources that are grounded in the latest scholarship. Resources include an annotated guide to the most useful web sites for
U.S. history and social studies teachers.
National Initiative for a
Networked Cultural Heritage (NINCH)
The National Initiative for a Networked Cultural Heritage (NINCH) is a
diverse coalition of cultural organizations dedicated to ensuring the greatest
participation of all parts of the cultural community in the digital environment.
NINCH's goal is the creation of an environment in which people and institutions everywhere
can network their cultural resources and receive encouragement and support in doing
so. NINCH's mission is to advocate for the inclusion of the cultural sector in all
policy deliberations on the future of the information infrastructure and to educate
policymakers, coalition members and the general public about developing a connected,
distributed and accessible collection of cultural knowledge. NINCH's work includes
community building to create a membership coalition across the breadth of the arts and
humanities community and to attend to diverse cultures and the needs of those unable to
become members; working with members and advocacy partners to ensure that the
contributions and the needs of the arts and humanities community are included in all
legislation and policy deliberations concerning our digital future by Congress, government
agencies and other institutions (e.g. universities, museums and others); and creating an
interactive information and communications infrastructure and instruments dedicated to
educating its constituency about digital networking developments, in the U.S. and abroad.
Teaching, Learning, & Technology
Group (TLT)
An affiliate of the American Association for Higher
Education (AAHE), the TLT Group is perhaps the most widely-know resource for
institutions wishing to make better use of instructional technologies. The core work
of TLT is the Teaching, Learning,
and Technology Roundtable (TLTR) Program, which organizes groups of faculty, staff,
and administrators to coordinate local efforts to integrate technology into the
curriculum. TLT also offers workshops, a consulting service, an online discussion
group, and, through the Flashlight
Program, a number of tools for campus-based technology assessment. The Equal Access to Software and Information
(EASI), which provides information and guidance on access-to-information technologies
by individuals with disabilities, is another of TLT projects.
ERIC
Crib Sheet on Technology in the Classroom
CRIB Sheets are brief selected ERIC bibliographies on topics of interest in the field
of higher education. This bibliography highlights some of the key issues related to technology implementation in the classroom: the changing faculty role; implementation within different disciplines; and
training and development.
"The
Age of Virtual Learning?" By Carol Geary Schneider, Education Week April 26,
2000
This editorial argues that both tests and technologies be put
to more productive uses than high-stakes tests and high-speed courses.
Center for Innovative Learning Technologies
The Center for Innovative Learning Technologies (CILT) is a distributed center designed to serve as a national resource for stimulating research on innovative, technology-enabled solutions to critical problems in K-14 learning. Its approach is to foster and conduct collaborative research and development in areas believed to promise significant advances in learning.
The Pros and Cons of
Technology in the Classroom
This page offers a threaded discussion on issues on the
value and role of computing technology in K-12 classrooms. Transcripts of speeches given
to a gathering of organizations that fund school reform projects by two nationally
recognized experts on the subject, Dr. Roy Pea and Dr. Larry Cuban, are provided as
context for the debate.
MERLOT - Multimedia Educational Resource
for Learning and Online Teaching
MERLOT is a free and open resource designed primarily for faculty and students of higher education. Links to online learning materials are collected here along with annotations such as peer reviews and assignments.
"Online Education: New
Paradigms for Learning and Teaching" by Greg Kearsley
This article from The Technology Source,
August 1998, analyzes courses that won the Paul Allen Foundation Virtual Education contest
for outstanding online courses in higher education. The author describes some of the
salient characteristics of these online courses, the issues they raise about online
education, and the apparent direction of online education in higher education. The
courses discussed here provide a window into the current state of the art, and provide
indications of the future.
"Seven
Principles of Effective Teaching: A Practical Lens for Evaluating Online Courses" by
Charles Graham, Kursat Cagiltay, Byung-Ro Lim, Joni Craner, and Thomas M. Duffy
This article, written by a team of scholars from Indiana University's
Center for Research on Learning and Technology in the March/April 2001 issue of The
Technology Source, adapts Chickering and Gamson's renowned "Seven Principles for
Good Practice in Undergraduate Education" to online teaching and learning and shares
the authors' results for the assessment of online courses. (Note: This article was
originally published in The Technology Source
as: Charles Graham, Kursat Cagiltay, Byung-Ro Lim, Joni Craner, and Thomas M. Duffy
"Seven Principles of Effective Teaching: A Practical Lens for Evaluating Online
Courses." The Technology Source, March/April 2001.
Technology Applied to Classroom
Assessment
Compiled by Tom Creed for the Virtual Companion accompanying the article
"TechnoCATs" in The National Teaching and
Learning Forum, Vol. 7 No. 5, this list provides links to resources for those
interested in using technology to enhance and extend their use of Classroom Assessment
Techniques (CATs). The web sites listed include general descriptions of classroom
assessment; articles and presentations on classroom assessment; and examples of
TechnoCATS.
AAC&U offers these resources only as possible models of interest and has not submitted each of them to any substantial peer or quality review. If you have questions about any particular resource, please contact the institution sponsoring it directly.
