ACU Connected Blog

Last spring we gathered faculty from around campus to reflect on preliminary experiments and research in a fledgling program (see Year One Interviews here). This spring we wanted to expand that circle by asking a second round of faculty to discuss their work continuing to rethink student interactions, media, and blogging on a mobile campus.

• Connected Interviews on YouTube

with Bryan Alexander (NITLE), Kyle Bowen (Purdue), Kyle Dickson (ACU), and Shan Evans (Univ of Texas) • June 11, 2010

New devices like Google’s Nexus One and Apple’s iPad extend previous conceptions of mobile computing. Now, as mobile computing becomes increasingly ubiquitous, campuses across the country are considering the challenges and opportunities of tapping “the phones in their pockets” as a learning platform. Five years after mobility first appeared in the 2006 Horizon Report, this panel will discuss the explosion of interest and innovation, as well as consider the promising directions for future work.

Hello, iPad. Hello, Cloud 2. via kwout

I have to thank Kenny Jones for bringing the following article to my attention. Marc Benioff chairman and CEO of salesforce.com message to 60 CIOs in various meetings throughout America’s heartland is:

We are moving from Cloud 1 to Cloud 2, and the iPad is the accelerator….What’s most exciting is that this fundamental transformation—cloud + social + iPad—will inspire a new generation of wildly innovative new apps that will change entire industries. More »

with Kyle Dickson & Mike Wiggins • March 30, 2010

In 2008 Abilene Christian University distributed iPhones and iPod touches to incoming freshmen and faculty in the first year of its Connected mobile learning initiative. Though initial faculty experiments included podcasting, interaction and response tools, a mobile portal, and apps in a range of disciplines, most classes remained tied to a Learning Management System with no viable mobile strategy. This panel will report on ACU Blogs, building on WordPress MU as a platform for class sites to serve 80% of common uses of the LMS. The success of the pilot pushed a campus deployment of WordPress up the summer priorities list so that this fall we had 146 faculty deploy 287 class blogs serving over 3,000 members of the student body. Panel topics will include network integration and faculty support for the deployment, post by email as a mobile blogging solution, and how this system suggests the future of the learning systems and platforms.

Getting Started

Given our roundtable format, we’ll ask participants to help direct our discussion of the following topics:

• Planning for Deployment
• Faculty Training & Support
• Mobile Usage and Post by Email
• The Future of the LMS

Before we get started, vote on the following PollDaddy poll to give us a sense of who is in the room. More »

In the past several weeks I have attended several functions in which the speakers talked about their experiences in college. Unfortunately what they said about their experiences was not surprising and not very encouraging.  For example, one individual who retired at age 55 talked about his experience going back to university to get a degree that would help him in a new endeavor. In sharing his challenges of being an adult learner and not being in school for many years, this individual talked about cramming for tests, meaningless assignments and all the work that he had to do which really didn’t appear to have any significance toward the degree he was working toward. While it was disappointing to hear about this individual’s experience it was even more disappointing to listen to the majority of the audience grown in agreement with his experience.

The audience also laughed in agreement with the speaker when he indicated that he was looking for any opportunity to get out of finishing his degree. They also laughed reluctantly when the speaker indicated that he just had to buckle down and “jump through the hoops” to get through his degree. This is an example of an adult learner who is motivated, mature, and responsible enough to know that the degree that he was working towards would enable him to do the things he wanted to do in the future. And yet, he only saw his educational experience as a means to an end – not as an opportunity to learn, grow and to be enriched. As learning theorist and an educator I grimace when I hear these types of stories but I also recall similar frustrations with many of my classes. I also shudder to consider what the average 18 or 19-year-old, who is often less motivated and focused, is thinking about their experiences in college. NSSE scores confirm that many of our students do not believe that they are being engaged or challenged enough.

It doesn’t have to be this way – one’s educational experiences can be so much more. Learning should be an active, dynamic and engaging process in which learners construct new ideas or concepts based on new, current and past knowledge. The making of meaningful connections is key to learning and knowing and this can be very rewarding and motivating. I also know that we need to move from the passive educational environment of main lecture points, rubrics, individual competition and standardized testing to an active learning environment of interactive presentations, critical and analytical thinking, collaboration and meaningful projects.  We (the Academy) have the responsibility to create significant and engaging learning environments to make these types of stories to go away.

Fortunately, teaching & learning is changing and some people are speculating that mobile devices are one good way of fostering engagement and interaction. But what do we mean by engagement or engaging learning? More »

Political Science classes gathered to watch the State of the Union in a unique screening with feedback provided by Turning ResponseWare.

The ACU Connected initiative continues to provide numerous innovative teaching and research opportunities that elevate the quality of ACU’s academic offerings and expertise. ACU is proud to announce five programs for research, innovation, and experimentation. You are encouraged to signup for as many programs as you are interested in. If you are awarded more than one, you may refine your choices at that time. Multiple programs may be stacked to provide optimal support, however preference will be given to maximize the opportunities for as many faculty as possible.

Questions should be directed to George Saltsman.

iPhone/iPod/iPad App Ideas

Have an idea for a great iPhone/iPod/iPad app?

Ideas are reviewed by the Mobile Learning Applications Team (a group of faculty, administrators and technologists) on a monthly basis. App ideas are routed to internal, external, and student programers for potential development as determined by the team. More »

For more than a thousand years, books have been the primary medium for the exchange of academic information, and the act of writing a book has been seen as the chief indicator that one has achieved academic status. Indeed, the terms “author” and “authority” both come from the same Latin root (augere: to increase, originate, or promote), and they are seen as integrally linked to one another both within the academy and also in popular culture. To be an author is to have authority, and this has been both the cause and the result of the mechanisms of authorship being available only to a limited few due to the procedural complexities that surrounded publishing as a business.

With the advent first of desktop publishing in the late 1980s, of the Web in the early 1990s, and finally of Web 2.0 technologies in the late 1990s, the barriers to authorship have become increasingly eroded. This has led to significant concern on the part of both publishers and academics who have watched traditional notions of authorship and authority become unsettled by new participants. Indeed, the accessibility of both content-creation tools and of high-speed networking has enabled those who were traditionally outsiders not only to participate in publishing but even to threaten some parts of the industry with displacement. Newspapers, for example, face a complex mixture of challenges generated by the increase in distribution channels and the increase in those new participants who are publishing “news.”

As converged technologies like the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad become increasingly available, driving a desire for increased content and increased opportunities to participate in content-creation, the broader publishing industry and the academy will face challenges similar to those currently faced by newspapers. However, this does not necessarily mean that the newspapers’ fate awaits publishing in general. Rather, if both publishers and the academy can creatively understand the challenges and opportunities offered by technological change (and the accompanying cultural change it generates), we could see a flourishing of content, a dramatically increased audience for that content, and an unprecedented opportunity to benefit from the energy brought by an array of new participants.

Two key challenges have faced the publishing industry and the academy over the greatest part of the last five-hundred years: the narrow channels that provide access to qualified authors and the narrowly-defined genres which confine those authors’ intellectual labors. Ironically, these mirror the challenges that authors face as they attempt to break into publishing — narrowness of access and narrowness of genre. The complex economics of serious publishing and the rigorous requirements of academic integrity mean that only those authors vetted through an arduous procedure of proposals, marketing- or peer-review, and editing are allowed to participate, and the works they produce must fit into either article- or book-length formats. Driven by the particularities of print publishing, these limits have been unavoidable in the past. More »

Devices like the iPad appear to offer significant potential as an academic tool. The Educause/New Media Consortium place multi-touch devices like the iPad in the four to five year horizon. Thinking about the iPad as an electronic book reader places in it the two to three year horizon. ACU has invested significant research in the iPhone/iPod touch. Researching the iPad would appear to be a natural extension of that work.

All ideas for experimentation and investigation are welcome. Due to the larger focus ACU is providing to the future of academic text, scholarly publishing and the future of the book, some number of iPads will be distributed to further this research goal.

Proposals will be submitted electronically by the midnight (CST) on March 22, 2010 to orsp@acu.edu. Applications will be evaluated through a peer-review process consisting of members of the ACU Research Council and the Mobile Leadership Team. Announcement of awards will be made on or about April 1, 2010. Selected applicants will will be expected to provide brief reports on a regular basis to the mobile learning leadership team and to complete written interim progress report on August 1, 2010 and a final report on January 10, 2011. As with all research involving human subject participants, formal approval of the ACU Institutional Review Board (see instructions athttp://www.acu.edu/academics/orsp/institutional.html) will be required on all projects.

Apply Now More »

This year at ACU represents the convergence of two bold undertakings: Core Curriculum design and the Mobile Learning Initiative. With the first semester of the Core’s Cornerstone course and the distribution of mobile devices to all undergraduate students, we have an uncommon opportunity to explore the impact of technology to deepen residential education. Of course, faculty across campus also know that course redesign is a natural part of building on our experience. This fall the Adams Center for Teaching and Learning along with the Digital Media Center would like to support both groups with Mobile Course Design and Redesign appointments.

Since 1999, the Program for Course Redesign at the National Center for Academic Transformation has worked with over 120 colleges and universities “using information technology to redesign learning environments to produce better learning outcomes.” Their model begins at the Proof of Concept phase, combining new faculty ideas with instructional design partnerships and technical support. Their approach provides the structure to move learning innovation beyond the individual classroom or campus. NCAT now works with institutions around the world to implement their 5 Principles of Successful Course Redesign.

Applications are now being accepted for the Mobile Course Design and Redesign program to provide stipends as well as access to media specialists in the Digital Media Center for faculty designing Core classes or redesigning existing courses. These positions will be appointed through an application process overseen by the Adams Center and the Mobile Learning Leadership Team. Applications will be accepted through midnight (CST) on March 22, 2010. Each of two positions per semester will be funded with a $2,500 stipend, or its equivalent to “buy out” of teaching a course in a long semester, with appropriate chair and dean approvals. In addition, each faculty appointment will receive up to 50 hours of assistance with media specialists in the DMC on a project developed in association with an instructional designer.

One key goal of the Mobile Course Redesign program is to develop new pedagogical approaches that will serve as the basis of future research. Our 5 Principles of Successful Mobile Redesign have been adapted from the research of the NCAT: More »