IBM provides plenty of tech training — in the form of text presentations, animated teaching guides, and “serious” video games — to the companies with which it works. Now the computing giant is offering its courses not just to business partners, but to business schools as well.

In an announcement this week, IBM officials said they have opened their training materials up to colleges that have signed up with the company’s Academic Initiative, a program that offers hardware and software discounts along with instructional tools. According to IBM, more than 3,000 institutions — mostly business schools and information-science programs — are now eligible to use the newly released training programs.

The company has also unveiled a tool, available on the Academic Initiative Web site, that helps professors match IBM’s technology and resources to courses recommended by the Association for Computing Machinery. —Brock Read

This ECAR research bulletin discusses the role cyberinfrastructure will play as higher education evolves. Changes in the job markets, in higher education research and teaching, and in emerging academic disciplines are having a direct impact on, and will be directly impacted by, information technologies. As high-level national councils acknowledge, higher education has an enormous stake in these crucial and sweeping changes.

Citation for this work: Dede, Chris. “Cyberinfrastructure and the Evolution of Higher Education” (Research Bulletin, Issue 18). Boulder, CO: EDUCAUSE Center for Applied Research, 2008, available from http://www.educause.edu/ecar.

This publication is currently password protected. All faculty, staff, and students from institutions that have subscribed to ECAR at the ECAR Participating, Comprehensive Content, Corporate, and Research Bulletins Package levels are authorized to access this publication by using their EDUCAUSE personal profile.

The TED conference, which invites leading thinkers to deliver mind-blowing lectures about technology and society, has inspired an academic copycat. The University of British of Columbia has announced a conference this fall that will mimic the TED conference’s format — short, entertaining talks — except that the speakers will be college students, rather than luminaries.

The university’s event is called the Terry Talks conference, and organizers are now looking for speakers, who must send in video clips of themselves along with their proposed topics. To make sure that the applicants create “kick-ass talks,” as organizers put it in the event’s announcement, organizers created a short video with tips on “things to avoid when speaking publicly.” Among the things to stay away from: “being dull,” “aggressive sweating,” and “laughing manically.” Organizers plan to put video of the resulting lectures online free, just as the TED conference does. —Jeffrey R. Young

From the UBC website….. 

The UBC Terry Project is pleased to officially launch a new kind of student conference, one that focuses on the inspired efforts of the very folks you share classes with.

A growing number of textbook publishers are offering digital editions these days, but a new study by a student group argues that many of those digital editions do not have the features that students want.

The group, the Student Public Interest Research Groups, a collection of independent statewide organizations representing college students, surveyed 500 students from several campuses for the study. They found that students wanted digital textbooks to be more affordable than print versions, to be printable, and to be free from restrictions on how long they can be viewed. But the report said that the electronic textbooks offered by major publishers through CourseSmart, generally cost about the same as printed versions, limited printing to 10 pages per session, and expire after about 180 days. Publishers put such restrictions in place to try to prevent students from giving copies to their friends for free or trading them on pirate Web sites.

The survey showed that students feel strongly about the printed word. About 75 percent of those surveyed said they prefer a printed textbook over an electronic one. And 60 percent said that even if a free digital copy were available, they would still pay for a low-cost print version.

The report calls on professors and colleges to support more “open textbooks” that are offered free online.—Jeffrey R. Young

Think about teaching as a set of strategies or techniques that we inherit and pass on to the next generation

By JAMES M. LANG

I’ve long been a devotee of traditional Irish music, despite my measly dollop of ethnic Irish heritage, and despite my inability to sing, or play any instrument you can carry into a pub. When I was in Ireland in March, though, chaperoning a group of students on a spring-break tour, I stopped into a music store in Galway and bought a half-dozen books of Irish music and a tin whistle.

I play the piano, which has 88 keys; the tin whistle had only six holes. How complicated could it be?, I thought to myself. So when I got home I opened the books and sat down to learn my favorites, expecting to master them easily with a little bit of practice.

Imagine your favorite cat sitting comfortably on the floor of the kitchen, dozing away. Now imagine you walk up and step on his tail. That sound that comes out of your cat? That’s the same sound that emerged from my whistle.

So I looked to the Internet for help, and almost immediately found a series of YouTube videos called “Introduction to the Irish Tin Whistle,” produced by two Jesuit seminarians from Fordham University, Ryan Duns and Drew Marquard. The videos accompany a course of the same title that Duns teaches at Fordham; he uses the videos (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0Xf1Ume0zA) and a blog (http://www.tinwhistler.blogspot.com) to supplement his courses, and he has made them available to the public as well through YouTube and Blogspot.

Whistle in hand and mouth, I watched the first video and was impressed by the clear and easy nature of Duns’s presentation. He covered scales and fingering techniques, and had me playing “Mary Had a Little Lamb” in two different keys by the end of the six-minute session.

But what really caught my attention were his closing words: “It is only through gradual, step-by-step learning, taking our time with it, struggling with the music, that you will begin to cultivate a sense of your place in the Irish tradition.”

The idea that, as a 38-year-old amateur musician, I could ever hope to find a place in the Irish musical tradition never occurred to me when I picked up the tin whistle. But I found it to be such an encouraging and inspirational sentiment that it made me want to practice and keep going.

I continued taking Duns’s YouTube “course,” and each week found myself impressed by his patient and careful lessons, by his sense of humor, and by his evident passion for Irish music. So I wrote to ask if I could interview him about how to teach with blogs and videos, assuming he would have useful tips I could pass along. His insights into both music and teaching helped renew my own faith and interest in teaching, and reset my compass just in time for the start of the new semester.

I began our e-mail exchange by asking Duns why he bothered to put his courses online. What was the point of adding the videos and blog to an already existing course?

“The logistics of the tin-whistle course,” he explained, “made some creative thinking necessary. I knew that I’d have limited face time with the students as a group and, unless I figured out a way to do private or one-on-one lessons with each of them, I’d have even less chance of working with them individually. Further, I know that it’s hard for kids to practice — I’ve taught for enough years to know that, no matter how hard the teacher works, it makes no difference if the kid isn’t picking up the instrument at home.

“It occurred to me that YouTube, where I had been posting some solo tin-whistle videos just for fun, would make a great venue for hosting my videos. The students were all familiar with the way it worked and it was accessible from their desks (where, I hoped, they’d keep their whistles), and it seemed logical that the ease of YouTube would help facilitate them in practicing along with my video. Rather than trying to remember what I said to them in class, all they’d have to do is pull up YouTube and find that week’s lesson and allow the ‘Balding Bard’ to show them, again, what to do.

“Nevertheless, YouTube is also limited to posting only video, and I wanted to give my students the notes to the tunes. Hence the blog.”

It turns out, Duns explains, that the videos and blog helped him deal with the challenge of working with students who were coming from a range of musical abilities.

“Sometimes I’ll have a student who just doesn’t get it,” he writes. “She might be on the cusp of grasping a movement and I can see it … but I can’t ask 34 other kids to wait for her. With the videos, I can pull her aside and say, ‘Go home tonight and nail Week No. 6’s video. You’re so close! Just keep at it!’”

The videos also enabled him to divide the students into two groups: “those who could play already and those who, well, needed padded helmets when it came to music.” He could put one group in a classroom with one of his videos while he worked directly with the other group.

Duns still hadn’t explained why he wanted to make the videos and the blog available to the public. Why not put DVD’s in the library, or restrict them just to students in the course?

“I firmly believe that my ‘musical ministry’ is to pass along what I have received,” he says. “To date, I have received e-mails expressing tremendous gratitude for my videos from Vietnam, Brazil, Sweden, Germany, Korea, Canada, Ireland, Spain, Peru, and many others.

“Irish music is a living tradition, something to be lived out of, and it makes my heart swell with joy to know that there are people from around the world who are not only learning to love to listen to Irish music, but also who are learning to speak through the tradition.” As our e-mail conversation came to a close, Duns made even more explicit the links between his musical passions, his vocation as a Jesuit, and his vocation as a teacher.

“I have a great passion for Irish music, and I want to share it,” Duns says. “It has done such wonderful things in my life, and I want people to participate in that. I reckon my mission is to evangelize the gospel and the whistle! My spirituality is best likened to music: I pray as I play — with joy and awe at being invited to have a place in a much larger symphony of musicians, but a symphony where my voice is both wanted and has something to add to the richness.”

As I was reading his reflections, I realized that we can think about teaching in much the same way: as a living tradition, a set of strategies or techniques — like melodies — that we inherit from our teachers, and pass along to those teachers yet to come.

Most of us share our melodies freely and happily with one another (unlike our scholarship, which we may guard jealousy and stamp with copyrights). When we find a teaching melody that works, we want to share it with others, and even to hear how our fellow teachers might help us make it better — give it a different rhythm, add grace notes, try out a new fingering technique.

And just as musicians have to work to find their own voice within a living musical tradition, we each have to struggle to find our voice as teachers, learning from those who have gone before us in the classroom and passing along our wisdom to those who will follow.

New Report Says Digital Textbooks Are off Track

A growing number of textbook publishers are offering digital editions these days, but a new study by a student group argues that many of those digital editions do not have the features that students want.

The group, the Student Public Interest Research Groups, a collection of independent statewide organizations representing college students, surveyed 500 students from several campuses for the study. They found that students wanted digital textbooks to be more affordable than print versions, to be printable, and to be free from restrictions on how long they can be viewed. But the report said that the electronic textbooks offered by major publishers through CourseSmart, generally cost about the same as printed versions, limited printing to 10 pages per session, and expire after about 180 days. Publishers put such restrictions in place to try to prevent students from giving copies to their friends for free or trading them on pirate Web sites.

The survey showed that students feel strongly about the printed word. About 75 percent of those surveyed said they prefer a printed textbook over an electronic one. And 60 percent said that even if a free digital copy were available, they would still pay for a low-cost print version.

The report calls on professors and colleges to support more “open textbooks” that are offered free online.—Jeffrey R. Young

A Video Version of the Periodic Table

The University of Nottingham, in England, has put a high-tech twist on the periodic table, creating a clickable version that points to short YouTube clips about each element.

The Periodic Table of Videos, as their creation is called, features 118 videos, each about 2 minutes long. Scientists perform experiments with the elements or describe unusual properties of each one. In the clip about Beryllium, for instance, a researcher refuses to open a jar holding a sample of the element, explaining that exposure to it can cause a rare and deadly disease. (Another researcher interviewed in the video explains that the element is used in the processing of medical X-rays.)

The “most watched” elemental video, according to the site, is the one for Sodium. If you drop sodium into water, the reaction is explosive, as researchers demonstrate. —Jeffrey R. Young

Welcome, Freshmen. Have an iPod.

By JONATHAN D. GLATER

Published: August 20, 2008

Taking a step that professors may view as a bit counterproductive, some universities are doling out Apple iPhones and Internet-capable iPods to students.  

The always-on Internet devices raise some novel possibilities, like tracking where students congregate. With far less controversy, colleges could send messages about canceled classes, delayed buses, campus crises or just the cafeteria menu.

While schools emphasize its usefulness — online research in class and instant polling of students, for example — a big part of the attraction is, undoubtedly, that the iPhone is cool and a hit with students. Basking in the aura of a cutting-edge product could just help a university foster a cutting-edge reputation.

Schools include University of Maryland, Abilene Christian University, Freed-Hardeman University, Oklahoma Christian University.

Aurora Concept Video

Aurora is a concept video presenting one possible future user experience for the Web, created by Adaptive Path as part of the Mozilla Labs concept browser series. Aurora explores new ways people could interact with the Web in the future based on projected technological trends and real-world scenarios.

 Even if you do not read the extensive Design Concept Theory on the site, be sure to take the few minutes to watch the video. Very inventive and reminiscent of the Apple video of the ’90s.

From Educauce Quarterly Magazine, Volume 31, Number 3, 2008

© 2008 Rafael C. Alvarado

The effective use of games in academia requires a critical approach to the medium and a willingness to let go of the learning process and harness its outcomes.

By Rafael C. Alvarado