Skip to main content

Effectiveness of Technology in Education debate


Check out the debate on the Economist site. Sir John Daniel and Dr. Bob Kozma go toe to toe on the topic of "Effectiveness of Technology in Education - Does new technology add to the quality of education?". As far as I know, both guys (can you refer to a "sir" as guy?) are technology proponents, but in this debate Kozma has the positive perspective and Daniel has the thumbs down position. A poll running on the site is at 52 percent con and 48 percent pro at the moment. Although can add your own comment on the site, it suffers from poor implementation. There's no way to reply to specific comment and are no titles for comments, so you get a very long list of text to look through if you want to find something. There is also a comment from Linda Darling-Hammond, professor of Education at Stanford University which is worth reading.

Comments

Rodney B. Murray, PhD said…
I thought you and your readers might be interested in the upcoming National Distance Learning Week and my interview of the NDLW National Chair, Dr. Ken Hartman on my podcast:

http://rod4jefferson.blogspot.com/2007/09/rpp-48-national-distance-learning-week.html

Also, see NDLW: http://www.ndlw.org

I'm glad I discovered your blog. We seem to have some of the same interests.

Thanks,
Rod
9:30 AM, October 26, 2007
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Learning to Teach Online - new online series from UNSW

I have been watching some of the videos in the Learning to Teach Online series from the University of New South Wales . The series covers various topics related to online teaching and they are divided into episodes which include a short video plus a PDF. I had some trouble getting the PDFs to download, but the videos played fine for me. I think the Managing your Time video is a good one for new online instructors: Overall, this looks like a good resource.
4 comments
Read more

Podcast features in Blackboard 7.3

The new podcast features in Blackboard 7.3 are actually part of the Podcast Learning Object from LearningObjects.com . This learning object makes it possible to easily add podcasts to your course and syndicate them to your students using an RSS feed. In English, this means your students can subscribe to the podcasts you make available, whether you create them yourself or download them from someone else. This way, students will be automatically updated with the latest podcast in your course and they can listen/watch them on an iPod, Zune(!), or a computer. Here's a 4 page overview of the podcast tools [PDF]. You may also find these resources useful: A tutorial from Dave Taylor on subscribing to podcasts in iTunes. Create your own Podcast (CNET). Kirk's Eight Rules of Effective Podcasting .
2 comments
Read more

Download Moodle courses from the Open University

I was listening to the BBC's Digital Planet podcast this morning and they had an interesting segment about how a university in Brazil was making use of the resources from the OpenLearn project at the Open University in England. The project is similar to the Open CourseWare effort at MIT and elsewhere. In both cases, university courses are made available online and many include audio and video segments as well as the syllabus, assignments and so on. The big challenge is how to make use of these excellent materials. A persistent student might make their way through a cours e as a self-study, but I think they are more suited for modification by instructors who are teaching something similar. Maybe only a particular unit would fit into someone's course, but since these materials are offered under a Creative Commons  license, they can be modified and re-used as you like. The big step (in my mind) with the OpenLearn materials is that many of them are available as Moodle courses. ...
2 comments
Read more