Technology & Instruction for UNEX

Christine Borgman's presentation from this week's EduCause conference is available online as a combination video and presentation recorded with Mediasite. The quality is impressive -- I can get just as much out of the presentation at my desk as I would have sitting in the auditorium. The title is the Future of Cyberlearning and it is based on the recent NSF report with the same name. Professor Borgman was the chair of the committee which produced the report. They present an exciting future for technology and learning, but I have two sons who are students in a school district that bans all electronic devices, so as enthusiastic as I am about the power of technology to enhance all aspects of learning, I'm a little skeptical about the impact it might make in schools. The same story has been told too many times already and despite lots of examples of success, there are too many examples of non-use. 

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.