Information technology has taken us well beyond the collection-and-search of information archives. Educators should consider how they will respond to an era in which the teaching and learning conversations must center not around pre-existing, "finished" and past-tense information, but around information that is currently being created in the "continuous tense."
Northern Virginia Community College's VP for Instructional and Information Technology Steve Sachs offers some advice for institutions as he comments on how technology can help achieve the goals of the American Graduation Initiative.
Rather than starting with a functional analysis of various ePortfolio tools, look at how ePortfolio technology in general fits with key educational trends and decide how a portfolio strategy can support your institution's unique objectives.
Brigham Young University-Idaho, a four-year university serving 12,000 students, has selected streaming technology from Optibase to stream live and on-demand content on campus and over the Internet.
Open-content publisher Flat World Knowledge has announced it will supply college textbooks to Bookshare, the free online library for people with print disabilities. Flat World will be the first publisher of post-secondary texts to contribute material to the organization.
If you could have a choice between a 'teacherless classroom,' where chunks of knowledge are packaged and pushed out to potential learners by technology, or a 'classroom full of teachers,' where students are included in the teaching/learning conversation via technology, which would you pick?
Blackboard and Microsoft have joined forces to offer students access to information from their online courses on Web browsers.
Many ePortfolio systems focus on institutional assessment data, putting student assessment--especially students' own reflections on their work--in second place. Batson advocates a voice for students in the assessment process.
New communications technologies and the Internet are fostering a move toward more distributed systems of education. Here, John Ittelson suggests that key stakeholders--faculty, legislators, administrators, students, employers, and the public--come together to help plan higher education's evolving role in a complex and changing knowledge economy.
Not all faculty are actively engaged in using technology in their classrooms. For some, technical support or basic technology resources on their campuses may be lacking. But still others may be clinging to the idea that nothing has changed...