- Dirty Water: Mapping Projected Climate Change Impacts in the United States and Abroad
- Money and Methods in Cancer Research
- Report Details How Climate Change Will Spark Heat Waves, Increase the Spread of Disease, and Erode Coastal Economies
- FDA Looks to Open Up the Medicine Cabinet
- NIH Funding is Good for Your Health, and It’s Good for the Economy
- Progressive Science Values
- Climate Change Will Not Be Kind to American Water and Agriculture
- Less Philosophy, More Policy: Obama Disbands Council on Bioethics and Will Create New One
- The Digital Textbook Case
- The Worn Grooves of Disciplinary Research
- NIH By the Numbers: Challenge Grants, Stem Cell Comments, and Conflict of Interest Rules
- States Are Looking to Grow Their Biotech Sectors
Good Technology for the Classroom
University and college professors have the responsibility to not only make knowledge available, but also to connect students with the tools that will facilitate learning. Faculty and staff have a growing number of technologies at their disposal, but they have to understand how to use them to enrich education rather than simply complicating it and making it worse. But there are risks for any institution that wants to experiment with new tools.
Judith Tabron, director of faculty computing services at Hofstra University, describes the challenges of encouraging the most effective uses of information and communication technologies in colleges and universities in a recent commentary (subscription) in The Chronicle of High Education:
All too many tools facilitate less-desirable teaching methods. My IT colleagues often observe that what course-management systems like Blackboard do well is deliver material. Here’s your stuff: Read it, absorb it, review it. What the systems do not do well is facilitate interaction. Here are your peers and teachers: Listen, talk, challenge, answer, try, fail, try again. Both the true liberal-arts curriculum and the online world are examples of revolutions in communication. We have to figure out how to use the latter in service to the former.
Tabron continues by explaining the benefits of allowing faculty to experiment without being judged prematurely by their peers, and of investing technology budgets in long-term academic outcomes, rather than only short-term needs, like equipment repairs.
She also points to the need to invest time and resources into determining new and effective ways to harness technology in the classroom–an avenue that can benefit university education and secondary education alike. Last month, the House authorized funding for a new learning center dedicated to researching and developing innovative digital learning and information technologies for the nation’s education system. And Federation of American Scientists President Henry Kelly explained some of the untapped possibilities for educational technology (including video games) in his recent column for Science Progress.
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