The 3 Obstacles of Second Life

“[Second Life] experiences can provide opportunities for teachers to observe and assess students’ understanding of concepts based on their performance.” – Weusijana, Svihla, Gawel, and Bransford.

There seems to me three major obstacles to using Second Life successfully for education:

1. Administrators (and many faculty) think the virtual environment should ‘resemble’ the classroom environment.

2. [...]

Thinking of Tinto

What makes students complete their schooling? Why do students drop out during or after the first year of college? These are questions of persistence. There is not one reason why students stop their educations; generally speaking the reasons are as varied as the students themselves. However when you get down to particulars it appears – [...]

Review of Sony Reader

When looking into using e-books for something productive there are some criteria that must be met to make a satisfying reading experience. The hardware and software must include the following for optimal performance:

You must be able to easily flip pages back and forth. It must be pleasant to read on the device. You should [...]

My Experience with Social Networking in Online Courses

I was reading a recent article in Innovate about using Facebook in the classroom. I really like this idea because Facebook is popular with students and might make it easier for them to interact with each other in a familiar and meaningful way. Instead of, for example, interacting in a forum where their responses for [...]

Spy Cameras for Distance Education?

New legislation that is certain to be passed by Congress includes a paragraph about requiring distance education providers to spy on students to make sure it is actually them doing the work.

Collaborative Distance Learning

The Connecticut Distance Learning Consortium has a collaborative e-tutoring program that sounds effective. They have partnered a whole slew of schools into a collaborative framework that allows students to utilize tutors from other campuses. The e-tutoring progam allows instructors to use a variety of synchronous and asynchronous tools to meet student needs.

They have a [...]