Sage Adams

“[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. Most people who [...]

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 – [...]

Google has a fairly new feature called FriendConnect that ostensibly helps website owners easily provide social features on their website. By simply copying and pasting a snippet of code in your website HTML you open the door to the possibility that other FriendConnect members will find your site and, assuming they like your content, follow [...]

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 [...]

The Economist has an article in the March 19th issue that discusses how open standards will, as they put it, ‘trump “walled gardens” on the internet’. The article is referring to closed systems on the internet such as Facebook and Second Life, which, much like the earliest subscription-based online services such as AOL, CompuServe, and [...]

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 cost-sharing [...]