One key reason people want to go to expensive schools, of course, are all the intangible benefits: the connections you make, the name recognition, etc. I agree that the cost seems way out of sync, but it also gets you some tangible benefits as well. At an exclusive SLAC, you won’t have a class larger than 40 or 50 people (and those are the lecture classes). Most classes will have 15 or so people. That means your opportunities for engaging in class discussion, for the teacher knowing you and keeping an eye on your progress are vastly increased. Your faculty will be from “better” schools (they cost more as a result, though their pay is still less than other professionals). The faculty will also be more available for one-on-one consultation and in theory, will also be more focused on teaching and learning rather than research (though this is debatable). Even at schools like Harvard and Yale, one could argue that having the opportunity to work with the great minds of our time is a privilege worth paying for.

There’s also a lot of learning that happens between classes, a point made back in the 70s by William Perry in his landmark study of Harvard students, Forms of Ethical and Intellectual Development in the College Years: A Scheme.  I have argued for using blogs, wikis, and other online tools to enhance and expand that learning even in face-to-face classes.  While I think that it’s possible to create the kind of community and environment in which this kind of informal learning and development can happen strictly online, I think that it takes a certain kind of student to do that, and it would take a lot of work on someone’s part to make that happen (the faculty member, usually).  Virtual worlds like Second Life show promise in helping to do this.  There’s just something about seeing a representation of people.  But we are a long way from virtual world learning being mainstream.

I do think there’s a market for a get in and get out kind of online course.  Heck, there are some courses I’d like to take like that rather than spending a whole semester online or offline trudging through material.  But I still there’s a value for being physically present on a campus at least for part of one’s college life.  Human connection is still important to learning and not all that connection is possible via the Internet.  As someone who’s shifted to working at home and having the Internet as my main way of connecting to people, I can tell you that I miss the face-to-face life of the office at times.  I do hope that the existence of online courses and social software more generally causes universities to think differently about how they teach and how they organize curriculum, but that doesn’t have to be strictly by putting courses online.  Collaboration, multimedia literacy, writing for an audience, finding research, critical thinking are all things that can be enhanced by considering what’s going on on the Internet, whether one chooses to use technological tools to explore these ideas or not.  I hope that universities will take up those and more topics.  I hope that universities change, not disappear.

• A.nnotate is a prouduct that lets you upload documents in many different formats and put “stickies” on them.  Those documents can then be shared with others so that you can collaborate on projects with others.  There are a number of different pricing plans, including one specifically for academic institutions that also includes a way to integrate with Learning Management Systems.  They tout the ability to integrate with Moodle and also say they can integrate with other systems.  This will cost you a fair amount of money–around $3000 for unlimited usage–but it might save you your own server costs in some areas.  They also have a free version for individuals to use that looks like it will suit most peoples needs.  Although both Diigo and Google docs allow for some commenting and collaboration, this product allows multiple formats from pdfs to web pages and the notes are intuitive to make and read.  This definitely looks like a product worth investigating and I’m thinking it would be great for commenting on student work.  I’ve often used the comment feature in various word processors and although that works, there could be compatibility problems and it just feels a little clunky to me.
• Absolutely Delicious is really a web page with a list of links to a wide variety of delicious tools.  I’m a big fan of delicious so it’s nice to see a list of resources that can help me take advantage of that tool better.  There are tools that help you manage, retag, post, and search you bookmarks.  Some are web based and some are desktop tools.  There are also instructions for posting delicious links to your blog and simply how to get started using delicious.  I highly recommend adding *this* site to your bookmarks and try out some of the tools on the site.
• Academic Earth is a site I looked at and wrote a bit about before.  I really do like the look an feel of this site.  It’s uncluttered and very easy to navigate.  I had said earlier that compared to YouTube, the site had less material, but it’s definitely growing, and I think the way it’s organized by subject matter makes a lot of sense.  The YouTube EDU site is organized by school and many of the videos listed under the school are more promotional than educational.  There’s nothing really wrong with that, but if you’re looking for physics lectures, you’ll have to do a search.  Once you click a video, you’re out of the EDU portal and getting back isn’t easy.  While there are 691 videos on YouTube’s EDU site labelled physics compared to AE’s 4, I still think that AE is going to win out–at least it should.  While YouTube fell into being used for education, AE was built for it and there are features that make it a better tool for that reason.  In addition to the listing by topic or subject, there are also playlists organized by editors.  Those playlists include “Understanding the Economic Crisis” and “Wars Throughout History.”  I’m planning to use those with my kids–at least my high schooler–this summer.  There just seems to be more potential for building out an entire learning unit from AE lectures than from YouTube materials.

These are definitely must check out tools.  Let me know what you think of them or how you’re using them!

• 16Bugs is a bug tracking site.  Believe it or not, just the other day, my husband asked me if I knew of a bug-tracking site that didn’t require software installation.  Well, I do now.  This site allows you to set up a project or company with multiple projects and track the progress.  Although it has some of the qualities of a project management site, it’s geared specifically toward software development and coding.  Also, the site follows the Web 2.0 style of using bright colors and large, friendly icons.  It’s pleasing to look at, as well as practical, a big plus in my mind.  In fact, their motto is “We make bugs pretty.”  To get the most use out of it will cost you, however.  There is a free version, but you can get almost all the features for just $8/month, very reasonable.  Obviously, the use of this in education would be primarily for computer science or for other on-site programmers.
• 1Time is project management/billing software.  I’m sure we’ll be running into more of these as there’s a huge demand for finding ways to track employee and project time.  Like 14dayz that I reviewed on Friday, the benefit of this software is to centralize the management of project and employee time.  It touts the benefit of reducing unbilled time.  They offer several different reports and the ability for clients to see how much time has been put into their project.  There is a free option, but to get the most out of it, you’ll need to pay up.  Like 16Bugs, the cost is on a per month basis and for US buyers, depends on the Euro exchange rate, but starts around $18/month.  Again, this might be useful in some way on the administrative side, but probably not for academic purposes.
• The final application is 22Books.  The name of the site comes from the number of books by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., which makes the site endearing already.  It’s a simple site compared to something like Library Thing, the go-to site for online book collecting and sharing.  All you do is make a list of books and give it a title, kind of like Listmania on Amazon. But I did see a school that was using it to list new books in the library.  Lists can be embedded in web sites or linked to directly.  Although the lists show who created them, you can’t click on the user and see other lists they created or anything else about them.  One of the tenets of social software is connecting people and this site doesn’t appear to have any way to do that.  However, this might be a simple way to create a reading list and embed it in a web site.

I’ll continue looking at sites tomorrow and on Friday, I promise a roundup of all the sites, with some picks of sites that I think are keepers.

This week, I tried out a new presentation tool, Prezi, taken from Alan Levine’s 50 Ways to Tell a Story wiki.  It’s a really nifty looking tool and subverts, as George Siemens noted, the linear nature of most presentations.  But, because I was using it for an actual presentation with an actual deadline, I got frustrated with it.  I will come back to it, I think, when I can just play.

What tools have you tried recently?  How did it work out?

In some cases, being too popular can be a bad thing.  When MySpace and Facebook became extremely popular and everyone, inculding your weird Uncle Bob, joined up, many found that to be a problem.  I have 243 friends on Facebook, mostly because I just friend anyone who friends me.  And that’s too many for me to manage and so I don’t really use Facebook.  I could cull my friends, but that takes time I don’t have.  Blogs also went mainstream a few years ago, with many bloggers grouping together and forming conglomerates, like The Huffington Post, and every news outlet now has blogs on their site, some of which are quite good, but some . . . well.  And that changed the blog world.  It was harder to get noticed when traffic was going to the big commercial sites.  Some individual bloggers benefitted for sure, getting contracts to blog for big media sites.  But most others, myself included, remained relatively secluded and even less likely to gain a large audience. But, I wasn’t trying to make money off my blog.  I use it much the same way I use Twitter, to express my ideas and share them with a random collection of people who share my interests.  It seems to me that having more people on Twitter might be a good thing.  One could find many more people to Tweet, perhaps allowing you to find a larger market or a larger audience.  No one’s making anyone follow all of Oprah’s followers, and it’s likely that many of those people won’t keep up their Twittering if they don’t find it useful.  And many will also simply follow Oprah and not tweet at all.  Just like with blogs, there are many more readers of tweets than there are writers even if it is slightly less work.  Most people prefer to be watchers rather than participants.

From my perspective as an educator, when a tool goes mainstream, that’s good for me.  It’s easier to talk about tools, both as actual tools that can be used in teaching and learning, and as metaphors–making a classroom more like the blogosphere or the twitterverse–when more people know about them.  Non-technical people start to pay attention when their local news anchors encourage them to follow them on Twitter.  Some things that still haven’t gone mainstream–wikis and social bookmarking–and they are therefore difficult to get people to appreciate their usefulness.  As an early adopter, I understand the feeling of some techies of not feeling like they had the edge on the world by being Twitter users, but I think we need to learn to embrace the mainstream and their use of Web 2.0.  It may, in fact, make Web 2.0 more useful for us.

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1. All ideas compete on an equal footing.

Instructors should value what students bring to the class and try to create an environment where the teacher isn’t the only expert in the room.  Both student and teacher bring value to the class on equal footing.  I try to point out when someone posts something interesting on our class blog that I didn’t know about or has an idea that didn’t occur to me in order to encourage the idea that student ideas are as important as mine.

2. Contribution counts for more than credentials.

The teacher at the front of the room obviously has more credentials than the students in the class, but teachers can work to encourage contribution from the students so that that is what’s valued in the class.  This is similar to #1 above, but  can be harder to overcome since students often look at credentials as a way of authenticating that the teacher’s contribution is more important.

3. Hierarchies are natural, not prescribed.

Again, because of the received dynamic of the teacher as the expert, this is a hard one to aspire to, but it is true that certain students seem to rise to the top of in-class or online discussion.   The thing to watch out for is that the ones who don’t get an opportunity to contribute.  I think in a classroom, one actually wants to eliminate hierarchies as much as possible.

4. Leaders serve rather than preside.

Approaching teaching as something your doing for the students rather than as some kind of power mongering (I’ve seen this very rarely anyway) can really make your classroom a thriving place for your students.  Offer articles for papers, offer to meet to discuss ideas, and come to the classroom expecting to learn something rather than teaching something.  There’s a balance to be struck, of course, in that you have a limited amount of time, but being generous with what time you do have can go a long way.

5. Tasks are chosen, not assigned.

I actually try to do this in most of my classes.  I don’t give topics for papers and sometimes give rather vague directives about page length, about image inclusion, etc.  I simply ask that it be argumentative and lean toward the academic rather than the casual.  This is very difficult for most students.  They’re used to doing what they’re told.  While assignments are generally necessary, giving students as much freedom within those assignments can help them learn how to choose tasks for themselves.

6. Groups are self-defining and -organizing.

Anyone who teaches has watched groups of students form–those who sit together every class, who comment on each other’s posts or in-class comments.  One can capitalize on this by assigning those students to group projects.  I’ve heard feedback from my students about our small groups that they like to choose their groups.  Sometimes it may be necessary to organize groups for a particular kind of experience, but consider at least trying to let groups form on their own.

7. Resources get attracted, not allocated.

In a classroom, this probably doesn’t apply, but in the larger context of an institution, it would be nice if resource allocation were open to an extent that allows people to gravitate toward interesting ideas.  Instead, there’s still a top-down allocation process.

8. Power comes from sharing information, not hoarding it.

In the classroom, I always try to be as open as possible and I encourage my students to be as well.  That’s why we blog in public.  I think it’s important for students to see each other’s work and ideas.  At the institutional level, it would certainly be good to have that kind of sharing of information.  Technology could help with this process, but most institutions I know of haven’t yet gotten to the point of being able or willing to share information across the institution.

9. Opinions compound and decisions are peer-reviewed.

I’ve done this in many classes, posted potential readings and assignments and let students choose.  I’ve also allowed them to change the direction of the course by voting on it.

10. Users can veto most policy decisions.

I’ve done this in class too.  It’s great when the students feel some ownership over the class.

11. Intrinsic rewards matter most.

This is a value I try to impart, but it’s very hard since many students are used to external rewards such as grades.  I, myself, like external rewards, but those can be very simple and usually I receive the greatest external rewards for projects that have had an instrinsic value for me.  I don’t have grades on individual assignments and I have students evaluate themselves, mostly focusing on what they learned from the class.

12. Hackers are heroes.

I celebrate the student who presents a contrary view–as long as they do so without hurting someone.  Class and blog discussions are most interesting when someone says, “I disagree and here’s why.”

What other ways can these principles play out in the classroom or in educational institutions?  These just came to me off the top of my head.