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Apple’s E-Textbooks

February 6, 2012 By drbexl Leave a Comment

Did you know that Apple was now providing e-textbooks … others are also looking at this:

Apple’s latest foray into electronic textbooks and education is causing a lot of excitement in the education world and beyond. Some of this is justified because it promises to lower the cost of e-textbooks, but the vote is still out on the educational benefit of e-textbooks in general, and Apple’s new initiative in particular.

Apple has launched three tools that enable anyone to create and distribute textbooks and university course materials. It works like a publishing system in a box. iBooks Author is a free application to design great-looking interactive textbooks. The iBooks reader lets users download, read and annotate these books, but only on the iPad. And iTunes U, which had been part of iTunes, has grown into a stand-alone application that allows people to download free university-level course packs including video and audio resources.

As always with Apple announcements, there was an almost deafening amount of buzz in the blogosphere and Twitterverse. So much, in fact, that it was easy to overlook the positive response from consumers. Even though Apple’s content partners released only seven textbooks for the launch, one study claims that more than 350,000 copies were downloaded through iBooks in the first three days. That is roughly equivalent to 25 per cent of the students enrolled in grades 9 and 10 in the UK, the target age group for the first set of books.

Read full story.

Filed Under Times Higher Education Tagged With Apple, E-Textbook

Electronic Isolation

February 5, 2012 By drbexl Leave a Comment

As someone who has just had to send my mi-fi off for repair, and thus will only be able to connect via my phone, or other people’s (sometimes dodgy speed) wi-fi, for at least the next 10 days… this tale of being disconnected is interesting… although you will note that I often CHOOSE to largely (if not entirely) disconnect when abroad:

Recently, Wikipedia went on strike, presenting us with blank screens rather than the usual fast “facts”. It was protesting against the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect Intellectual Property Act proposed in the US.

Wikipedia’s founder Jimmy Wales encouraged the public to rise up against what he sees as a threat to free speech.

“Imagine a world without free information,” said Jimmy. I did. It scared the living daylights out of me. But it turns out I needn’t have bothered. I could have waited until I came to this hotel and had the chance to live it for real.

Read the rest of this amusing story here.

Filed Under Times Higher Education Tagged With Connectivity, Disconnection

Jeff Jarvis: Public Parts

February 4, 2012 By drbexl Leave a Comment

I have this book on my desk, so was interested to see what someone else had said about it:

Martin de Saulles, principal lecturer in information management, University of Brighton, is reading Jeff Jarvis’ Public Parts: How Sharing in the Digital Age Improves the Way We Work and Live(Simon and Schuster, 2011). “Jarvis presents an intelligent counter to some of the uninformed fear-mongering over online privacy and shows how individuals and society can benefit from greater information sharing. His tweets and blog posts about the side-effects of his prostate cancer treatment may not be to all tastes, but he shows how the kindness of internet strangers helped him and fellow sufferers.”

Taken from Times Higher Education.

Filed Under Review, Times Higher Education Tagged With Jeff Jarvis, Public Parts

Richard Sennett: Together (Book)

February 2, 2012 By drbexl Leave a Comment

I thought this looked really interesting:

Together traces the evolution of cooperative rituals in medieval churches and guilds, Renaissance workshops and courts, early modern laboratories and diplomatic embassies. In our lives today, it explains the trials and prospects of cooperation online, face-to-face in ethnic conflicts, among financial workers and community organisers. (from Amazon description).

Frank Furedi reviewed this for Times Higher Education - here’s a taster:

Today, informality and spontaneous behaviour are often regarded as a potential breach of contract by human resources departments. This formalisation of relationships is not a by-product of overzealous managerialism, but a symptom of society’s estrangement from the uncertainties associated with informality. Sennett rightly observes that “formality favours authority and seeks to prevent surprise”. Informal relations are by definition fluid and unpredictable. Precisely because such relations involve an element of give and take, their pursuit could lead to unpredictable outcomes. The reason why Sennett’s Boston workers cultivated relations of cooperation is because, through that interactive dynamic, they gained a measure of self-respect and a glimmer of agency.

Read the review here, or buy the book.

Filed Under Review, Times Higher Education Tagged With Book, Co-operation, Informal Networks

Plagiarism Software

January 21, 2012 By drbexl Leave a Comment

My colleague, Nicole McNab, has looked at plagiarism quite extensively over the past couple of years, so this has gained my interest … especially as Nicole tends towards the idea that TurnItIn, etc. should not be used for detection, but for training students to understand!

Students who are aware that their work will be checked by plagiarism-detection software are just as likely to cheat as those who are not, a study suggests.

Turnitin software, which is used by thousands of universities worldwide, extracts text from submitted essays and checks it against other sources, such as online documents.

However, the study conducted by a researcher at California State University suggests that such measures should not be regarded as a “silver bullet” in the battle against “deviant” academic practices.

Robert J. Youmans, a cognitive psychologist, says in the paper published in the journal Studies in Higher Education that he expected to find that fewer students would cheat if they were warned that their work would be scanned.

This proved not to be the case.

Read full story.

Filed Under Academic Research, Times Higher Education Tagged With Plagiarism, Turnitin

Disruption with Online Education

January 13, 2012 By drbexl Leave a Comment

http://www.sxc.hu/photo/987822

A really interesting article in this weeks Times Higher Education which considers how the US system (and probably those of us who end up echoing their systems) is about to face turbulent times with higher and higher fees causing ‘disruption’ as students look for other ways to engage:

This disruption, they say, will force down costs, lure prospective students away from traditional “core” universities, transform the way academics work, and spell the end for the traditional scholarly calendar based around face-to-face teaching

….

Online education will bring a shift by opening higher education to a new middle group in the concentric circles, they argue.

“We use the word ‘disruptive’ not because it is a breakthrough improvement for that middle group, but because it transforms the product or service into something that is so much more affordable and simple that a whole new population can afford it and find that it is accessible to them,” Christensen says.

The book asserts that until now, unlike other industries, higher education has not had a “disruptive innovation” that has forced the sector to drive down costs. The result, says Christensen, has been “sustained and difficult price increases”

….

“Almost invariably, the [established] leaders find it impossible to lead the industry in disruption,” he says. “It’s not technology per se that keeps them in the middle, but the very fact that it is affordable and accessible makes it almost impossible for the [sector's traditional] leaders to address.”

Christensen suggests that instead it will be new institutions and providers that will lead the way in online learning innovations. “What you will see is that online learning will take root in this larger population: people who, either because of the nature of their life or their situation, can’t go to a campus but can do it online.

This is a challenging piece, and one worth a read, as I’m sure the questions will be asked in the UK shortly.

Filed Under Academic Research, Times Higher Education Tagged With Distance Learning, Online Education, University

Copyright: Reclaiming Fair Use

January 12, 2012 By drbexl Leave a Comment

I get asked a lot of questions about copyright, and as a non-lawyer, I have to say that it’s not my strongest area of expertise. I went to a day event at the Institute for Historical Research on copyright whilst undertaking my PhD, and every other sentence was ‘this is guidance, check with the lawyer’ … The following text looks interesting, although largely for US audiences:

This lively book, Reclaiming Fair Use: How to Put Balance Back in Copyright, is designed to liberate people from the “Mind Forg’d Manacles” of copyright law. The authors – film and media scholar Patricia Aufderheide and professor of law and stalwart defender of the public interest Peter Jaszi – hope to help readers “understand how to think about and use copyright, and especially your right to use copyrighted material without permission or payment when you make a work – whether a blog entry, a song, a mashup, a poem, a documentary, a magazine article, a lesson plan, a scholarly archive, a slide show, a technical manual, a scrapbook, a collage, or a brochure”.

The broad and flexible defence of fair use was codified in the US copyright act in 1976. The defence provides that the use of copyright material for “purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright”. This defence has also been applied in a wide range of cultural and technological contexts.

Read the full article, or buy the book.

Filed Under Academic Research, Times Higher Education Tagged With Book Review, Copyright, Fair Use

Branding and Perception in #highered

January 9, 2012 By drbexl Leave a Comment

http://www.sxc.hu/photo/1185407

I’m interested in branding, but truly believe that a brand has to represent authentically what something is about… can consultants who are not at the centre of a brand really help… Times Higher Education has an article which indicates… not:

Paul Temple, reader in higher education management at the Institution of Education, has argued that although branding consultants have said they can change a university’s reputation, it can be built up only by years of academic excellence.

The attack comes as many universities are spending heavily on branding consultants to gear up for the new marketised sector.

Writing in Perspectives: Policy and Practice in Higher Education, the journal of the Association of University Administrators, Dr Temple argues that “people are not, mostly, idiots: they will see what is branding candyfloss and what is the reality, created over time by good management and a well-nurtured academic culture. Branding work…can have no significant impact on these matters.”

Even the most “credulous” university managers would not be persuaded that branding consultants could find short cuts to improve an institution’s reputation, he adds.

“If there were, we can be sure that someone would have found them by now,” he writes.

Read full story, and see also how the Australians are improving their chances with a different attitude.,

 

Filed Under Times Higher Education Tagged With Authenticity, Branding, Perception

“Hello Avatar” #BookReview

January 6, 2012 By drbexl Leave a Comment

10 years after The Matrix stormed the world:

More than a decade later, we inhabit a world of pervasive media and ubiquitous computing (think about the miniature computer in your pocket). We now accept as normal our engagement with virtual reality, including gaming, email, Skype and social media, and we feel more comfortable living in this world of simulation than previous generations did. Just as those living in the Matrix existed in an unreal world, we too can escape into our own fantasy worlds for as little or as long as we like. The continuing development of graphical interfaces in computing are creating ever more believable worlds; places where human features, gestures and language are being simulated successfully. “Virtual worlds” such as Second Life and Habbo Hotel or, for schoolchildren, Club Penguin captured our attention, becoming obsessions for some; places we visited when we fancied an alternative to a less-exciting reality, with personas and communities we built up over a period of time.

Read full story.

 

Filed Under Review, Times Higher Education Tagged With Book Review, Hello Avatar

Unregulated KIS’s?

December 22, 2011 By drbexl Leave a Comment

http://chrislorensson.com/design/hefce-kis/

I’ve always been keen to see data that engages more with ‘how did we develop this student from where they started from?’ rather than final grades, etc. so the new KIS are of concern – read more about them here:

I recently spent an enthralling Sunday morning renewing my car insurance via a price-comparison website. In the past, I’d always performed the insurance-renewal ritual via a series of telephone calls in which I’d asked patient and blameless call-centre workers whether the companies employing them were having a laugh. While this involved some cheery conversations and usually resulted in a decent outcome, it did take rather a long time.

The website I used allowed me to be precise in my search. But the process took as long as ever. I found myself having to compare seemingly similar products that were actually quite different. This was because, in the key information provided, critical data were missing. For instance, the website identified whether a product included legal cover and at what cost, but not the level of cover provided. In most cases the absent details could be obtained only by making a phone call …

Nonetheless, car insurance is fairly straightforward; and although we all wince at its cost, policies are far cheaper, simpler and easier to compare than the complexity of UK university courses. As we know, the idea that prospective undergraduates should be able to make informed comparisons between programmes and institutions is central to the government’s vision of market-orientated higher education. But its plans for the provision of vital data, via Key Information Sets, are inadequate and likely to be misleading and counterproductive.

Read full story, and read more on the HEFCE site. I also thought this story about ‘adding social value‘ was of related interest…  see, e.g.

Universities have long measured their financial value, for example the spending power of their staff or their total turnover, she explained. But the report recommends finding an economic price for all university “outputs”, including those not captured by financial analysis….

A “social weight” could then be applied to this economic value to reflect social priorities, for example by counting an activity as more valuable if it delivers to the poor rather than the rich.

Filed Under Academic Research, Times Higher Education Tagged With Higher Education, KIS, Times Higher Education
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