Helicopter Parents

Today's News in Chronicle of Higher Education points out the benefits of having helicopter parents http://chronicle.com/daily/2008/01/1355n.htm?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en . When I was in college, my parents came to the school exactly twice - once to move me in and once to move me out. Telephone calls were deemed too expensive and we communicated by letter. I was expected to write once a week.
That is in sharp contrast to the communication parents have with their children and with the universities they attend. New and inexpensive technologies have made this possible.
"Do 'helicopter parents do more harm than Good?" See the Q&A Advice on ABC News: http://abcnews.go.com/2020/Health/story?id=1237868
The College Board has an online quiz for parents and discusses the benefits of parental involvement http://www.collegeboard.com/parents/plan/getting-ready/155044.html Take the online quiz for your parents and comment on the results. What guidelines would you suggest for parents of college students in the 21st century?

Open Education

The founders of Wikipedia and Connections (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(TV_series) were considered to be outrageous when they dreamed of anyone being able to contribute his/her knowledge freely in an arena that anyone could access. This idea must be very threatening to scholars. Should we be concerned? How will we know what to believe?
The free sharing of books and other materials, the sharing of research possible via Web 2.0 are emphasizing collaboration rather than competition. Who does this threaten?
See the Open Forum from the San Francisco Chronicle. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/01/22/EDRTUJ346.DTL

Open Access: Sharing on the Web

Here are some links to videos done by students in a contest about Open Access. Did you know that faculty here at Trinity have published scholarly articles and the copyright by the publisher did not allow them to make copies to distribute for their students? That's right, they couldn't make copies of the articles they wrote. See this video:

http://blip.tv/file/517300

To see other contestants' videos, including the winner's, see today's Chronicle of Higher Education blog.

http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/article/?id=2682&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

French Students Become Prostitutes to Pay Tuition

For interesting news about what is happening to higher education, subscribe to the Chronicle of Higher Education blog. To do that you need a news aggregator and a feed to the blog. Here is a link to today's blog about French students becoming prostitutes in order to support themselves.

http://chronicle.com/news/article/?id=3780&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

Web 2.0: Professors as Video Stars

In the early 1970s I worked on a math series for education television. The idea behind the series was to identify topics that were difficult for students and could be better addressed through the medium of television rather than in a typical classroom setting. The ability to show motion is very powerful. The microchip came out in 1974 and computers as a vehicle for education entered the scene. The World-Wide-Web became a phenomenon in the late 1990s. Distance learning became possible. Students didn't have to be physically present in a classroom. More recently, Web 2.0 is allowing people all over the planet to work together in a way that has never before been possible.

The rock stars of teaching now have the potential to educate anyone who "tunes in." Colleges can now have channels on YouTube and podcasts on Itunes. Berkley has taken the lead and others are following. A new web site named the Big Think, a YouTube for academics, was recently launched.

Twenty years ago, the president of Trinity predicted that technology in education would go the way of educational TV, that it wouldn't have much impact. Now we are on the verge of something really big. Universities are sharing their education. People everywhere are contributing. What changes will this bring?



If "a picture is worth 1000 words," how much is a moving picture worth?

I would like to embed one of my favorite videos, but for now you'll have to take the link to view it. Thanks you, Professor Walsh for making "The Machine is Using Us." http://youtube.com/watch?v=NLlGopyXT_g

Link to Email Address

How to make a link from your name to your email address:

Pat Semmes

When you preview the post you should try clicking on your name and see if it links to your email. The email program will open in the email program on your computer and your name will be in the TO box. If you are using a TU computer, you cannot check it this way. Mouse over the name and you should see mailto: followed by your email address.

YouDiligence Monitors Athletes' Web Sites

Who is reading what you put on social web sites? Large colleges have coaches who monitor what their athletes put on Web sites like MySpace and Facebook. Now there is a program they can purchase to do the monitoring for them in real-time. If it finds objectionable words or phrases, it sends an email alert to the designated college official with a link to the page.

The program named YouDiligence was shown at the NCAA annual convention and is discussed in today's Chronicle of Higher Education. Wouldn't this be a violation of 1st amendment rights? Legal experts say if students publish information over the Web, it is public and anyone can search for it. Why does this make me feel queasy? Maybe it depends what they do with the information. On the other hand, I can't believe what students and others put out for public consumption.