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Law-school deans and professors, meeting in New York this weekend for the Future Ed 3 conference, invoked software and distance learning as tools that can rescue legal education from classroom doldrums, the National Law Journal reports. “Legal education significantly lags the rest of higher education in integrating online learning and other educational technologies into its programs,” Bryant G.Garth, dean of Southwestern Law School, told the meeting, according to the Journal.

To rectify that, six law schools, including Southwestern, announced a consortium to develop new technology, specifically an online-learning platform that the schools themselves would own. (Other schools in the group include the University of Miami School of Law, Australian National University College of Law, Chicago-Kent College of Law, the University of the Pacific McGeorge School of Law, and New York Law School.)

The conference also endorsed a program called “Apps for Justice,” a proposal to have law…

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Today the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced that 29 organizations have won its inaugural Next Generation Learning Challenge, sharing $ 10.6-million to test projects for improving college-completion rates and course success.

The winning proposals focused on four areas: blended learning, interactive games and social media for class engagement, open course resources for introductory math and English classes (which often have low rates of student success), and analytical software to measure what works best. Grant winners together serve more than 117,000 students through more than 200 institutions, including 78 community colleges.

The winners include the Iowa Community College Online Consortium, a tuition-supported partnership between seven Iowa community colleges to provide online classes. The organization already uses data from its course management system to track the progress of students and notify academic advisers of at-risk students. With a $ 750,000 grant the…

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I’d like to see the studies that this article is referencing.  I do agree — Window’s style TabletPC’s are much more flexible, and I find Ubiquitous Presenter to be a powerful educational technology.  (Great to see Beth Simon and Bill Griswold quoted in this piece.)  But I wonder if the iPad allows for a different kind of interactivity, one that can also be used for learning, but we’ll have to learn how to leverage that.

Despite the iPad’s popularity—Apple has sold nearly 15 million of them and just came out with the iPad2; and there are dozens of competitors, like the Samsung Galaxy—early studies indicate that these finger-based tablets are passive devices that have limited use in higher education. They are great for viewing media and allow students to share readings. But professors cannot use them to mark up material on the fly and show changes to students in response to their questions, a type of interactivity that has been a major thrust in pedagogy.

Even students have issues….

Computing Education Blog

Austin, Tex.—New forms of online racism are emerging as video games add audio-chat features, and as popular online games draw a more global audience.

That was the message of a panel of academics and journalists at this year’s South by Southwest Interactive conference, an annual event that brings together video-game designers, social-media leaders, and cultural critics looking for the latest technology trends.

A famous New Yorker cartoon has long summed up the anonymizing power of cyberspace: “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” But in some popular video games and in social virtual worlds like Second Life, chat features have been added in the past few years, essentially proving the cartoon outdated. The addition of human voices has led people to make assumptions about the players based on their speech, often on the basis of race. That’s according to research cited at the conference by Lisa Nakamura, a professor of Asian-American studies at the University of Illinois at…

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Testing the limits of distance education and administration, the University of Kentucky has hired a professor and the technology leadership center that he directs away from Iowa State University—but will leave the professor in Ames to work remotely, unsettling some of his new colleagues, according to a local newspaper.

Scott McLeod will become an an associate professor in the department of educational leadership studies in the fall of 2011, the university announced today. His organization, the Center for the Advanced Study of Technology Leadership in Education, will be moving to Kentucky as well, along with another full-time faculty member. The center will have two research assistants.

The center focuses on school instructors and administrators, leading courses in cutting-edge educational technology use. Mr. McLeod expects to teach online, visit Kentucky several times each month, and work with local school districts as well as with colleagues at the university.

Some of those…

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A key fob that is used as a part of the RavenAlert system.

Colleges have wrestled with emergency-alert systems for years. E-mail is sometimes inaccessible to students and staff on the move, and text-message systems have been slow. The latest fix is based, surprisingly, on one of the oldest wireless communication systems around: the pager.

IntelliGuard Systems, a company that offers wireless “first responder” messaging, has introduced RavenAlert for college campuses. The technology mimics paging systems that are already used at hospitals and fire stations. But in this case, the pagers carried by students are small key fobs that house wireless receivers. The key fobs can display messages in text, emit sounds or words, vibrate, and emit a flash of light. The system also includes wall units for classrooms that display emergency messages in text, and large LED displays in major campus gathering places.

Drexel University was part of a pilot study of the system last year, in which five…

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The Obama administration wants to establish a new agency with the U.S. Department of Education to support the creation of education technologies and to promote their adoption by teachers, according to a news article in the journal Science. The new entity, described briefly here, will be part of the president’s 2012 budget request. It would be called Advanced Research Projects Agency-Education. “The name is a deliberate takeoff on the Sputnik-era DARPA within the Department of Defense that funded what became the Internet and the much newer Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) that hopes to lead the country into a clean-energy future,” says the Science article. “ARPA-ED will seek to correct what an administration official calls the country’s massive ‘underinvestment’ in educational technologies that could improve student learning.”

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What started as a small group on LinkedIn that allowed college professors to talk about their teaching has grown into an online community boasting more than 6,000 participants.

One selling point of the group, according to its new Web site, is that it is not affiliated with any particular college, academic association, or company. “Members represent all disciplines, functions, and levels within the higher-education ecosystem around the world,” the site explains.

It’s called, simply, Higher Education Teaching and Learning Portal, or HETL, and it serves as a forum for professors to seek and share advice about teaching, and often about how (or whether) to bring technology into the classroom.

“Do you accept your students’ invitations to connect on Facebook and other social networks?” read one popular discussion post on the group’s LinkedIn page, which is still the heart of the community. More than 300 responses poured in. Other threads are less popular but still attract some quick…

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