Prominent Education Scholar Michael W. Apple to Deliver Lecture at Adelphi

Dr. Michael W. Apple

Dr. Michael W. Apple is one of the most eloquent proponents for the democratization of educational policy today and he is speaking at Adelphi University on October 20th.  His lecture, “Markets, Standards, and Inequality in Education” will be a must-see for anyone interested in what’s at stake for education in the current era of neoliberalism.

I plan to attend and will be keen to see if he addresses policy-makers’ discursive tropes around technology and education. As an instructional technologist, I don’t doubt that technology can be used to improve teaching and learning, but I am interested in critically examining policy-makers’ and industry-insiders’ rhetoric about technology literacy. Taking my cue from J. Elspeth Stuckey, whose seminal work “The Violence of Literacy” examines how the rhetoric of literacy often serves to “perpetuate disadvantage and promote Western economic agendas,” I am curious to know if the rhetoric of technology literacy ever functions in a similar way. Perhaps I’ll have a chance to ask him this if there is a Q&A period…

If you are interested in attending the lecture, details can be found here. And if you can’t make it to the lecture, you might be interested in reading Dr. Apple’s article “Rhetorical Reforms: Markets, Standards, and Inequality.”

As always, we’d love to hear your comments on this and other blog postings. Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments section below.

Posted by Susan Lambert

The New and Improved Faculty Center!

With the renovations finished and the semester fully underway, the Faculty Center for Professional Excellence has been busy with providing faculty support, creating new and innovative video projects, and hosting parties! If you were unable to make it to the Grand Opening Event you can catch some of the festivities here!

Expanding Media Options at the Faculty Center

Hello, my name is Jenifer Heck, and I’ll be working as the Media Technologist at the Faculty Center for Professional Excellence. I’m here to offer advice and assistance to you as you look for creative film and video solutions to reach out to your students with. Whether you want to shoot your own material, or find creative ways to incorporate pre-existing material into your curriculum, I’m here to help. Media and technology is a great way to make your classroom a more exciting, intellectually robust place. Let’s explore the possibilities!

Welcoming Benjamin Rosner to the FCPE Team

Hello, my name is Benjamin Rosner, and I am the new Instructional Technologist at the Faculty Center for Professional Excellence. I am very excited to be working at Adelphi University as a full-time member of the Faculty Center team.

Benjamin Rosner, Instructional Technologist

I have been lucky enough to work with the Faculty Center team for close to three years as a Student and Graduate Instructional Technologist.  Throughout my years at the Faculty Center I have grown in the field of Instructional Technology—the effective integration of technology in education—and in faculty support.  Now, with great pleasure, I am provided the opportunity to put my education and experience to use and remain part of this great institution.

My education began at Nassau Community College where I was immediately enthralled by the education process and by the instructors. I received an Associate of Arts degree, summa cum laude, with a concentration in General Psychology in 2007. I began my Adelphi career at the Derner Institute for Advanced Psychological Studies, receiving my baccalaureate with high honors in August 2009.  Immediately after I began my graduate studies, also at Derner, and will complete my Masters of Arts in August 2010. My interests in psychology rest in the cognitive domain—how thoughts influence everything from our behaviors to our perceptions—and find it rewarding that I can apply this knowledge as an Instructional Technologist to help develop curriculum that effectively integrates technology.

My work history at the FCPE includes administering Moodle CMS, providing instruction in the use of instructional technologies, writing and editing tutorial documentation, and teaching workshops on various technologies.  In the past years, I have had an extensive amount of experience working with faculty members to recommend and support innovative uses of technology to actively engage learners in acquiring the instructional objectives in a course.  One of the projects that I am most proud of is the Moodle support site, where I was primarily responsible for the creation of the content, and played a pivotal role in the website’s design.

Please stop by my office, and let us discuss how I can help you achieve your goals. Find me in Alumnae Hall, Room 01 – my door is always opened.

Also, if you have a few minutes check out our new staff profile videos here!

San Diego State U. Mobile App Tracks BP Oil Spill

In keeping with this month’s theme of situated learning and mobile technologies, here’s an article from Wired Campus about a mobile app. created at San Diego State U.  that works to map the BP oil spill through smartphone images taken by users who’ve downloaded the free app.  The data collected will be used by students and scientists to help with the ongoing clean-up effort.

Situated Learning & Mobile Technologies, by Susan Lambert

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With devices like Smartphones and the iPad providing access to 1,000’s of apps and free educational content, such as online courses, lectures, e-books, language flashcards, graphing calculators, and whole art collections (including the entire collection of the Louvre); and with an increasing number of faculty at Adelphi University using mobile technologies with their students, I thought the use of mobiles for education would make a timely blog topic.

These devices, which also capture images, audio, and video, at the same time that they support social networking, offer myriad opportunities for supporting “more collaborative, contextual, and constructivist approaches” (Herrington & Herrington 2007) to teaching and learning.  By way of introducing blog readers to some of the ways mobiles have been used in education, I’ve compiled the following resources for you to peruse.

Please feel free, as always, to share your own teaching and learning experiences in the comments sections below.

Four ideas for using mobiles with students:

• As an art student’s sketchbook
• For field work and data capture
• For interviews
• For collaborating on digital stories

Readings, Resources & Additional Ideas for Using Mobiles in the Classroom:

• 2009 Horizon Report article on mobiles http://wp.nmc.org/horizon2009/chapters/mobiles/
• A free e-book containing case studies of mobile learning activities http://www.tonybates.ca/2009/10/15/free-book-on-mobile-learning-in-higher-education/
• Article in Campus Technology that highlights Abilene University, a pioneer in mobile learning: http://campustechnology.com/Articles/2010/01/27/Pioneering-Mobile-Learning.aspx
• Mobile Learning – 54 Resources, by Educause http://www.educause.edu/Resources/Browse/Mobile+Learning/17505
• New Media Consortium http://www.nmc.org/

iPhone as Sketchbook – David Hockney’s iPhone Sketches

Free and Public Domain Multimedia for Classroom Uses

Google made searching for information easier than ever. We all know how to search images or videos online using Google’s search box by just typing the keywords. However, do you know many of the multimedia files are copyrighted or the copyrights are not clearly stated in the search results? At the same time, there are many ways to find free or public domain multimedia that you can use without worrying about the copyright issue.

Here are some of the sources I like:

Free Images

WikiMedia Commons
Wikimedia Commons is a media file repository making available public domain and freely-licensed educational media content (images, sound and video clips) to everyone.

EveryStockPhoto
A search engine for free, public domain photos. Source and licensing information for each image is available on the search results pages below the photo. Sources of the search includes Flickr, NASA, Wikimedia Commons, stock.xchng, and more.

Microsoft Clip Art
Although it is called Clip Art, this site also has a lot of high quality photographs you can use.

morgueFile
The morguefile contains photographs freely contributed by many artists to be used in creative projects by anyone. You are asked to credit the photographer when possible.
The site also features a “Classroom” section where you can find photography and image editing tutorials.

Free Audio

Internet Archive: Open Source Audio
The site contains clips on a wide range of subjiect. You can also find usable audio files in the broader cagegory “Audio collection.” When you find an audio clip on the site, you have the option (in some cases) of streaming the content or downloading it to your computer. In either case, be sure to check out the attribution requirement.

Sound Bible
This is a resource for free sound clips, sound effects, and sound bites. You can find sounds for use in podcasts, videos, presentations or other multimedia projects.

Free Video

Internet Archive: Moving Images
This library contains thousands of digital movies which range from classic full-length films, to daily alternative news broadcasts, to cartoons and concerts. Many of these videos are available for free download.

Youtube and its Alternatives – You can embed the videos in Web pages, course sites, or presentations, but they are usually not for download.
Vimeo – Another video sharing site
TeacherTube – Video sharing especially for education

For more resources, you can check out this article: 26 Places to Find Free Multimedia for Your Blog

Did You Know?

Did you know that there is a wealth of course material on the web that is free for you to use and to adapt to your teaching needs? Did you know that a growing number of institutions and organizations, such as Stanford, Tufts, and MIT are making open courseware available on the Internet?

In my work as Distance Learning Specialist at Adelphi University, I’ve compiled a list of some of these online repositories for faculty to use.  They contain materials that are relevant to all disciplines.

Feel free to browse the list and to share your experiences with using these materials in the comments section below.

Open Courseware and Learning Object Repositories:

http://www.diigo.com/user/fcpeau/DL.Learning.Objects

Posted by Susan Lambert

News Worthy Resources

One of my favorite blogs that I love reading each week is the semi-new Education blog from the New York Times, The Learning Network: Teaching and Learning With The New York Times. This blog, rich with resources, is based on current events and content from the Times. Not only does it provide lesson plans, crossword puzzles, and quizzes, it offers them in several different content areas based on what is happening in the world. From investigating the possible causes and connections of the recent earthquakes, to Making Sense of the Census, using current events to engage students in learning has never been so easy, or so fun!

Creating an Adelphi University Google Site – Easily & Quickly

Because Adelphi has Google accounts for all students, there are educational apps that can be taken advantage of beyond email.  Google’s Apps for Education includes – document sharing via Google Docs; video chat; calendar share; and the intuitive website creation tool called Google Sites.

Google Sites has the functionality to create and share website templates that can be used by any AU student for an assignment, project, etc. With an AU Google Site template, the navigation menu and foundational structure are preloaded so that students don’t need to worry about the technical mechanics involved in creating a website and can focus instead on creating the content. Watch the video below to see how easy it is to create an AU Google Site with a template.