All Posts Tagged With: "online"
Nursing students suspended for posting placenta picture on Facebook
School may have overreacted, but students should have known better
A group of nursing students at Johnson County Community College were kicked out of school for posing with a human placenta and posting the photos on Facebook. (It seems the esteemed “in-mirror club shot” for Facebook has effectively been replaced.) According to court documents, the students were visiting a medical centre with their class in November when they asked their teacher if they could take photos with a placenta. The teacher “implied consent” and the girls snapped away, posting the pictures on a least one Facebook page. A few hours later, an instructor requested that the photos be taken down, and the students were informed that they were being “dismissed.” They responded by filing suit against the school.
This story has gone viral south of the border, inciting heated debate about the freedom to post the miscellaneous online and the appropriateness of school sanctions for non-academic conduct. The issue is not foreign to us here in Canada, as the University of Calgary is currently battling a case concerning its punishment of two students for content they posted on Facebook. The rhetoric is usually the same; either “give me freedom and stay off my page” or “privacy is dead, so act responsibly.”
Regarding this particular case, public opinion seems to have come down hard on the school for enforcing such a severe punishment, and it’s not terribly difficult to see why. The placenta the students (inexplicably) decided to pose with was not attributable to an individual; it was an anonymous placenta, in other words. And they weren’t doing anything exceptionally inappropriate with the organ, just posing and snapping photos (which is curious enough, to say the least). But the situation is complicated for a number of reasons. Firstly, the placenta is an organ involved with reproduction and birth, which makes it a little more personal, sensitive, than a lung, for example. It’s the difference between posing with a heart and posing with a pair of severed testicles; one snapshot will elicit a little more reaction. Secondly, the students are studying to be nurses, a job that demands professionalism and empathy, especially when working with patients whose illnesses have robbed them of dignity. Nonchalance in the presence of blood, scars, feces, vomit, etc. (except when medically necessary) is the mark of appropriate bedside manner. Few patients would feel secure watching their nurse gawk at their oddly coloured growth.
But unless the school has explicit rules about appropriate out of class conduct, it seems beyond its parameters to police students’ Facebook pages. If they indeed did get permission from their instructor, they weren’t technically breaking the rules. But the real onus lies with the students. The infalliability of one’s online presence is a myth, a lesson which, unfortunately, students seem to be learning over and over. Skeletons from school left hidden in your closet (or on your wall, in this case) can be detrimental to your career, and should be purged from your page. That means all those aspiring kindergarten teachers should probably take those “dead baby” jokes off their profiles. It is the student’s responsibility to act professionally, not the school’s obligation to look the other way. Even if your professor doesn’t catch you, don’t leave it to your boss.
Crash course in copyright law for professors
U.S. interactive guide shows how to avoid breaking copyright in class
When I went to university, there were two types of professors: those who loved using audio, video clips and pictures in their classroom slideshows, and those who stood at the front of a lecture hall and talked.
But according to Baruch College at the City University New York, some professors might not be using copyrighted material in their classes because they don’t want to break any copyright laws and are erring on the safe side. For those teachers, and those who might be unknowingly breaking the law, the university recently released their interactive guide to using multimedia in academic courses.
Riding the “copyright metro,” professors can click through various questions about the multimedia they want to use in the classroom or online, which leads the user though a maze of options and questions, along with some additional information about fair use and American copyright law.
Keep in mind, though, it’s a primer on American copyright law. For some Canadian copyright resources for profs, you can take a peek at the Canadian Education Ministers of Canada’s Copyright Matters!
Are Facebook fears false?
Study fails to find “any robust relationship” between Facebook use and lower grades
To the collective relief of thousands of procrastinating university students, a new preliminary study at Northwestern University has failed to find “any robust relationship” between Facebook use and lower grades.
This announcement was made after Northwestern researchers tried to replicate the results of a highly publicized Ohio State University study from last April that correlated students who earned lower marks and studied less with Facebook usage.
“We found no evidence of Facebook use correlating with lower academic achievement,” said Eszter Hargittai, associate professor of communication at the school, in a news release late last week.
According to the release, the researchers used information from three existing data sets – including more than 1,000 undergrads at the University of Illinois, Chicago, a national cross-section of 14- to 22-year-olds, and a national panel of American youth aged 14 to 23. No significant negative relationship between grade point averages and Facebook use was found.
“I suspect that basic Facebook use…simply doesn’t have generalizable consequences for grades,” said Hargittai. According to researchers, the doubt cast on the use of social networking sites and their effects on students is reminiscent of suspicions cast on earlier new media, including TV and motion pictures, and their effect on children.
However, Hargittai does concede that Facebook use isn’t necessarily the best thing to being doing if a student wants an A.
“If somebody’s spending an inordinate amount of time on Facebook at the expense of studying, his or her academic performance may suffer,” she said. “ We need more research with more nuanced data to better understand how social networking site usage may relate to academic performance.”
Facebook users get lower grades
A new study correlates lower marks, less studying with Facebook use
The time students spend “poking” friends, posting photos and updating their status on Facebook may bear some relationship to how they’re faring academically, a new study suggests.
Researchers found that students who use the popular networking site spend less time studying and have lower grade point averages compared to those not on Facebook.
Study co-author Aryn Karpinski, a doctoral student and graduate teaching associate at Ohio State University, said the researchers wanted to look at demographic differences of student Facebook users and non-users and to investigate their typical profiles.
Karpinski and Adam Duberstein of Ohio Dominican University are presenting their research Thursday in San Diego at the annual meeting of the American Education Research Foundation.
The researchers surveyed 219 students at Ohio State – 102 undergraduates and 117 graduates – in the summer and fall quarters of 2008. Of that total, 148 said they had Facebook accounts.
Facebook users were typically younger, full-time students majoring in statistics, technology, math, engineering and medicine, Karpinski said.
When it came to academic achievement, Facebook users surveyed had GPAs between 3.0 and 3.5, a B, compared to non-users with GPAs between 3.5 and 4.0 – an A, said Karpinski.
What’s more, researchers found those on Facebook spent one-to-five hours a week studying compared to their non-Facebook-using counterparts who devoted between 11 and 15 hours weekly to hitting the books.
When asked whether Facebook had an impact on their academic performance, 79 per cent of Facebook users said it didn’t. Students also said it was not having an impact on their grades because they weren’t using it frequently enough – even though nearly 65 per cent said they use their account daily or multiple times daily, Karpinski said.
While not drawing a direct causal link between Facebook and academic achievement, researchers found the disconnect between qualitative and quantitative findings are “cause for concern.”
“I totally agree you cannot say Facebook causes lower GPA or less time spent studying, but there is some kind of relationship there,” Karpinski said. “I hope that the more people that research this area will tease apart the intricacies of this relationship.”
Technology revolutionizes learning at Athabasca
Students can wander in space with new video game-based learning
Why look at a PowerPoint presentation about Mars in a science class when you can wander its red ridges and canyons?
Or stare at a famous painting’s two-dimensional image instead of stepping inside and chatting with the characters? A new virtual learning centre at Athabasca University in Alberta could take lessons a long way from the conventional classroom.
The distance-education school is hoping that cutting-edge video game technology can be used to sink students deep into what they’re learning.
Young people have long been able to hone physical skills through realistic video games, and the university wants to approach academics the same way, says Rory McGreal, the university’s associate vice-president of research.
Hours spent hunched over a computer perfecting how to shoot a gun or explore a virtual environment could also be spent learning how the body works or understanding the universe.
“We’re trying to harness the power of games and how we can use them to promote learning,” McGreal said Wednesday.
“What they do is they grab the students, they hold their attention, and the students learn.”
The school is launching a specialized centre in immersive technologies and plans to create its own programs.
McGreal stresses they will go far beyond a virtual classroom or computer tours of existing attractions.
Quite a few schools, including Athabasca, have already done that in the online Second Life community, but it’s really a waste of the technology, he said. Even taking art history students to a virtual trip of the Louvre would be a “primitive” use of the vast possibilities online, he suggested.
“We want to move forward ahead of that, and to get away from the classroom altogether. How about going into the photo and actually interacting with the characters in the piece of art?”
One school programmer sees students creating a virtual representation of themselves, known as an avatar, and having the ability to go anywhere or do anything their teacher can think up.
Tech-savvy educators connect via virtual classrooms
With avatars and online games, students can interact with professors, curriculum and each other
As pens and legal pads have given way to laptops in the lecture hall, professors who are usually incensed by key tapping and the annoyances of technology have gradually adjusted – or at least accepted that such gizmos are here to stay.
The most innovative of the bunch have turned the distractions of technology to their advantage.
These tech-savvy educators are transplanting the classroom into the digital realm, shifting eager students into cyber-classes and shedding teaching limitations of the past.
Lyle Wetsch is one of those professors. Last year, he joined at least 10 other Canadian educational institutions inhabiting Second Life, an online virtual world, to teach an MBA class for students at Memorial University in St. John’s, N.L.
Interacting via his lifelike representation – called an avatar – Wetsch led students on virtual visits of the headquarters of major car companies. He also had virtual office hours and encouraged students to meet and practise presentations before the real deal.
“One of the advantages of education in the virtual world is you’re not limited to what you’re stuck with in the real world,” he said.
Indeed, entirely new demographics are being reached. Online learning opens doors for the sick, disabled and shy, to those living in remote areas or who are financially disadvantaged, and to students being home-schooled.
For students in grade school and high school, online tutoring is being offered for free through programs such as TV Ontario’s Ask a Teacher service, or for a fee by services such as newly launched TutorJam.
“There are students who for some reason got left behind,” said TutorJam founder Ajit Singh, who is also a professor at the University of Waterloo. “They cannot clearly state that they are not ‘getting it.’ And this tutoring service is right in the privacy of their homes, so kids can just open up.”
Loyalist College in Belleville, Ont., Canada’s first school to build a campus in Second Life, has used the platform successfully.
Following the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, students hoping to become border guards saw their grades drop after practice sessions at the Canada-U.S. border were cut back.
The creation of a realistic simulation in Second Life provided a way for the students to attain the same skills. Students later tested in mock interview scenarios of people passing between countries saw their marks jump 28 per cent.
Online, tuitionless university planned
University of the People would have study communities, homework and exams
From The New York Times:
An Israeli entrepreneur with decades of experience in international education plans to start the first global, tuition-free Internet university, a nonprofit venture he has named the University of the People.
The University of the People, like other Internet-based universities, would have online study communities, weekly discussion topics, homework assignments and exams. But in lieu of tuition, students would pay only nominal fees for enrollment ($15 to $50) and exams ($10 to $100), with students from poorer countries paying the lower fees and those from richer countries paying the higher ones.
Experts in online education say the idea raises many questions.
This year I’m taking math, physics and… blogging?
How-to-blog courses are popping up at universities and colleges across the country
It seems that just about everyone wants a blog these days, but fewer have much of an idea about how to start one.
“It’s part of our public profile: how are you represented on the net?” says Gary Shilling, who will teach a weekend course next April about blogging and social media at B.C.’s Simon Fraser University. “It used to be, ‘Do you have a fax machine?’ and then it was, ‘Do you have an e-mail address?’ And now it’s, ‘Do you have a blog or do you have any videos up on YouTube?’ It’s become part of our social fabric.”
There are already millions of blogs on the internet and thousands more created every day as they make online publishing easier and cheaper than ever, according to the blog-tracking website Technorati.com.
And to help would-be bloggers — everyone from technical neophytes to professional writers looking to make the leap from the printed page to the web — how-to courses are popping up in continuing education departments at universities and colleges across the country.
“The people we’re designing it for are people who perhaps are not terribly comfortable with technology, who have an interest in the medium but haven’t made those first steps to actually push the button,” Shilling says.
The Simon Fraser course will focus on the technical aspect of starting a blog and posting text, photos and video, as well as writing for the web. Shilling, a communication design consultant, will focus on the technology, while co-instructor Vancouver-area writer Meg Walker will talk about storytelling.
Writing for the web, and blogs in particular, is different than traditional pen and paper, Shilling says.
“The most important thing is that we’re dealing with short concentration spans,” he says. “You go to a web page, what do you give it, five seconds, 10 seconds to catch your interest? It’s important to condense the storytelling to the point where you have to hook people in your first couple of sentences.”
Courses elsewhere range from beginner classes for basement bloggers — such as “Internet Storytelling” at Nova Scotia Community College or “Introduction to Blogs” at Ontario’s Centennial College — to the professional, like “Blogging for Business” at the University of British Columbia.
