University Students have Laptop Computers

The ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology, 2009 is available from EDUCAUSE. This is the results of a survey of 30,000 students at 103 US universities. As well as Australian universities, this has some interesting implications for secondary schools.

The study found that almost all students have computers, mostly laptops. Almost all students were using course management systems at their university and most were happy with these.

Less than half of the students thought their teachers had adequate IT skills, nor provided adequate IT training for the students. Just over half the students had an Internet capable mobile phone and of those two thirds had used the Internt on their phone. For those not using the Internet on the phone, cost was the most common reason. Few were using the mobile phone for course related purposes and the phones were see as largely a distraction from study. One use favoured by students was to use the SMS function of phones for emergency messages from the unviersity.

If the results are applicable to Australia, which I suspect they are, then this would suggest:

1. Campuses should be equipped to accommodate laptops, with less provision for desktop computers. As an example, power points and network access for laptops would be desirable. Some way to provide a larger screen and keyboard interfaced to the student's laptop would be desirable (perhaps using a desktop or thin client computer)
   
2. Learning/Course Management Systems should be used for course administration, and where applicable, course delivery.
   
3. Mobile phone Internet access should not be assumed, unless the unviersity provides some sort of low cost or free access (for example WiFi for smart phones).

The federal government is funding the provision of computers for schools. However, it is being left to school systems as to if the students get laptops or desktops. The university research would seem to favour laptops. With the cost of netbook coming down, this suggests that some of what is happening in universities is now applicable to secondary schools.

Abstract

Since 2004, the annual ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology has sought to shed light on how information technology affects the college experience. We ask students about the technology they own and how they use it in and out of their academic world. We gather information about how skilled students believe they are with technologies; how they perceive technology is affecting their learning experience; and their preferences for IT in courses. The ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology, 2009 is a longitudinal extension of the 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, and 2008 studies. It is based on quantitative data from a spring 2009 survey of 30,616 freshmen and seniors at 103 four-year institutions and students at 12 two-year institutions; student focus groups that included input from 62 students at 4 institutions; and review of qualitative data from written responses to open-ended questions. In addition to studying student ownership, experience, behaviors, preferences, and skills with respect to information technologies, the 2009 study also includes a special focus on student ownership and use of Internet-capable handheld devices.

Table of Contents

Entire Study: The ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology, 2009

Foreword

Chapter 1: Executive Summary

Chapter 2: Introduction: Higher Education—A Moveable Feast?

Chapter 3: Methodology and Respondent Characteristics

Chapter 4: Ownership of, Use of, and Skill with IT

Chapter 5: IT and the Academic Experience

Chapter 6: Undergraduates and the Mobile Revolution

Appendix A: Acknowledgments

Appendix B: Students and Information Technology in Higher Education: 2009 Survey Questionnaire

Appendix C: Qualitative Interview Questions

Appendix D: Participating Institutions and Survey Response Rates

Appendix E: Bibliography

Online Supporting Materials: Key Findings: Roadmap & Survey Instrument

From: The ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology, 2009, EDUCAUSE, 2009

What is Google Wave?

It is an unusual and slightly refreshing feeling to sit in a technical computer presentation have no idea of what the presenter is talking about. The experts from Google Sydney who have developed the technology are giving an introduction for developers on how to use it. While the details of Java and Python APIs and the use of various techniques is familiar and by the end of the day I could probably code a Google Wave application, I am still having difficulty understanding what it is for. There are some glimmerings of understanding happening. One is that Google Wave robots (applications running out in the cloud) can manipulate the Wave data in XHTML format. Also there is an OpenSocial interface coming to allow for interaction with social networking services (or for building social networking services). These are of interest for my intended application in e-learning. This could be used to build web based services for students to interact with each other and the tutors. Even if it does not turn out Google Wave is not the technology for this (or more likely is more technology than needed) it might make a good prototype.

ps: On a less serious note, the first Google Wave presentation was illustrated with images of not very friendly or pretty looking robots. Ruth Ellison, head of WSG Canberra, gave a presentation The Uncanny Valley at BarCamp Canberra with more interesting robots.

Google Wave in Canberra

Greetings from the Google Wave Hackathon at the the Australian National University in Canberra. This free technical event about Google Wave platform. It started at 9am, but there is still room for more people and it runs until 5pm. There also some people following on Twitter: #cbrwave. I am here to see how it might be used for collaborative education with a learning management system: think social networking for a tutorial group (I talked about teaching Green ICT with a smartphone at Google Sydney on Friday).

Canberra Google Wave Hackathon Day
Saturday 8th August

PROGRAM:
9:30am Registration
10:00am Talks

A presenter from Google (details available soon) will give an introduction to the Wave API.

If you have already been developing for Wave, please consider giving a short presentation about what you have done (doesn't have to be a formal presentation).

12:00 pm Brainstorming Lunch (BYO or we will take orders & payment for pizza at registration)
1:00 pm Hacking
5:00 pm Demos
7:00 pm Head out for dinner at restaurant (at your own cost).

REGISTRATION
You must register if you wish to attend so that a Google Wave Developer sandbox account can be created for you. Registrations will close on Tuesday, 4th August so that the accounts can be created.

Numbers are limited, so please register as soon as possible at: http://tr.im/cbrwave

This day is being organised by volunteers who are interested in Google Wave development and thought it would be useful to have a Google Wave developers day in Canberra. Please indicate if you are willing to assist with organising and running the day. Contact brenda@moon.net.au for more information.

We will be providing WiFi internet access, but you will need to bring your own computer. Please have a look at the developer information on the Google Wave site (http://code.google.com/apis/wave/) as an introduction.

Canberra Google Wave Hackathon Day

A Google Wave Hackathon is being held the the Australian National University in Canberra on 8 August all day from 9am (registration essential). This is a free technical event about Google Wave platform. I am going along to see how it might be used for collaborative education with a learning management system: think social networking for a tutorial group (I am talking about teaching Green ICT with a smartphone at Google Sydney on Friday):

Canberra Google Wave Hackathon Day
Saturday 8th August

PROGRAM:
9:30am Registration
10:00am Talks

A presenter from Google (details available soon) will give an introduction to the Wave API.

If you have already been developing for Wave, please consider giving a short presentation about what you have done (doesn't have to be a formal presentation).

12:00 pm Brainstorming Lunch (BYO or we will take orders & payment for pizza at registration)
1:00 pm Hacking
5:00 pm Demos
7:00 pm Head out for dinner at restaurant (at your own cost).

REGISTRATION
You must register if you wish to attend so that a Google Wave Developer sandbox account can be created for you. Registrations will close on Tuesday, 4th August so that the accounts can be created.

Numbers are limited, so please register as soon as possible at: http://tr.im/cbrwave

This day is being organised by volunteers who are interested in Google Wave development and thought it would be useful to have a Google Wave developers day in Canberra. Please indicate if you are willing to assist with organising and running the day. Contact brenda@moon.net.au for more information.

We will be providing WiFi internet access, but you will need to bring your own computer. Please have a look at the developer information on the Google Wave site (http://code.google.com/apis/wave/) as an introduction.

Social networking in e-learning tool

At Matthew Allen's online learning seminar in Canberra I speculated about having a way to link e-learning systems easily to external social networking tools. One of the less well known open source e-learning systems, ATutor, claim to have done some of this by implementing the OpenSocial 1.0 standard in a module called "ATutor Social". This is somewhat limited in its features, but shows what may be possible. The Atutor code is open source:

Contents

• Demo (ATutor)
• ATutor Social Features
• Download

ATutor Social is a social networking module that allows ATutor users to network with each other. They can gather contacts, create a public profile, track network activity, create and join groups, and customize the environment with any of the thousands of OpenSocial gadgets available all over the Web

OpenSocial

ATutor Social is based on the Google OpenSocial standard, implementing the Container part of the standard in ATutor. It essentially turns ATutor into a platform for OpenSocial applications. Applications are based on the Gadget part of the OpenSocial standard, and gadgets plugin to containers. Gadgets are available for a wide range of purposes, from simply linking a quote of the day app into the networking environment, to integrating sites like Flickr, Picasa, and YouTube, as well as integrating other social networks like Facebook and MySpace.

Anyone familiar with iGoogle, can click on "Add stuff" to find a list of gadgets that plug into the iGoogle environment. Gadgets that work with iGoogle (or most of them), also work with ATutor

ATutor Social Features

All Users

• Search Network: Search for people on a network to display basic information about them. Login to add people as contacts.

Registered Users

• My Contacts: Search the network for people you know and add them to your contact list.
• People you Might Know: To help build networks, contacts of your contacts (i.e. friends of friends) are displayed making it easy to add common contacts to your own. Random selections of a few other's contact display each time a page loads.
• Network Activity: Keep track of what other people in your network are doing by following their activities.
• Network Groups: Create interest groups, or join an existing ones. Invite people to join groups you belong to.
• Gadgets: Select from thousands of OpenSocial gadgets available around the internet to customize your social network to your specification. Once a gadget has been used on a system, it becomes available to others on your network to add to their social networking tools.
• Privacy: Select from a range of privacy settings to control who sees what parts of your profile, and control which parts of your profile are searchable by others.

Instructors

• Turn off ATutor Social: ATutor Social runs both inside or outside of courses. Instructors may choose to disable social networking in their courses.

Administrators

• ShinDig Location: The ShinDig server acts as a hub for a social network. By default social.atutor.ca acts as the central hub for the ATutor social network. Administrators may choose to point to a different ShinDig server to create a private network.

Developers

• OpenSocial Standard: Develop your own OpenSocial Gadgets that will plugin to ATutor, or into other OpenSocial container applications.
• Public Source Code: All ATutor Social source code is available for public checkout from the Subversion version control repository.

From: ATutor Social, ATRC, 2009

It is some time since I have looked at Atutor and the development of the package has progressed considerably. Some features of interest are:

1. ACollab: ACollab is a collaboration tool which can be used with Atutor, or on its own. there is a demo for it. Students can use thios to work on group projects, with sdhared document development being the main feature.
2. AChecker: is an addon to test web pages for accessibility using proposed Open Accessibility Checks.
   

3. Release Dates:

   Atutor allos the course designer to set a date when particuarl content will be available to the student. Unfortunately these dates appear tio be absloute calandar dates, not relative to the start of the course (as for example day 1 of week 3 of the coruse).
   

Combating Academic Plagiarism

Combating Student Plagiarism: An Academic Librarian's Guide (Chandos Series for Information Professionals) by Lynn D Lampert (Chandos Publishing, 2008) suggests requiring students provide a bibliography with written assignments and also submit drafts and parts of assignments progressively as they work. This is designed to make it more difficult for students to show how they got to their final work. This might also make it easier for the student, rewarding them with marks for the progress of the work and thefore encouraging them to work in stages, rather than leaving everything to just beofre the final deadline for the finised work. This would work with online Learning management Systems, such as Moodle. The student would be able to submit parts of the work as they progressed and the assessor would not be swamped with bits of paper. This might be taken further to provide the student with an online set of tools fort keeping track of their work, including the bibilography. Also for group assignments, an online system with some of the features of social networking could keep track of who contributed what.

Offline guides to teaching online

Teaching Online: A Practical Guide, by Susan Ko and Steve Rossen (Routledge, 2008 paperback 339 pages, ISBN: 978-0415996907) provides a useful guide for those new, and not so new to Internet based education. About half the book is devoted to the technicalities of getting courses online and the other to the educational and social issues of interacting with students and encouraging them to interact with each other. One problem with such books is that they have to either deal with specific online tools, which not be the ones you have, or deal in generalities. This book takes the latter course, not naming products and giving a general guide. As a result it can be a bit vague on some of the details.

"Tutoring Online" by Tim Brook and Stephen Wall (CIT Solutions), 2001 is a more modest 50 page booklet on the same topic. It gives more specific details for Widows based systems and concentrates on tutoring online, not the production of courses. Unfortunately, the publisher CIT Solutions (the commercial arm of the Canberra Institute of Technology), do not seem to have done much to promote the book. I couldn't find it for sale on Amazon.com or elsewhere online. CIT, or the authors, could use something like Lulu.com for print on demand, as I did with my Green ICT course notes.

Both the books Teaching Online and Tutoring Online suffer from the quality of the print-on-demand process used to produce them. This does not allow colour, or high quality diagrams. One solution would be for the authors to providing a companion web site with supplementary materials. Also to avoid the general nature of the technology descriptions they could use the open source Moodle e-learning system as example. They could also provide examples online using Moodle.

Teaching Computer-Mediated Communication for Governance

At the Varietas Multidisciplinary Teaching Interest Group on Wednesday we discussed what was required for a learning management system (LMS). What quickly became apparent was that selecting an LMS should be treated like other requirements analysis for an ICT system. Rather than start with a shopping list of features found in typical LMS, we should work out what the learning objectives are, the appropriate learning styles for that learning and then how ICT can support it.

LMS can have document creation and document/record management facilities, person to person and person to group communication, meeting management, assessment management and course delivery features. What many of these have in common is computer-mediated communication (CMC):

Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) is defined as any communicative transaction which occurs through the use of two or more networked computers.^[1] While the term has traditionally referred to those communications that occur via computer-mediated formats (i.e., instant messages, e-mails, chat rooms) it has also been applied to other forms of text-based interaction such as text messaging. ^[2] Research on CMC focuses largely on the social effects of different computer-supported communication technologies. Many recent studies involve Internet-based social networking supported by social software.

From: Computer-Mediated Communication, Wikipedia, 28 September 2008, at 11:06

Even the document/record management facilities and assessment, could be considered a form of communication. The record management facilities are used for communicating from now to the future, and the assessed is the assessor communicating to those who may wish to employ the student.

This analysis should work well for the courses on web design and electronic document management I present, as the topic of the course is also Computer-Mediated Communication.

To test if this would be a useful approach I tried the same technique wh9och I had used with "learning commons". A web search on CMC, returned about 2.5 million hits. Narrowing the search to the last 24 hours, produced just over 10,000 documents. This suggested the term was widely used, but the real surprise came when I narrowed the search to CMC for 24 hours at ANU, which found 4 documents, including an announcement of a seminar a few hundred metres from my office by an expert in lexicography and computer-mediated communication: The 5-Concentric Circles Model & the Australian English Dictionary, Vincent B Y Ooi, The Australian National Dictionary Centre, CEDAM Seminar Room, Building #96, 10 October 2008.

Rather than arguing the merits of Wiki, Blog, Podcast, Webinar, Feed or whatever new technology may be around the corner, it should be possible to apply the analysis developed for CMC, such as synchronicity, persistence, multimodality, privacy and security.

My courses on web design and e-document management largely address the needs of governance. This could be generalised as CMC for governance; that is using computer based systems to coordinate an organisation, or a society. In this way we can step back from the detail of how email or word processing documents should be archived in a company or a government agency and look at how computers can be used to make decisions, have those decisions implemented and satisfy the community the process was properly carried out. Different forms of CMC can then be assessed to see how they assist governance.

Selecting a learning management system

The ANU is deciding what Learning Management System to use from 2009.The paper "Designing a learning management system to support instruction" (Hsiu-Ping Yueh, Shihkuan Hsu,Communications of the ACM, Volume 51, Number 4, 2008) provides a useful overview of some of the issues:

The goal of an LMS, devised by a growing number of universities, is to offer faculty instructional support. The actual use of these programs, however, suggests that support is elusive. An experience at National Taiwan University illustrates how a university can increase faculty usage through better LMS design.

The paper looks at traditional education activities of presenting information, managing course materials and evaluating student work. The point is made that an LMS provides an array of tools for teaching. One issue not raised is if these tools need to be in the LMS: would it be better to simply provide some way to identify students and then provide an array of online tools they could use.

It may be a minimalist LMS could be created, which just implements the core education functions of identifying who is a student and reporting the evaluation of them. Instead of trying to create yet another online group discussion froum, wiki, blog, or podcast facility, the tool would instead authenticate the student to the best external tools available.

ePortfolios, seen as a trendy new development in education is essentially just an educational version of social networking tools. Perhaps institutions should leave ePortfolios to external providers. It is unlikely that any university is contemplating its own standalone "real time audio interactive communications system", instead they use telephones connected to, and compatible with, the public telephone network. Similarly it may not sense for each institution to create its own isolated LMS environment with its own implementation of services such as ePortfolios.

Selecting large number of features for an LMS may not be the best approach. As paper reports, research has shown that few higher education institutions use assessment functions in the LMS, or their group facilities. The LMS is mostly confined to publishing course details, sending announcements to students and providing reference materials. It may be that this will change when staff become familiar with the tools, but such software probably only has a lifetime of one or two years and by the time the staff learn what to do it will be time to select a new LMS anyway. It may be better to use an LMS with limited facilities as in the years it takes staff to learn to use advanced features, LMS as a class of computer application may have ceased to exist.

The paper emphasises the needs of the faculty and the complexity of learning an LMS. The example of NTU is of interest as it provides a dual language facility via the LMS, with Chinese and English. The system started for providing supplementary material for courses, with more teaching facilities then added. Another interesting aspect is the use of the LMS for teaching teachers about instructional design, including goals, interaction, and evaluation. Many LMS have a particular view of pedagogy implicit in them and assume the course developer knows what it is and agrees with that view of learning.

The paper emphasises the need for support personnel, with instructional specialists to support faculty members and training on using the tools.

LMS tend to make a distinction between the teachers and the students. Perhaps these distinctions need to be removed and a common set of tools provided which can be used both by the teachers and the students. These would include tools for organising and disseminating information, collaborating with people and collecting views and assessment.

Learning Management Systems for multi-disciplinary teaching

Srinivas Chemboli runs the Varietas Multidisciplinary Teaching Interest Group at the Australian National Unviersity in Canberra. This week's meeting is on learning management systems (LMSs) for multi-disciplinary teaching (all welcome):

The Varietas TiG will meet today at 11:30 at N329, CSIT Building [Bldg 108]

Agenda

• LMS needs for multi-disciplinary and disciplinary teaching/research/collaboration
• What should a wish-list for a LMS comprise of?
• Document creation/management tools
• Focus on function and goals, not specific technologies
• Communicate/discuss the proposed draft outline for group activities via LMS
• Support for logically ordered communication
• Calendaring/meeting-manager support
• Support for blended/flexible learning
• Set up a time-frame/agree upon an action-plan to draft the needs statements for an LMS
• Assess existing LMS options in the context of the needs statements
• Integrating cross-disciplinary strengths in teaching
• The logistics of a cross-disciplinary group course