The Educause Center for Applied Research (ECAR) has published its 2009 study on the use of information technology by undergraduate students.  This is part of a longitudinal study begun in 2004 aiming to “shed light on how technology effects the college experience.”

Students are asked about their skill level with technology, their preferences, and how technology affects their learning.  The ultimate goal is to help colleges identify information technology environments that are a factor in student learning and overall satisfaction.

Briefly, the study found that college students want a balance between “real books and people” and the use of technology in the classroom.  They see a disparity in teacher expertise with technology. They are comfortable with many technologies, but are more likely to identify themselves as not early adopters and prefer only a moderate amount of IT in their courses.

They are also heavy users of mobile technology.  You can see in the image that 33% of students say they own and use an Internet-capable handheld device and another 11.8% plan to purchase one in the next 12 months.  18% own such a device but do not access the Internet with it.  However, half of the students, particularly older ones, agreed that instructors should have the authority to ban cell phone and handheld device use during class because it is distracting.

Take a look at the key findings (PDF).  Or find more information about the ECAR study and links to various reports here.

Howcast Media, Inc. says that “from How to Write a Resume to How to Jump-Start Your Car, Howcast provides the answer to any how-to question.”  They do this by engaging consumers to watch and share free, useful how-to videos and guides produced in-house or by their media partners, trusted brands, and individual contributors.

A friend called my attention to Howcast so I watched a couple of the “how to” videos on their site, including one on how to use Twitter.  I thought they were fairly well done.  The small ads at the bottom of  the videos were a bit annoying but I found tbey could be removed by clicking on “x.”

The video content is distributed across a network of web, mobile, and cable partners, including YouTube, MySpace, Hulu, AOL, Yahoo!, Comcast, Apple, TiVo and Verizon.

“In addition to the Howcast Studios, the Emerging Filmmakers Program offers up-and-coming filmmakers the chance to gain experience, exposure, and extra income by creating short how-to videos.”  The filmmakers program has partnered with film and television programs at Boston University, Flashpoint Academy, and Charles Sturt University to expose students to web video production.

Howcast was named a top web site of 2008 by both TIME and PC Magazine, profiled in the New York Times Sunday Business Section, nominated for two Webby Awards and has had its iPhone app featured in an Apple iPhone commercial.

At OnlineColleges.net you’ll find links to tutorials for those interested in incorporating Twitter into their teaching.

They point out that “using Twitter in education has been all the buzz recently.  If you are ready to start using Twitter yourself and need a little help getting started or have already been using it and can use a little extra help, then these tutorials are just for you.”

The site has links to everything from how to set up a Twitter account to practical ideas for using Twitter in elearning.  It also includes links to video highlights showing how Twitter is being used in promoting education.

In a study funded by the U.S. Department of Education, Evaluation of Evidence-Based Practices in Online Learning (PDF), online learning was broken down into three types: expository (learners receive information via digital means), active (learners build knowledge by manipulating online tools), interactive (learners build knowledge through collaborative interaction).

Online learning certainly doesn’t mean the end for teachers, Mashable notes.  “Online learning tools are just like any other tools in a teacher’s bag of tricks: what matters is how they’re applied.  The instruction of good teachers will be made better by the proper application of web tools, while bad teachers won’t necessarily be made better by utilizing online education methods.”

Appropriate use of the tools at the teacher’s disposal will maximize the learning impact of education for students, separating good teachers from bad ones. “The major difference between teachers of today and teachers of the future is that in the future educators will have better online tools and will require better specialized training to learn how to utilize them properly.”

Online learning environments can produce results that are just as good or better than classroom learning.  We can expect it to be used more often to enhance face-to-face learning and where classroom learning is infeasible due to lack of funds, or desirable because of convenience.  Teachers will need to continue to adapt and learn to employ future technologies.

Here’s some tips for using Twitter to advantage in higher education from DIOSA Communications.  I’ll list them briefly; see the post for details.

1.  Don’t use Twitter for traditional marketing messages. Build community.
2.   Don’t use Twitter for RSS or publish “News” unless you call your Twitter profile “News.”
3.  Have Twitter accounts for various departments.
4.  Be nice, thankful, reply and retweet.
5.  Follow everyone who follows you.
6.  Use “Favorites” to organize the chaos and feature your most important Tweets.
7.  Provide value, not chit-chat.
8.  Don’t tweet only your own content — f it is a good read or a good resource, pass it along.
9.  Send messages, but not via auto-responders.
10. Limit your Tweets to 5 or 6 per day.
11. Get professional training on how use Twitter.  (Or, my advice, at least read the many style guides, and tips on Twitter.)

I used to do quite a bit of screencasting and was happy to have Camtasia Studio to allow me to do a number of functions.  But these days, I’m only likely to need a simple (and preferably easy) app.

Screenr just launched yesterday.  It is a free app that runs inside your browser (nothing to download!), with the twist that when you are finished recording you can send your video directly to your Twitter followers.  Before you send your screencast to Twitter, you can review your recording and add a description, says ReadWriteWeb.

You don’t have to send your video to Twitter, but for a lot of users, this will be the main reason to use Screenr. “The integration with Twitter also goes one step further, as you can re-tweet a screencast right from within the application and when you leave a comment, you can also choose to send it to Twitter as an @reply to the author.”

You can also embed your video in a blog post, upload it directly to YouTube, or download it to your desktop for more editing.  Check out the Screenr home page for a short video tour and a number of examples of screencasts that users have created.

Screenr has a lot of competition.  We have mentioned Jing here before.  All screencasters have a similar range of features, but with Screenr it is extremely easy to record a video and share it with your Twitter friends.  If you don’t already have a free Twitter account, this is a good time to get with it.

Online and technology-based resources have become increasingly popular as innovative teachers explore their use to improve their students learning experience.

ReadWriteWeb lists seven of these tools:

• Scitable: Free online access to key scientific and genetics concepts.
• Edutopia: Won the 2009 Webby Award for high quality videos for educators.
• LearnHub: Good site for standardized test prep and basic K-12 education exercises.
• Moodle: Free open source course management platform designed to help teachers create better online resources.
• Edmodo: An invite-only service for micro-blogging.
• YouTube Edu:  Allows students and educators to access lectures from leading educators.
• ESL Video:  ESL teachers can create video quizzes to specific learning units or create simple vocabulary quizzes.

Add free Jing to your apps arsenal
Three TechSmith products works well together, including a freebie — Jing.  The other two are SnagIt, which I use almost daily, and Camtasia Studio, which I have used to create online workshops.

Use Jing to capture what you see on the Web, make a point, and share instantly.  According to Jing, you can do something personal such as narrating your vacation photos, or use it professionally to collaborate on a design project or share a snapshot of a document.

A friend, Jean Kent, who teaches web development, uses Jing to respond to student work that needs some corrections or changes.  It’s quick to do and she uploads the Jing video to ScreenCast.com and sends the link to the student.  Jean’s surveys of her students tell her they really appreciate her using Jing to give them feedback.

If the free version of Jing doesn’t have enough features for your needs, Jing Pro is only $14.95/year

bing making headway
A few days ago, TechChruch noted that bing, Microsoft’s new search engine, was having a strong showing, according to comScore stats.  Its market share increased to 12.1 percent during bing’s second week, up from its previous showing.

When bing was introduced, I tried it out as my default search engine and was so pleased with the results, I continued to use it.  Usually with a new search engine, I find myself quickly going back to Google for everyday searching.  Then yesterday while once more investigating a topic of interest to me, I felt I had exhausted bing and tried the same search with Google.  I was rather startled to discover good relevant sites I had not found with bing — now I am back to relying on Google.

I read yesterday in several places, for instance here and here, about a free “answer engine” — not to be confused with a search engine — called WolframAlpha.  I tried off and on all day to log on, but I guess everyone else was trying, too, and I never succeeded.

It’s a new day, however, and I have been playing around on the site, adding it to my list of very valuable Internet resources, and wishing it were named something shorter and snappier.  WolframAlpha is “a computational knowledge engine: it generates output by doing computations from its own internal knowledge base, instead of searching the web and returning links,” according to information at the site.

Among its long-term and far reaching goals:

• to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone;
• to collect and curate all objective data; implement every known model, method, and algorithm;
• to make it possible to compute whatever can be computed about anything;
• to build on the achievements of science and other systematizations of knowledge in order to provide a single source that can be relied on by everyone for definitive answers to factual queries.

They suggest some examples to try.  For instance, check out the info you get when you enter two stocks: Microsoft and Amazon.  You’ll get an up-to-date stock quote and a comparison of the two along the lines of market cap, revenue, net income and so forth.  There is also a chart showing a 5-year rate of return which showed me that I own the wrong stock.  Want to know basic facts about a date? a city?  Or select from their visual gallery of examples

In order to serve as a knowledge engine with powerful results presented with clarity, they expect to bring in the expertise of a wide range of professionals.  A capsule comment from their site:  “Wolfram|Alpha is an ambitious, long-term intellectual endeavor that we intend will deliver increasing capabilities over the years and decades to come.”

The compiler says that, “From preschool to graduate education, these 100 blogs are a great starting point for educators looking for inspiration and innovation.”

Educators can find answers and valuable teaching resources in these blogs.  Includes General Teaching Blogs, Specialty Subject Blogs, Best Podcasts for Teachers, Best Video Blogs for Teachers.  [via iLibrarian]

Photo by peiqianlong. Creative Commons license.