EDUCAUSE Quarterly on Student Engagement

The latest issue of EDUCAUSE Quarterly has been released and it is a special issue with a focus on student engagement: "a rendez-vouse between learning and digital tools and techniques that excite students."

Check it out online.

Using Flash to breath new life into old statistics

You may remember Hans Rosling from his popular speaking engagements at TED. His team of developers used Flash to take existing data and present it in a way that allows the viewer to easily grasp complex patterns of social change in the developing world. Users can experiment with the interactive data graph online at Gapminder.org.

How might this type of interactive data visualization be utilized by educational institutions with other topics such as Engineering or Nursing? Visualizing stresses on machinery over time? Or the effects of combining medication on a patient?

How the iPhone Could Reboot Education

A recent article in Wired highlights how iPhones and iPods are being used as learning aids in a pilot program at a Texas university.

No Evidence to Support Use of Learning Style Assessments

A newly-released review of the literature on learning styles concludes there is no scientific basis for using learning style assessments in education to make decisions about teaching and learning methods.

Writing in the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest, Harold Pashler, Mark McDaniel, Doug Rohrer, and Robert Bjork argue that few of the studies of learning styles used appropriate experimental methods that would allow appropriate conclusions to be drawn about the impact of customizing instruction for particular learning styles. Furthermore, in the few studies that did use appropriate methods, the results do no support the hypothesis that tailoring instruction to learning styles will improve performance.

They conclude that "at present, there is no adequate evidence base to justify incorporating learning- styles assessments into general educational practice. Thus, limited education resources would better be devoted to adopting other educational practices that have a strong evidence base, of which there are an increasing number."

What's your digital identity?

Digital Tattoo is a web-based learning resource created at the University of British Columbia to support students in learning how to be proactive about gaining control over their digital identity.

And over at SCoPE, there's a discussion about the many threads digital identity can entail. If we hold back what we share about ourselves digitally, are we creating roadblocks to knowledge sharing and knowledge making? If we post that less that flattering photo, how will it haunt us in the future, and even if it does, will we be forgiven?