NYTimes’ “Knowledge Network”

From the Wired Campus blog at the Chronicle of Higher Education:

September 6, 2007

New York Times Develops Online Course Content

The New York Times today began to pair its articles, multimedia offerings, and even its reporters with faculty-created course material from about a dozen institutions, letting professors use the new resource for both credit-bearing and continuing-education courses.
The project puts the newspaper’s Knowledge Network on an interactive Web platform called Epsilen Environment, developed at Purdue and Indiana Universities. Epsilen works like an academic version of Facebook, says Felice Nudelman, director of education at the newspaper. “Faculty members can put up profiles, including résumés and important papers, and work they would like reviewed by their peers,” she says. “They can form working groups around topics of common interest.”

They can also develop courses around those topics, and students at different universities will have the chance to participate. Mount Holyoke College, for instance, is developing course work around the art and craft of film; Northern Kentucky University is creating a series of studies on women and entrepeneurship.

The cost for universities to participate varies, Ms. Nudelman says, but can be as low as $1 per student per year.­—Josh Fischman

Comments and Annotations

Here’s a brief item on what could be a very useful tool for sharing comments and annotating texts with students.

Social Scholarship

Kevin Wiliarty at Academic Commons has a useful intro to Laura Cohen’s post on “2.0 scholarship”. Wiliarty discusses a number of additional social software resources worth investigating including SlideShare, Scribd, Zoho, and ThinkFree.

University of Manitoba’s LTC Wiki

The University of Manitoba’s Learning Technologies Centre is hosting a wiki devoted to “New Technologies for Teaching and Learning.”  It has basic information for faculty on using blogs, wikis, audio, video, webconferencing, flickr, and social bookmarking. I’m adding to the list of resources on the right panel.

Centers for Teaching and Learning

I was asked by a colleague if there are centers for teaching and learning comparable to CNDLS at Georgetown.  A quick and dirty search of the web reveals a range of centers from the community college level at Maricopa to the large and "homey" university sites such as UNC-Chapel Hill.

A few others are at Stanford (and a second site here), Univ. of Chicago, Univ. of Minnesota, Minnesota State, Harvard, and Cornell.

And here’s a directory, compiled at Hofstra, of centers for teaching and learning in the U.S.  I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader to rank them in terms of comparability.

CNDLS @ Georgetown

One of our colleagues, Dominic Pettman who teaches cultural theory and media applications at Lang, recently pointed me to the Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship (CNDLS) at Georgetown.  The website contains information about projects in which faculty work closely with academic technology staff to enhance teaching and learning.

Here’s a brief description of the Center:

Since 2000, CNDLS has supported faculty and graduate students with
tools, resources, and opportunities for new learning environments. We
began with a mission to bridge a historic gulf between pedagogy and
technological advances, and today CNDLS integrates a teaching and
learning center with the latest educational technology. Our team of
experienced educators facilitates a broad-based program that promotes
discovery, engagement, and diversity in an ever-expanding conception of
learning.

To take just one example, the profile of Jim Slevin’s course Literacy, Literacy Education, and Social Justice describes the use of Blackboard, MS Word, and wikis to help students understand the way one’s choice of medium can affect content.

Thanks to Dominic for passing this on.  If you know of similar sites, please feel free to send the links.