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Big app on campus

By Candace Lombardi, CNET News.com on August 1, 2007

Summary

Universities are using Web 2.0-style tools to tap into a generation's lust for celebrity as they revamp learning and recruiting.

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"One of the pain points in higher education is that they said "no" to a whole bunch of people and are counting on kids to accept. They know they need X percent," said Day.

A social-networking environment gets students comfortable with a school well before freshman orientation, said Day. Prospective students can e-mail roommates, make friends and find out the best campus hangouts even before they accept admission.

Some universities use video downloads to introduce professors.

Apple's iTunes--though met with skepticism among professors wary of freely distributing their valuable content--is a useful public relations tool, according to Rhonda Blackburn, assistant director at Texas A&M University. Professors have used it to post videos introducing themselves, their research and their classes.

Once students get to universities, the tools continue. Classes in which content is pushed out one way to students are becoming passe. Instead, instructors are beginning to distribute lecture content to encourage intellectual debate and research online--away from the classroom--and are using class time for more in-depth discussion.

Knauff said self-publishing tools are an enticing way to get college students to develop original thoughts as opposed to simply repeating what they think professors want to hear. Students are collectively creating glossaries and repositories for academic articles, audio files and videos.

"They write for their peers as well and it creates a different motivation. They want to do well, don't want to look phony and get excited about the projects with the media aspect," said Knauff.

The multimedia or personal stuff that professors may think of as flashy filler is getting students to make an emotional investment in their education. "Sure, the content they offer is not as good as if a faculty member produced it. The content expert is always going to be better at creating the content, but that's not the point," said Knauff.

And it goes beyond blogs replacing reading journals for undergrad American lit classes. Dartmouth's medical school students use wikis to author, share and critique case studies.

Michael Barrett, a doctor and clinical associate professor at the Temple University School of Medicine, found that listening to heartbeat audio files drastically improved stethoscope skills.

In a study Barrett presented in March to the American College of Cardiology, 149 doctors correctly identified heartbeats 80 percent of the time, compared with the usual 40 percent. Barrett initially distributed his files on CD, until his students suggested he make the files available to iPods.

Kenneth Hartman, academic director of Drexel University's eLearning program and teacher of graduate education classes, uses TVEyes.com, a search site for major TV and radio content, to automatically feed students relevant video content.

Some Texas A&M professors use Camtasia, a software program that enables users to create videos of screen captures with voice-overs and an aid for figuring out complicated math problems.

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