June 2007 News

posted June 29, 2007 Janet de Vry, manager, IT-User Services, has accepted appointment to the EDUCAUSE Advisory Committee on Teaching and Learning. She will serve a three-year term beginning in July.

Members of the committee are professionals with significant experience in innovative uses of technology for creating new learning environments on higher education campuses.

“I feel serving at this level, I can make more of an impact than I would in an individual presentation or individual publication. Technology has not really fulfilled its often-hyped promise to 'transform' education. By interacting with national leaders, perhaps, I can help focus the discussion on those aspects of technology that hold the greatest potential to enhance student learning,” de Vry said.

She said she accepted the position because she is passionate about the potential technology has for enhancing teaching and learning. “I also like to identify those technologies with the greatest potential and with best match in terms of faculty and student time and prior experience with technology. I am especially interested in the potential of wikis to aid the collaborative learning process,” she said. A wiki is a web application designed to allow multiple authors to add, remove, and edit content.

EDUCAUSE is a nonprofit association whose mission is to advance higher education by promoting the intelligent use of information technology. The 12-member, advisory committee's focus is to spearhead the incorporation of leading edge, visionary thinking about higher education instruction into EDUCAUSE programming.

posted June 19, 2007 The recently released Horizon Report identifies and describes emerging technologies and their potential impact on teaching and learning both in and out of the classroom over the next 1-5 years.

The Horizon Report is a collaboration between the New Media Consortium and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative, an EDUCAUSE program.

Key technologies identified in the Horizon Report include social computing, personal broadcasting, cell phones, educational gaming, augmented reality and enhanced visualization and context-aware environments and devices.

Read the full story on UDaily to find out more about these new tools in use at the University of Delaware.