Learning technology alone does not necessarily advance learning; well-integrated learning technologies and practices often do. With learning principles and practices in mind, technology is being used in service of learning. New technologies may advance learning; even traditional technologies, when implemented with pedagogically sound practices, can result in significant learning gains.
Questions the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) explores include:
What are the emerging learning technologies and practices, and how can we use them?
How do we accommodate emerging practices associated with new learning technologies within our institutions?
How do we evaluate the potential impact new technologies and practices may have on advancing learning?
What do our students think about these technologies and higher education's perspective on them?
How can we understand what is happening on our campuses? Can surveys help us develop strategies that align student and faculty expectations for the use of learning technologies?
Get an Overview of the Topic
The Horizon Report
The annual Horizon Report is a collaborative effort between the New Media Consortium (NMC) and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI). Each year, the report identifies six areas of emerging technology likely to have a significant impact on teaching and learning in higher education over the next one, three, and five years. Web links to additional resources and examples are provided for each technology cited.
The Evolving Technologies Committee is charged with identifying emerging technologies and evaluating their impact on higher education for the EDUCAUSE community. Each year members of the committee identify and research such technologies and develop Evolving Technologies Reports. The information gathered is presented at a meeting of the committee during the EDUCAUSE Annual Conference.
The ChemCollective This Web site contains a collection of virtual labs, scenario-based learning activities, and concept tests. They can be incorporated into a variety of teaching approaches as prelabs, alternatives to textbook homework, or in-class activities for individuals or teams. It is organized by a group of faculty and staff at Carnegie Mellon University for college and high school teachers interested in using, assessing, and/or creating engaging online activities for chemistry education.
The Croquet Project Croquet is a combination of open source computer software and network architecture that supports deep collaboration and resource sharing among large numbers of users. Such collaboration is carried out within the context of a large-scale distributed information system. The software and architecture define a framework for delivering a scalable, persistent, and extensible interface to network delivered resources.
National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education (NITLE) Research: Casual Games NITLE's Casual Games site identifies an array of computer games that are playable through Web browsers. Their content can be action, puzzle, simulation, storytelling, point-and-click exploration, or any other genre, and their tone can be comic, tragic, neutral, playful, political, or other.
PublicHealthGames.com The Center for the Advancement of Distance Education in the School of Public Health at the University of Illinois-Chicago develops and maintains the PublicHealthGames.com site. It provides state-of-the-art games and simulations for public health workers and emergency responders to help them train for a multitude of catastrophic scenarios.
Rice University, Connexions Project Connexions is an environment for collaboratively developing, freely sharing, and rapidly publishing scholarly content on the Web. Its Content Commons contains educational materials for everyone-from children to college students to professionals-organized in small modules that are easily connected into larger courses. All content is free to use and reuse under the Creative Commons"attribution" license.
The State of Play Academy The State of Play Academy is the first law and technology academy built in a virtual world. Its purpose is to challenge the traditional means of imparting a legal education--in time, place, and manner--by experimenting with opportunities offered by the virtual space.
University of British Columbia, Ancient Spaces Project The Ancient Spaces Project is based at the University of British Columbia in Canada. It aims to create a platform for 3-D modeling of the ancient world, together with a student-built resource for studying ancient society and architecture.
Futurelab Originally part of the United Kingdom's National Endowment for Science, Technology, and the Arts (NESTA), Futurelab is a non-profit research organization dedicated to teaching and learning innovation through technology. Its site offers a showcase of current and past Futurelab projects; research on teaching, learning, and technology innovation; and Viewpoint, Futurelab's page of recurring articles on the future of learning and technology.
JISC e-Learning Focus The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) supports research, development, and use of technology in the United Kingdom's postsecondary education sector. The e-Learning Focus site highlights JISC's e-learning program and its focus areas in e-learning pedagogy, innovation, infrastructure (frameworks and tools), and broad scale implementation (distributed e-learning). Focus area pages offer resources on the use of emerging technologies to advance teaching and learning, including analyses, case studies, practice guides, and tools.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Technology Review.com The companion Web site to MIT's Technology Review magazine, Technology Review.com provides access to articles and forums on emerging technologies across a range of fields, including biotechnology and health care, business, computing, telecommunications, and nanotechnology.
Metaverse Roadmap The Metaverse Roadmap (MVR) is the first public, ten-year forecast and visioning survey of 3D Web technologies, applications, markets, and potential social impacts. Areas of exploration include the convergence of Web applications with networked computer games and virtual worlds, the use of 3D creation and animation tools in virtual environments, and the underlying trends in technologies and practices that will transform the Web in the coming decade.
New Media Consortium, Emerging Technology Initiative/Horizon Report Web Site The NMC's Emerging Technologies Initiative focuses on expanding the boundaries of teaching, learning, and creative expression by creatively applying new tools in new contexts. The Horizon Project, the centerpiece of this initiative, charts the landscape of emerging technologies and produces the annual Horizon Report, which in 2005 was developed in partnership with NLII.
PlayOn The PlayOn project at the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) investigates the social dimensions of massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs) and virtual worlds. They have explored several virtual worlds including Star Wars Galaxies, EverQuest Online Adventures, Second Life, World of Warcraft, and EverQuest II. Project leaders consider these to be "...the most successful virtual worlds to date..." and view them as "...laying the foundations for future environments which may be used for more than entertainment and sociability."
Serious Games Initiative "The Serious Games Initiative is focused on uses for games in exploring management and leadership challenges facing the public sector. Part of its overall charter is to help forge productive links between the electronic game industry and projects involving the use of games in education, training, health, and public policy." This site has two discussion lists of note, Games for Health and Games for Change.
Tools
ELI Discovery Tools
The following ELI Discovery Tools can help you investigate emerging instructional technologies that have potential for enhancing teaching and learning at your institution. Visit the Discovery Tools page to learn more about these ELI resources. PLEASE NOTE: ELI Discovery Tools are open only to ELI members for the first 6 months they are available. If you aren't sure if your institution is an ELI member, please see our list of member organizations.
ELI Discovery Tool: Guide to Blogging A practical exploration of how blogging can be used to support teaching and learning, including the important considerations, current examples, ways to make the case to stakeholders, student and faculty perspectives, and sources for more information.
ELI Discovery Tool: Guide to Podcasting A practical aid for podcasting implementation, covering the ways podcasting can support learning, its relative benefits and limitations as an instructional tool, implementation and assessment considerations, and other important issues.
Applying Technology to Teaching and Learning A set of guides to help you select and integrate technology into teaching and learning—determining the driving learning issues, understanding your options, and implementing the technology that best supports your teaching and learning objectives.
Other Tools
del.icio.us del.icio.us is a social bookmark manager. It allows users to easily add Web pages to their personal collections of links, categorize those links with keywords, access them from any Web browser, and share them among browsers, computers, and other users. What makes del.icio.us a social system is its ability to let users see the links that others have collected as well as who else has bookmarked a specific site. Users can also subscribe to the links of people whose lists they find interesting.
Flickr Flickr is photo blogging site that uses collaborative tagging to organize photos in terms of key word structures or "folksonomies" that have community meaning. This allows for easier search and retrieval, both by the photographer and the people with whom he or she wants to share pictures. Flickr serves as an example of the emerging trend toward community classification of online information and resources; however, it also functions as a basic photo sharing site as well.
Juice: The Cross-Platform Podcast Receiver Juice is a program that allows users to select and automatically download audio files from anywhere on the Web to their computer desktops. Users can then transfer the files to an iPod or other digital media player for access when and where they want.
Related Writings
Cyprien Lomas, Michael Burke, and Carie Page, "Collaboration Tools," ELI White Paper series, August 2008.
New Media Consortium and EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative, The 2005 Horizon Report, January 2005.
Unless otherwise noted, EDUCAUSE holds the copyright on all materials published by the association, whether in print or electronic form. In certain cases the work remains the intellectual property of the individual author(s) (see Special Circumstances). Content from conference speeches, presentations, blogs, wikis and feeds reflect the opinions of the author, and not necessarily those of EDUCAUSE or its members.
Unless otherwise noted, EDUCAUSE holds the copyright on all materials published by the association, whether in print or electronic form. In certain cases the work remains the intellectual property of the individual author(s) (see Special Circumstances). Content from conference speeches, presentations, blogs, wikis and feeds reflect the opinions of the author, and not necessarily those of EDUCAUSE or its members.
