Textbook Costs - Denver Post

The Denver Post recently ran a series of articles on the high costs of text books and student reactions to those costs. This quote is from the article by Howard Pankratz published on October 17th, 2007, Students Rally for Cheaper Books:

Throngs of students on the Auraria campus signed a petition today calling for cheaper textbooks and accountability by book publishers and university faculty that they hope will lessen their financial burden.

The petitions, to be sent to the Colorado legislature, asks legislators to take action this coming session.

"In many ways it — buying books — is like getting a root canal," said Chris Dezember, 39, a theater major at Metropolitan State College. "I spend $500 to $600 a semester on books. It gets costly."

College textbooks are a $6.2 billion industry, according to the National Association of Stores. The College Board estimates that students spent about $940 on books and supplies in the 2006-07 school year, a 30 percent jump in the past five years.

The most recent article (Collegians' book, tuition concerns on same page) quotes students as working towards a legislative solution:

Students from Colorado State University, the University of Colorado at Boulder, Metro State College and the University of Northern Colorado are already working together to push for legislation that would make textbooks cheaper.

I think most business people would see a legislative solution to high textbook costs as cumbersome and inappropriate. There are many other possible solutions among which is NROC and open source content for at least some courses.

Lisa

Authentic Learning Experiences

Had an interesting juxtaposition of two emails today.

The first was from Stephen Downes of OLDaily. Stephen was considering the research and arguments around authentic learning or constructivist learning. Essentially the research seems to support direct or guided learning more strongly than it does minimally guided or constructivist learning as sometimes implemented. Here's the link to that blog post: http://halfanhour.blogspot.com/2007/11/kirschner-sweller-clark-2006-summary.html.

The flip side was a link to a YouTube video produced by a Cultural Anthropology course, which is perhaps an example of a minimally-guided, group project more or less panning the current educational system. This one was actually posted on this blog a couple of weeks ago, but I am slow and didn't watch it until now. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGCJ46vyR9o



Lisa

National Conference Season

The MITE Team is on the road, traveling the country to participate in a growing number of conferences about education, technology and online learning. National conferences tend to bunch up in the fall, but we also present, conduct workshops and organize round tables throughout the year at smaller, focused, regional conferences. We especially enjoy hooking up with NROC members to share tales and ideas.

Each year there are a few consistently popular topics that pop up across most, if not all, of the conferences. As one would expect, these themes show up when they are somewhere between the second stage of innovation and becoming mainstream. Conferences are one of best venues for spreading innovation beyond pioneers. When a conference room is packed with faculty and staff learning about educational applications of games, virtual reality environments, podcasts and web. 2.0 tools, you can expect to see the tools turning up in classrooms and online programs in non-tech subjects at a campus near you.

This year we continue to see standing-room-only sessions around tools that allow instructors and students to co-create immersive and interactive learning. Techie-pioneers were presenting earlier versions of such tools in previous years; now practitioner-pioneers share their reflections on the realities of using the tools to teach. Educators who advocate for more constructivist learning methods should be delighted at the abundance of these types of tools coming into mainstream use.

It's very encouraging to see an increase in sessions on two important non-tech subjects, which we at MITE have been pushing for a few years: sustainable models for open education resource (OER) projects, and inter-institutional collaboratives for developing and sharing digital content. We'll share some new ideas and highlights as we hear them out there.

What other topics are hot this year? We'll report back from the conference circuit, and welcome your comments.