I don't know how much of this has reached Tulsa yet, but it is certainly HighTech, and I just read of several ways Education is embracing online to try to teach better.
Education Week: Breaking Away From Tradition talks about
As the world of online education continues to evolve, brick-and-mortar schools are incorporating digital curricula and virtual teachers into their classrooms in ways that have surprised even the advocates of the online education movement.
Once mostly catering to advanced students who educators believed had the motivation to pursue education online, virtual courses are growing in popularity for struggling students, too. And school districts and teachers that once felt threatened by the surge of online education are embracing the technology, often in a hybrid model that blends face-to-face learning with digital teaching and curricula.
A 2009 report from the Sloan Consortium, a Needham, Mass.-based advocacy group for online education, found that the number of K-12 students using online courses rose to more than a million public school students during the 2007-08 school year. That was a 47 percent increase from 2005-06.
They go on to say
Chicago's VOISE Academy High School, which opened in September 2008 with 9th graders, provides each student with an in-school laptop computer and an at-home desktop model. A significant hurdle, however, has been that the mostly low-income families of students must still pay for their home Internet connections.
This is college, not high school, but a good friend of mine attends classes at Southern Nazarene University here in Tulsa, and they required each of their students to have the same brand of laptop, and I have reason to believe that is the case for many other colleges and universities.
Education Week goes on to say
The 1,358-student Tarrant, Ala., city school system has had success with online courses provided by the ACCESS program (for Alabama Connecting Classrooms, Educators, and Students Statewide), a state-sponsored distance-learning initiative, says district Superintendent Martha P. Rizzuto. The courses, which often have a videoconferencing component and use teachers across the state, have worked particularly well for situations in which a handful of students want or need to take a course, but the number isn't large enough to justify hiring a full-time teacher, Rizzuto says.
They also indicated
The report, "Keeping Pace With K-12 Online Learning," (Requires Adobe Acrobat Reader) released in November 2008 by Evergreen Consulting Associates, an Evergreen, Colo.-based firm, found that more U.S. students are using online courses for credit recovery than for Advanced Placement classes.
You think that is far out? As this indicates, on March 27-29, 2009 there was a Best Practice in Education Conference held, not in this world, but in the Virtual World of Second Life. 700+ educators from various universities participated, some who have never been in-world.
I learned about the Best Practice in Education Conference from Elizabeth Stenger, an educator both in the Real World and in Second Life. In the real world, Tec-Know-Kids is one of her clients, and in the virtual world she is known as CallieDel Boa, one of approximately 1700 mentors who help teach newcomers how to do things in Second Life.
Here is the schedule of the conference
As the wiki says:
This grassroots, community-based conference attracts faculty, instructors, trainers, administrators, instructional designers, technical specialists, and members of organizations from around the world. Those who create teaching/learning environments, resources, tools, support services and professional development opportunities internal and external to virtual world environments participate. During the conference, participants have opportunities to ask: What is education?, What is teaching?, What is learning? and How can we provide virtual world educational environments in which today's learners can become all they can be.
The VWBPE Conference provides opportunities for virtual world communities to showcase projects, courses, events and research that lead to best practices in education. The end result of collaborating, sharing, and co-construction of knowledge during the conference is the creation of innovative and immersive environments in which virtual world residents can learn, work, and play.
I am interested in education, so I went the first day. Just as I teleported in I saw "a Linden", i.e. John Lester, from Liden Labs, creators of Second Life, a.k.a. Pathfinder Linden. As I was recovering from seeing one of the creators of this virtual world, and as I had just moved off the teleport stand, teleporting in over my shoulder was my good friend CallieDel Boa. I caught at least part of both in this photo. I'm the guy with the Visual Studio shirt I got at a Microsoft event earlier, and wearing a Cowboy Hat Callie "built".
I went on one of the Virual World Tours, and one of the places we went was built by Texas State Technical College, and the specific SLURL (Second Life address) is http://snipurl.com/eh8v3.
Recently I had been talking to a photographer friend of mine, and we both comiserated that they don't seem to teach Composition, and particularly the Rule of Thirds, any more. Well Paula, they apparently teach it at Texas State Technical College (TSTC),
because they built a kiosk to demonstrate it.
They have a very busy picture, and a rectangle broken into thirds, and you can make it horizontal or vertical, larger or smaller, and move it all around the larger picture, centering one of the intersections of the two horizontal and two vertical lines, then go to the next image, and do it again.
They also have an SLR camera, sliced in half, and they trace light as it goes through the camera.
Photography is not the only artistic subjects taught at TSTC. Here is one of several panels on the Principles of Art.
TSTC also covers the internals of computers, and although I have not had a chance to check it out, I understand that on Dell Island there is a computer your Avatar can walk through.
Elizabeth/CallieDel Boa told me:
Many who are disabled, either physically or mentally, are no longer limited by physical [restrictions] and are able to expereinece in SL what they can no longer do physically or for some, things they will never be able to do or see in a physical envoirment. This is where my entusiasum comes from when I Mentor people.
No longer are the boundries of physical borders an issue or physical limitations. Places like SL are open and available to anyone.
Most of the people I know who are the best content creators of SL are disabled physically. They emerge themselves in developing their creation, a lot through Gimp & PhotoShop, to earn money in Second Life they are not capable of making in 1st life. Many earn $2,500 to $3,000 a month, and that is US Dollars, not Linden Dollars (L$). Rates fluctuate based on supply and demand, but the current conversion rate is approximately 250 Linden Dollars (L$) to the US Dollar.