Latest News and Comment from Education

Tuesday, June 8, 2010

Blog U.: Closing the Idea-to-Curriculum Gap - Technology and Learning - Inside Higher Ed

Blog U.: Closing the Idea-to-Curriculum Gap - Technology and Learning - Inside Higher Ed


  • Closing the Idea-to-Curriculum Gap

    By Joshua Kim June 8, 2010 9:26 pm
    One advantage of learning technology is it can help us close the gap between and idea and curriculum. When I first started teaching (in grad school in 1993) the task of finding teaching materials was extremely time consuming. I remember spending lots of time at the photocopy machine, transferring charts and graphs to plastic transparencies that I'd display in class with the overhead. Collecting VHS tapes to show video segments in class was a particular passion of mine - leading my (shared) grad student office that was cluttered with tapes. Good teaching content was a scarce and valuable commodity, and it was difficult to rapidly locate and process "just in time" non-text based curriculum.
    Today we are able to find and share rich curricular materials with amazing agility and ease. YouTube, Google Image Search, and FlickR, combined with the ease of sharing these materials in the LMS (as links or embed code), has moved rich curricular development from a scarce to an abundant good. Where in the past we may have shared with our students only a