Laptop computers have become commonplace in K-12 and college classrooms. With that, educators now face a critical decision. Should they embrace computers and put technology at the center of their instruction? Should they allow students to decide for themselves whether to use computers during class? Or should they ban screens altogether and embrace…

How can educators make use of augmented reality technologies and practices to enhance learning and why would we want to embrace such technologies anyway? How can an augmented reality help a learner confront, interpret and ultimately comprehend reality itself ? In this article, we seek to initiate a discussion that focuses on these questions, and…

Alumni relations professionals need a method of measuring alumni engagement, including giving, that goes beyond counting event attendees and the number of Twitter followers. Social media are changing the way things have been done within the alumni relations profession, but that does not mean that people throw out everything they have done in the…

Institutions already cater to the technology needs of students. According to the 2008 Campus Computing survey, 60 percent of colleges and universities offer pervasive or near-pervasive wireless; computers are as ubiquitous as water bottles; course management systems have become one-stop shops for class content; few classrooms lack projectors; and…

Just a few years ago, virtual worlds were credited with the power to transform the universe. Used since the late 1990s in military and medical applications, virtual worlds first gained mainstream media attention when Linden Lab released Second Life in 2003. While other worlds, including open source environments, have launched since then (examples…

At the end of 2010, for the first time ever, smartphones outsold PCs. Mobile device adoption rates continue to rise rapidly around the world. A recent forecast by Cisco found that global mobile data traffic more than doubled last year, and by the end of 2012, the number of mobile devices in use will outnumber the world's population. In the United…

Two decades ago, many campuses mobilized a major effort to deal with a clear problem; faculty and students needed access to desktop computing technologies. Now the situation is much more complex. Responding to the current challenges, like mobile computing and social networking, will be ore difficult but equally important. There is a clear need for…

A lack of good information about what youth are doing with new media stimulates fears and hopes about the relationship between young people and digital technologies. This article focuses on new modes of inquiry into youth new media use, highlighting the challenges, complexities, and opportunities inherent in studying young people's digital…

The documents enclosed in this report provide a comprehensive and systematic review of the progress made in developing a network organization capable of supporting nanoscience education for the public on a national scale. There is a logic to the studies that were done and to the reports that are included in this notebook. The following are the…