There was an article in the Red Eye on Friday, October 19th about young people not wanting their parents or “creepy old people”—which includes anyone over 40—on the social networking site Facebook. (If you’re not familiar with local Chicago media, the Red Eye is a popular free newspaper. Although it’s unseemly for a librarian to be caught with one, the paper is the perfect length for a relaxing commute read.) There are a number of things that I found interesting about this article, especially as we in higher education examine ways to connect with students where they already are.

Running the video production team for IDD, I am often asked to include subtitles with the videos we create. However, we don’t really have an efficient workflow for producing subtitles and I am often unable to fulfill the request. I know we need to improve our ability in creating subtitles—not only to meet the demands of our diverse student body (students with disabilities, international students, etc.), but also to allow for text-based video-searching, which will increase each video’s value as a learning object.

Depending on where you stand, education is poised to be elevated into the sublime heights of effortless and ubiquitous real-time virtual interaction and connectivity, or about to be overrun by leering mountebanks as tech-bewitched apostates unbar and swing wide the sacred doors of academia.

At least that’s my take on the current discourse regarding Second Life. I attended the University of Wisconsin’s Conference on Distance Teaching and Learning in early August, then the Second Life Community Convention in Chicago August 24-26, and was struck by the divide between those for whom Second Life is just too cool, and those who are left just a bit cold.

The Educause Center for Applied Research (ECAR) recently released its fourth annual research study on the role of technology in student life, which describes their findings of the ways college students use technology and the impact this may have on instruction. In case you don’t want to leaf through the 122-page PDF, you can read Andy Guess’s article in Inside Higher Education for an excellent analysis of the study. But the ECAR report is well worth reading. The tables and stats alone will come in handy for you to whip out at any cocktail party when the discussion turns to “these kids today”.

I took my first French class in 10th grade at a public school in a small Alabama town. The class was typical of most high-school foreign language courses. We spoke mostly in English and the assessments were designed to ensure that no one would fail the class. Vocabulary tests typically asked us to pair French terms in column A with their English equivalents in column B, like so:

Grammar tests were only slightly more challenging and usually consisted of simple sentences with missing verbs to conjugate, as shown below: