schultafel image by Carsten Meyer from Fotolia.comMore and more blackboards are going blank as new technologies open new worlds of instruction.When beginning readers have their own electronic book readers with touch screens and anyone in the world with Internet access can reach into the collections of the world's greatest national libraries to all but handle the firsthand account of a shipwreck on Palau at the turn of the 19th century, it becomes complicated to say what is and isn't "instructional technology." There's a new technique every time an instructor -- or a self-directed learner -- opens a page of a website or sits before a Web cam. The unifying innovation is how closely the world is approaching universal access to information.Learning-Object RepositoriesLibraries are being redefined by communication, computing and archiving technologies. No longer mere collections of hard copy, they are the holders of rapidly expanding accumulations of files and materials that educators may create and make available, but students will make use of it their own way. College students in the United States are actually organizing to have more textbooks made available as digital files that instructors can tailor to their particular courses. Students won't have to lug around textbooks in addition to their laptop computers and smart phones. Most importantly, they won't feel manipulated into buying new textbooks every semester, knowing they lack a fair resale value. The technologies that students use in their daily lives are making the old instructional technologies seem obsolete.Instruction Unbound by Time or Space"Webcast" and "webinar" have become entrenched in the vocabulary of education as well as business. Instructors can deliver lectures to even larger numbers of students by creating "movies" with simple interactive options and attachments. Students who view these webcasts can do so at their own pace and are free to replay and pause the lecture to look into a source or explore their own ideas sparked by the lecturer. This ability may help the student to get more out of the lecture because they are more in control of the lesson and more responsible for their learning experience. According to a January 2007 white paper titled "Teaching With Technology" by Ashley Deal of Carnegie-Mellon University, teaching this way can be less stressful for students.Technology and CollaborationLearners, whether or not formally enrolled in educational programs, have access to information sources of unprecedented and constantly growing proportions. In 2005, the U.S. Librarian of Congress, James H. Billington, proposed to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, or UNESCO, a collaboration with other national libraries, great and small, to provide digital access to their collections, including manuscripts, maps, rare books, musical scores, recordings, films, prints, photographs and architectural drawings. The UNESCO World Digital Library was launched in April 2009, already containing at least one item from almost every one of the UNESCO member nations, from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe. Access requires only an Internet connection, though the size of some files, such as high-quality photographs -- cover to cover and page by page -- of multivolume print works from the 17th and 18th centuries, complete with high-resolution images of their copper engravings, make broadband access nearly a necessity. The library catalog is fully searchable and yields detailed descriptive information that can be read or read by a computer-generated voice in Arabic, English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Russian or Chinese. You also can click through to see an item in the member library's collection. Or you might, for instance, choose to hear an 1898 recording of the "Marseillaise" from the collection of the National Library of France. References The Student PIRGs: Open Textbooks Carnegie Mellon University Lecture Webcasting: A Teaching with Technology White Paper Library and Information Resources: Emerging Visions for Access in the Twenty-first Century Library UNESCO: World Digital Library Vtech Kids: Vreader ResourcesITC Library: List of Resources on Various Aspects of Distance Learning

• Innovative Techniques in Instructional Technology [10/12/2010 03:00:01]