iterativelearning

When Web 2.0 first started to catch fire among faculty teaching online, the widespread assumption was that the NetGen students would be extremely adept at using the tools because they used them all the time to connect with their friends, check out new music and videos, and so on. But some recent research has been chipping away at this assumption (e.g., Digital Learners not Digital Natives and Not so techno-savvy).

Continuing this trend is a story from the Chronicle of Higher Ed. on researchers from the Community College Research Center at Columbia’s Teacher College who looked at students taking online classes from various community colleges in Washington state. One of the key take-aways was how this assumption overlooks the factor of socio-economics:

People assume this generation is super-technologically sophisticated, but that’s not necessarily true, especially in the community-college population, which tends to be low income, disadvantaged …

The CHE Tech Blog recently wrote about a lawsuit against Zotero. Apparently, Thomson Reuters has claimed that the folks behind Zotero have simply reverse engineered its EndNote tool and integrated it with their own free tool. As a fan of Zotero, this was disappointing to read. Even though I don’t use EndNote, this seems to have echoes of RIAA. Similar to the outcry against the RIAA, Zotero’s supporters have been quick to speak out against the suit. So is this RIAA all over again? Perhaps, not; some other pretty significant voices in the ed-tech world think Thomson Reuters might have a legitimate claim (e.g., Michael Feldstein). Even if Thomson Reuters has a legitimate claim, the lawsuit seems a little heavy-handed as a first move. Why not first just call and talk and see what happens? Probably naive on my part.