A little too much time was spent on intro/war stories-type material. I would have preferred more of a hands-on approach to testing and using some of the "Web 2.0" tools touted. The session did give me a few new ideas for potential tools to enhance the classroom experience, but I believe that it could have been covered in 1 or 1.5 CPE hours.

"Reader Poll: Tech Tool You're Most Excited to Take into the Classroom," by Julie Meloni, Chronicle of Higher Education, August 10, 2010 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Reader-Poll-Tech-Tool-Youre/26127/

I'm not sure I've ever said this out loud, but ReadWriteWeb is my absolute favorite blog in all the blogosphere, and has been since they began covering all things technology-related in 2003 or so—it's the emphasis on critical thinking and analysis rather than knee-jerk "first!" responses to news and events that makes me respect them so.

Recently, my most favorite RWW author (Audrey Watters) asked educators for input via Twitter: what's the tech tool you're most excited to take into the classroom with you this fall?. Audrey is collecting responses for use in an upcoming RWW story, so between now and August 15th feel free to help her out.

However, I'm interested in your answers as well. No, I don't aim to write a similar story as Audrey, but I do wonder about the different answers based on the different audiences. Audrey's readership comes from the already highly-technologically-inclined, often found on Twitter. The ProfHacker audience in the CHE is not necessarily so. In fact, I think it is safe to say that the majority of the ProfHacker readership is not on Twitter and is more technology-curious than technology-embedded (or invested).

So, I'd like to hear from you as well. In the comments, please let us know what's the tech tool you're most excited to take into the classroom with you this fall? (anything hardware or software "counts," and I'll even accept analog technologies as valid answers)

Hopefully, given your responses and Audrey's own article from (predominantly) her own audience, there will be some interesting food for thought on the state of technology in higher ed.

Jensen Comment
“Taking into the classroom” is a rather ambiguous phrase that should probably read “taking into the course.” In the latter case, something Camtasia is still on my list of important priorities for things to add to virtually any course whether onsite or online ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/video/acct5342/

Camtasia --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camtasia
Camtasia can be used by students as well as instructors.

Bob Jensen's threads on Tricks and Tools of the Trade ---
http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Reader-Poll-Tech-Tool-Youre/26127/

4G (fourth generation wireless) --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4G

"The state of 4G wireless at a glance," MIT's Technology Review, September 21, 2010 ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/wire/26335/?nlid=3540&a=f

This is a summary of how U.S. wireless carriers are dealing with the transition to fourth-generation, or 4G, network technology, which promises faster data speeds:

-- Sprint Nextel Corp. subsidiary Clearwire Corp. already has a 4G network up and running, and Sprint started selling the first compatible phone this summer. But Clearwire is using WiMax, a technology that's imcompatible with LTE, which everyone else is using or plans to use.

-- Verizon Wireless plans to bring LTE to 25 to 30 cities later this year, mainly for PC modems. Phones will come next year.

-- AT&T Inc. plans to launch commercial LTE service in the middle of next year. In the meantime, it's upgrading the speeds on its 3G network.

-- T-Mobile USA hasn't made any specific plans public. It's focusing on upgrading its 3G network for now.

-- LightSquared is a dark-horse entrant funded by a private equity firm. It plans to build an independent LTE network, with service starting next year, but financial and regulatory hurdles remain.

-- MetroPCS Communications Inc. turned on LTE in Las Vegas on Tuesday, and plans to expand it to the rest of its coverage area by January.

Bob Jensen's technology bookmarks are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob4.htm

"Mapping Novels with Google Earth," Chronicle of Higher Education, April 6, 2011 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/mapping-novels/32528?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

Jensen Comment
Various accounting student team projects come to mind using the above technology. One could be an accounting history project in which students map important events in early accounting history, some of which are mentioned at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Theory01.htm#AccountingHistory

Abacus Techniques by Totton Heffelfinger & Gary Flom.

Articles, Excerpts and Analysis

The Abacus vs.The Electric Calculator

In 1946, a contest held in Tokyo, pitted an abacus against an electric calculator; the abacus won, of course.
 

Feynman vs. The Abacus

Richard Feynman battles against the abacus; the result is not surprising (if you know Feynman).
 

Comparing the Chinese and the Mesoamerican Abacus

An analysis contributed by David B. Kelley.

The Roman Hand-Abacus

The Incan Khipu

Lost Tribes, Lost Knowledge

All Things Abacus

Additional Abacus Resources

Resources For Teachers

Photos

Early History of Mathematics and Calculating in China
The best general source for ancient Chinese mathematics is Joseph Needham's Science and Civilisation in China, vol. 3. In this volume you will learn, for example, that the Chinese proved the Pythagorean Theorem at the very latest by the Later Han dynasty (25-221 CE). The proof comes from an ancient text called The Arithmetical Classic of the Gnomon and the Circular Paths of Heaven. The book has been translated by Christopher Cullen in his Astronomy and Mathematics in Ancient China: The Zhou Bi Suan Jing. Needham also discusses the abacus, or suanpan ("calculating plate").
Steve Field, Professor of Chinese, Trinity University, September 24, 2008
Jensen Comment
Later Han Dynasty --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Later_Han_Dynasty_(Five_Dynasties)
Pythagorean Theorem Theorem --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythagorean_Theorem
Pythagorean Theorem (Gougu Theorem in China) History --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythagorean_Theorem#History
Suanpan --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suanpan

A nice timeline of accounting history --- http://www.docstoc.com/docs/2187711/A-HISTORY-OF-ACCOUNTING

From Texas A&M University
Accounting History Outline --- http://acct.tamu.edu/giroux/history.html

Accounting History (across hundreds of years)
 A Change Fifty-Years in the Making, by Jennie Mitchell, Project Accounting WED Interconnect --- http://accounting.smwc.edu/historyacc.htm

Papyrus --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papyrus
Early accounting records were written on papyrus

Serious Accounting Historians May Find Some Things of Use Here
Advanced Papyrological Information System from Columbia University --- http://www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb/projects/digital/apis/

Questions
What was an ancient Greek ploy to combat inflation?
How do you account for interest paid in cabbages during hyperinflation?

"The time has come," the Walrus said,
"To talk of many things:
Of shoes--and ships--and sealing-wax--
Of cabbages--and kings--
And why the sea is boiling hot--
And whether pigs have wings."
Lewis Carroll, The Walrus and the Carpenter --- http://www.jabberwocky.com/carroll/walrus.html

"Papyrus Research Provides Insights Into 'Modern Concerns' of Ancient World," Science Daily, October 30, 2010 --- Click Here
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/10/101029092045.htm?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+sciencedaily+%28ScienceDaily%3A+Latest+Science+News%29

Origins of Double Entry Accounting are Unknown

• 1300s A.D. crusades opened the Middle East and Mediterranean trade routes
• Venice and Genoa became venture trading centers for commerce
• 1296 A.D. Fini Ledgers in Florence
• 1340 A.D. City of Massri Treasurers Accounts are in Double Entry form.
• 1458 A.D.Benedikt Kotruljevic (Croatian) (Dubrovnik,1416-L’Aquila,1469) (His Italian name was Benedetto Cotrugli Raguseo), wrote The Book on the Art of Trading which is now acknowledged to be the first person to write a book describing double-entry techniques (although the origins of double entry bookkeeping in practice are unknown)
• 1494 Luca Pacioli's Summa de Arithmetica Geometria Proportionalita (A Review of Arithmetic, Geometry and Proportions) which is the best known early book on double entry bookkeeping in algebraic form. 

Recall that double entry bookkeeping supposedly evolved in Italy long before it was put into algebraic form in the book Summa by Luca Pacioli  and into an earlier book by Benedikt Kotruljevic.

"A Brief History of Double Entry Book-keeping (10 Episodes) ," BBC Radio ---
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00r401p
Thanks to Len Steenkamp for the heads up

Jolyon Jenkins investigates how accountants shaped the modern world. They sit in boardrooms, audit schools, make government policy and pull the plug on failing companies. And most of us have our performance measured. The history of accounting and book-keeping is largely the history of civilisation.

Jolyon asks how this came about and traces the religious roots of some accounting practices.

Eventually, educators might be able to get copies of these audio files.

October 3, 2009 message from Rick Dull

Benedikt Kotruljevic (Croatian) (Dubrovnik,1416-L’Aquila,1469) (His Italian name was Benedetto Cotrugli Raguseo), who in 1458, wrote "The Book on the Art of Trading" which is now acknowledged to be the first person to write a book describing double-entry techniques? See the American Mathematical Society’s web-site: http://www.ams.org/featurecolumn/archive/book1.html .

Rick Dull

And so on --- I think you get the idea.

One truly valuable research for an accounting history mapping project is the free Accounting Historians Journal archive (although not all of the publications are free online but should be free to students using the hard copy stacks in campus libraries) ---
http://www.olemiss.edu/depts/general_library/dac/files/ahj.html

Using MAAW and Jstor for Accounting History Research ---
http://maaw.info/

Bob Jensen's threads on accounting history ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Theory01.htm#AccountingHistory 

"Treating Higher Ed's 'Cost Disease' With Supersize Online Courses," by Marc Parry, Chronicle of Higher Education, February 26, 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Treating-Higher-Eds-Cost/130934/?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

Oh my God, she's trying to replace me with a computer.

That's what some professors think when they hear Candace Thille pitch the online education experiment she directs, the Open Learning Initiative at Carnegie Mellon University.

They're wrong. But what her project does replace is the traditional system of building and delivering introductory college courses.

Professors should move away from designing foundational courses in statistics, biology, or other core subjects on the basis of "intuition," she argues. Instead, she wants faculty to work with her team to put out the education equivalent of Super Bowl ads: expensively built online course materials, cheaply available to the masses.

"We're seeing failure rates in these large introductory courses that are not acceptable to anybody," Ms. Thille says. "There has to be a better way to get more students—irrespective of where they start—to be able to successfully complete."

Her approach brings together faculty subject experts, learning researchers, and software engineers to build open online courses grounded in the science of how people learn. The resulting systems provide immediate feedback to students and tailor content to their skills. As students work through online modules outside class, the software builds profiles on them, just as Netflix does for customers. Faculty consult that data to figure out how to spend in-person class time.

When Ms. Thille began this work, in 2002, the idea was to design free online courses that would give independent novices a shot at mastering what students learn in traditional classes. But two things changed. One, her studies found that the online system benefits on-campus students, allowing them to learn better and faster than their peers when the digital environment is combined with some face-to-face instruction.

And two, colleges sank into "fiscal famine," as one chancellor put it. Technological solutions like Ms. Thille's promise one treatment for higher education's "cost disease"—the notion, articulated by William G. Bowen and William J. Baumol, that the expense of labor-heavy endeavors like classroom teaching inevitably rises faster than inflation.

For years, educational-technology innovations led to more costs per student, says Mr. Bowen, president emeritus of Prince­ton University. But today we may have reached a point at which interactive online systems could "change that equation," he argues, by enabling students to learn just as much with less "capital and labor."

"What you've got right now is a powerful intersection between technological change and economics," Mr. Bowen tells The Chronicle.

Ms. Thille is, he adds, "a real evangelist in the best sense of the word."

Nowadays rival universities want to hire her. Venture capitalists want to market her courses. The Obama administration wants her advice. And so many foundations want to support her work that she must turn away some would-be backers.

But the big question is this: Can Ms. Thille get a critical mass of people to buy in to her idea? Can she expand the Online Learning Initiative from a tiny darling of ed-tech evangelists to something that truly changes education? A Background in Business

Ms. Thille brings an unusual biography to the task. The 53-year-old Californian spent 18 years in the private sector, culminating in a plum job as a partner in a management-consulting company in San Francisco. She earned a master's degree but not a doctorate, a gap she's now plugging by studying toward a Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania.

She has never taught a college course.

Ms. Thille wasn't even sure she'd make it through her own bachelor's program, so precarious were her finances at the time. Her family had plunged from upper middle class to struggling after her father quit his job at the Lockheed Missiles and Space Company because of his opposition to the Vietnam War. But with jobs and scholarships, she managed to earn a degree in sociology from Berkeley.

After college, Ms. Thille followed her fiancé to Pittsburgh. The engagement didn't last, but her connection to the city did. She worked as education coordinator for a rape-crisis center, training police and hospital employees.

She eventually wound up back in California at the consultancy, training executives and helping businesses run meetings effectively. There she took on her first online-learning project: building a hybrid course to teach executives how to mentor subordinates.

Ms. Thille doesn't play up this corporate-heavy résumé as she travels the country making the case for why professors should change how they teach. On a recent Tuesday morning, The Chronicle tagged along as that mission brought Ms. Thille to the University of Illinois at Chicago, where she was meeting with folks from the university and two nearby community colleges to prepare for the development of a new pre-calculus course.

It's one piece of a quiet but sweeping push to develop, deploy, and test Open Learning Initiative courses at public institutions around the country, led by an alphabet soup of education groups.

The failure rate in such precalculus courses can be so bad that as many as 50 percent of students need to take the class a second time. Ms. Thille and her colleagues hope to improve on that record while developing materials of such quality that they're used by perhaps 100,000 students each year. Facing Skepticism

But first the collaborators must learn how to build a course as a team. As Ms. Thille fires up her PowerPoint, she faces a dozen or so administrators and professors in Chicago. The faculty members segregate themselves into clusters—community-college people mostly in one group, university folks mostly in another. Some professors are learning about the initiative in detail for the first time. There is little visible excitement as they plunge into the project, eating muffins at uncomfortable desks in a classroom on the sixth floor of the Soviet-looking science-and-engineering building.

By contrast, Ms. Thille whirls with enthusiasm. She describes Online Learning Initiative features like software that mimics human tutors: making comments when students go awry, keeping quiet when they perform well, and answering questions about what to do next. She discusses the "dashboard" that tells professors how well students grasp each learning objective. Throughout, she gives an impression of hyper-competence, like a pupil who sits in the front row and knows the answer to every question.

But her remarks can sometimes veer into a disorienting brew of jargon, giving the impression that she is talking about lab subjects rather than college kids. Once she mentions "dosing" students with a learning activity. And early on in the workshop, she faces a feisty challenge from Chad Taylor, an assistant professor at Harper College. He worries about what happens when students must face free-form questions, which the computer doesn't baby them through.

"I will self-disclose myself as a skeptic of these programs," he says. Software is "very good at prompting the students to go step by step, and 'do this' and 'do that,' and all these bells and whistles with hints. But the problem is, in my classroom they're not prompted step by step."

Around the country, there's more skepticism where that came from, Ms. Thille confides over a dinner of tuna tacos later that day. One chief obstacle is the "not-invented-here problem." Professors are wary of adopting courses they did not create. The Online Learning Initiative's team-based model represents a cultural shift for a professoriate that derives status, and pride, from individual contributions.

Then there's privacy. The beauty of OLI is that developers can improve classes by studying data from thousands of students. But some academics worry that colleges could use that same data to evaluate professors—and fire those whose students fail to measure up.

Ms. Thille tells a personal story that illustrates who could benefit if she prevails. Years ago she adopted a teenager, Cece. The daughter of a drug user who died of AIDS, Cece was 28 days' truant from high school when she went to live with Ms. Thille. She was so undereducated, even the simple fractions of measuring cups eluded her. Her math teacher told Ms. Thille that with 40 kids in class, she needed to focus on the ones who were going to "make it."

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
In a way we already have something like this operating in colleges and universities that adopt the Brigham Young University variable speed video disks designed for learning the two basic accounting courses without meeting in classrooms or having the usual online instruction. Applications vary of course, and some colleges may have recitation sections where students meet to get help and take examinations ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#BYUvideo

Although BYU uses this no-class video pedagogy, it must be recognized that most of the BYU students learning accounting on their own in this manner are both exceptionally motivated and exceptionally intelligent. For schools that adopt the pedagogies of Me. Thile or BYU, the students must be like BYU accounting students or the pedagogy must be modified for more hand holding and kick-butt features that could be done in various ways online or onsite.

Perhaps Ms. Thille is being somewhat naive about turn wars in universities. Certain disciplines are able to afford a core faculty for research and advanced-course teaching with miniscule classes because teaching large base courses in the general education core justifies not having to shrink those departments with almost no majors.

Where Ms. Thille's pedagogy might be more useful is in specialty courses where its expensive to hire faculty to teach one or two courses. For example, it's almost always difficult for accounting departments to hire top faculty for governmental accounting courses and the super-technical ERP courses in AIS.

Bob Jensen's threads on courses without instructors ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#NoInstructors
Of course Ms. Thille is not exactly advocating a pedagogy without instructors. There are instructors in her proposed model.

Bob Jensen's threads on competency-based learning and assessment ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Assess.htm#ECA

Question
How do you come up with a lesson plan for 20 or more students for an entire week when all your students are learning at a different pace?

"The evolving classroom: Lessons go virtual," by Rick Bastien, CNN, June 27, 2012 ---
http://schoolsofthought.blogs.cnn.com/2012/06/27/the-evolving-classroom-lessons-go-virtual/

On any given Sunday night, your child’s teacher might face this problem: How do you come up with a lesson plan for 20 or more students for an entire week when all your students are learning at a different pace?

Mike is great at reading but needs help in math. Katie excels in science but struggles with writing. They both need to pass the same state tests. And with states picking up new high standards for education, there isn’t always a precedent of how to teach. Even with textbooks and years of experience, the best teachers can struggle to find new ways of teaching complex subjects, especially when each student learns differently.

This is a problem that Eric Westendorf and Alix Guerrier are determined to solve. The two former teachers co-founded LearnZillion.com, a social venture that provides free lessons for students, all in organized YouTube-style videos.

The formula is simple: Videos have to be about five minutes long, illustrated by hand and voiced by a real teacher. The product simulates a real-classroom effect —it’s like your favorite teacher drawing the math lesson on the chalkboard, except that you can play it over and over if you don’t quite understand it. At the end, you take a brief quiz. But as it turns out, this resource is mostly utilized by teachers looking for new ways to teach the topics with which their students are struggling .

In other words, teachers need help from other teachers. Jonathan Krasnov, Learnzillion’s publicist notes, “Even great teachers don’t teach everything great.”

Westendorf was the principal of E.L. Haynes, a charter school in Washington, D.C., when he came up with the idea.

He told CNN, “We started using it because we came across the Khan Academy site.  We liked this idea of instruction being captured and delivered to students. Then we said, ‘What if it could be based on the Common Core Standards,  [which most U.S.states have now adopted] , so that it is aligned with what students need? … It was out of these ‘what ifs’ that I came up with a prototype.”

Westendorf plans for LearnZillion to eventually make profit by selling services to school districts, such as lessons tailored to the needs of the school. But he says that the lessons posted online will always be free.
 

CNN attended LearnZillion’s first TeachFest , recently held in Atlanta. Westendorf and Guerrier recruited more than 100 “Dream Team” teachers to help build up their database of lessons. The teachers get paid $100 for each lesson created. But the chance to reach more students is the biggest reward for many teachers to whom CNN talked.

Mike Lewis, a fifth-grade teacher from Cohasset, Massachusetts, says his interest in the “ability to replicate yourself and your lessons using video” is what led him to LearnZillion. The slogan for TeachFest was “scale your impact.”

The idea is not new. KhanAcademy.org has thousands of lessons, and unlike LearnZillion, Khan Academy is a nonprofit. Both receive funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The Gates Foundation donated $300,000 just for TeachFest.

Even Bill Gates acknowledges that the idea of the virtual classroom hasn’t quite gone viral yet. During last month’s Innovation in Education summit, the Microsoft CEO noted the example of Edx, a  partnership between The Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University that provides free online courses.

 

Jensen Comment
This is why I created Camtasia modules for nearly every technical phase of both my AIS and Accounting Theory courses and then served them up on either my LAN drive or my Web server. When the video module contained copyrighted material I used the LAN drive. For example, if I showed students how to solve an end-of-chapter problem I used the LAN drive.

The Camtasia videos had several great learning advantages:

1. Students could repeat, repeat, and repeat again until they finally mastered some complicated task such as writing a database query or booking fair value adjustments of an interest rate swap.
    
2. Students could skip over parts of the module that they fully understood and then focus on the parts of a task that they had not yet mastered.
    
3. Usually I encouraged students to work in partnerships such that they appreciated how teamwork aids learning. But they were on their own when I gave a quiz in every class to test whether they truly understood the technical process they were supposed to learn before coming to class.
    
4. This allowed me to focus on such things as theory and concepts in class rather than having to solve problems that some students understood fully and other students had their heads in the clouds.

There is a risk that this works so efficiently that it's tempting to add more and more technical material to the course. My students generally let me know when my courses were demanding too much of their time relative to the other courses they were taking in the same semester.

This video module approach may be less successful for students who are not well above average. Students at the lower end of the spectrum may need more direct supervision and face-to-butt kicking.

At BYU, where basic accounting students are probably above the national norm for these two courses in terms of aptitude and motivation, each basic course is taught via variable speed video in courses that rarely meet face-to-face ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#BYUvideo

There is no magic bullet for students who are overly exhausted from off-campus work, parenting, or partying. Learning requires lots and lots of sweat. And if the sweat arises from things other than course content, not a whole lot of learning of course content will take place under any pedagogy. Students in these poor learning circumstances generally discover that accounting, mathematics, engineering, and science courses should be avoided whenever possible.