SAR Academic Freedom Media Review

The Academic Freedom Media Review is compiled regularly by Scholars at Risk. Here is the review for July 31-August 7, 2009

Police clash with Honduran students
BBC News, 8/5

Researcher Resists Coptic Pressure (in Arabic)
Ad-Dustour, 8/5

Shift in Middle East Studies?
Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed, 8/4

Reforms to Women’s Education Make Slow Progress in Saudi Arabia
Andrew Mills, The Chronicle of Higher Education, 8/3

Scandals Lead to Promises of Reform in Australian International Education
Shailaja Neelakantan, The Chronicle of Higher Education, 8/3
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IRAN: Iranian-American academic detained in Tehran
Jonathan Travis, University World News, 8/2

Barriers to Religious School Graduates lifted
Brendan O’Malley, University World News, 8/2

NIGERIA: Supreme court reinstates sacked academics
Tunde Fatunde, University World News, 8/2

Professor Speaks on UN Arab Human Development Report 2009 (in Arabic)
Al-Fayhaa, 7/31

Note: For more about the United Nations Human Development Reports, see the UNDP site.

Special Topics: Teaching Tools for the Global Age

National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education

National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education

Special Topics: Teaching Tools for the Global Age
National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education

This series addresses a critical challenge for higher education: to prepare graduating students to cope in a world that is at once increasingly globalized and increasingly fragmented. To meet this challenge, colleges and universities must help students understand other languages, cultures, and societies, as well as the relationships that connect them. International education is an expensive and complex undertaking; however, technology–the harbinger and engine of modern globalization–offers a number of cost-effective tools that can be used in the classroom to facilitate teaching about the peoples of the world and the relationships between and among them. Each session listed is priced at 1 program unit.

If you have questions about this series or would like to propose a topic for presentation, please contact Michael Toler at michael.toler@nitle.org.

* Technology and Less-Commonly Taught Languages, March 19, 2009, 4:00 – 5:15 p.m. Eastern. Featuring Hiroyo Saito (Director of the Language Learning Center, Haverford College) and Rachid Aadani (Assistant Professor of Arabic, Wellesley College). Registration Deadline: Friday, March 6, 2009.
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* Faculty Development Abroad: Connecting Campus and Community via Online Writing Tools, May 14, 2009, 4:00 – 5:00 p.m. Eastern. Featuring Shila Garg (Dean of Faculty) and Joe Benfield (Instructional Technologist), both of The College of Wooster. Registration deadline: Friday, May 1, 2009.
* Video Conferencing for Global Education: Tools for Teaching and Administration, August 13, 2009, 4:00 – 5:00 p.m. Eastern. Featuring Todd Bryant (Language Technology Specialist, Dickinson College), and David Clapp (Director of the Office of International Students and Off-Campus Studies, Wabash College). Registration deadline: Friday, July 31, 2009.
* Internationalizing Curricula in the Sciences: Uses of Media and Technology, September 10, 2009, 4:00 – 5:00 p.m. Eastern. Featuring Mark Stewart (Chair of the Department of Psychology) and Stas Stavrianeas (Professor of Exercise Science), both of Willamette University. Registration deadline: Friday, August 28, 2009.
* Models for Collaborative Teaching in Cultural Studies: Working Across Campuses, October 8, 2009, 4:00 – 5:00 p.m. Eastern. Registration deadline: Friday, September 25, 2009.
* Global Knowledge through Gaming: Teaching about the Real World through Virtual Ones, November 12, 2009, 4:00 – 5:00 p.m. Eastern. Featuring Chris Boyland, Director of the Language Learning Center at Bryn Mawr College. Registration deadline: Friday, October 30, 2009.

Study Abroad Blogs

Recently I was asked for information on blogs associated with abroad programs. I’m posting the information here in case it is useful to anyone else. It’s just a few links that came to mind. I know there are many others and I will post them when I remember them. Please, also, post them in the comments if you know of any.

Student blogging from abroad, in a structured manner, is common. What is less common is innovative or pedagogically sound uses of it. There is a very interesting project supported by National Geographic called Glimpse. This is a user-generated, professionally edited website in which students and others post blogs, images, travel tips, etc. In addition to the site, there is a magazine that you can pick up a newsstands here and there. It’s a handsome, glossy publication.

One of the earliest projects of this sort (2005-2006) that I am aware of was the Blogging the World project involving Middlebury, Haverford and Dickinson.

Some International Education offices use a blog for practical reasons, simply to post news, such as this from my undergraduate alma mater, VCU.

Others, like Bucknell, consolidate student postings into a central blog.
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At Cornell students maintain blogs and the links are collected on a central page.

There are some study abroad podcasts, too. Here’s the Japan Study Abroad podcast.
I haven’t listened to it because I don’t speak Japanese, so I can’t tell you what is it about.

Here are Pacific University’s Study Abroad Podcasts.

There are more study abroad podcasts in the iTunes podcast directory, if you go to iTunes and simply search on “study abroad.”

Glimpse – Your Stories From Abroad

This is an interesting site, supported largely by National Geographic.  It’s composed of user-generated content, but it is professionally edited which, to be honest, I find to be a nice balance.

Glimpse is a community of globally Try to reduce your consumption of coffee and alcohol if you have circulatory problems and eat foods rich in vitamin C and viagra uk E. Experts said, women must pay attention to irregular menstruations, or tube blockage may occur and cause infertility in men, for urine infection influences the appearance and transportation of sperms, make them have low activity and high rate for abnormality, it can even cause the atrophy wouroud.com wholesale prices viagra of testicle, and lead to oligospermia or obstruction of spermaduct. This will augment the male libido and mitigate some of cialis cheapest the better-known cults. Erectile dysfunction is a disorder which cheap levitra online is faced by men where he is not able to satisfy their partner sexually. minded young people who like sharing stories about life abroad. All of our content comes from people who are living or have recently lived overseas.

via share your story – Glimpse – Your Stories From Abroad.

Video Conferencing for Global Education

National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education

National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education

The next instance in NITLE’s professional development series, Teaching Tools for the Global Age is next Thursday.  I am responsible for this series and I have really enjoyed it.  The potential of technology to help our students better understand the wider world and their place in it is enormous and we, as educators, are just beginning to take of advantage of it.

Video Conferencing for Global Education: Tools for Teaching and Administration

Date: August 13, 2009, 4:00 PM – 5:15 PM. EDT.

Location: Delivered online in NITLE MIV Auditorium

For faculty and staff from participating institutions responsible for the teaching and supporting instruction in foreign languages, the social sciences, and/or cultural studies and those charged with the administration of study abroad, international studies, student exchange and visiting scholars programs.

This session considers the uses of real-time audio and video communication tools in higher education, for both pedagogical and administrative purposes, with a particular focus on the widely used, free internet videoconferencing application, Skype. Todd Bryant, language technology specialist at Dickinson College, will discuss uses of the tool for the instruction of language, and present the Mixxer, an online application he developed for finding conversation partners for language learning. David Clapp, director of the Office of International Students and Off-Campus Studies at Wabash College, will discuss the use of Skype by his office to connect with students in advance of, during, and after programs, and the impact its use has had on recruitment for programs, student satisfaction, administrative effectiveness, and the costs of running programs.

Participants will

  • explore the features of Skype
  • discuss its current and potential use in higher education
  • begin developing best practices for its use in programs and courses
  • investigate its features and limitations in comparison with other programs

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For more information and registration instructions see NITLE – Video Conferencing for Global Education.

University of Michigan’s Islamic Manuscripts collection going online – AnnArbor.com

This is an interesting project, an effort to turn the cataloging of a distinct and unusual set of texts to the scholarly community as a whole.

The University of Michigan Special Collections Library needs help cataloguing its vast Islamic Manuscripts Collection.

But the library doesn’t plan to hire an expert. Instead, almost all of its 1,250 pieces are being scanned in-house to put the work on the Internet.

And the library hopes interested scholars will get involved…
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“It will be presented to the public in Wiki or blog-type interface, so people can comment on what they see. In that way, we hope we can get help from scholars all over the world in identifying the manuscripts and cataloguing them properly,” said Peggy Daub, director of Special Collections.

Read more about the project at this page: University of Michigan’s Islamic Manuscripts collection going online – AnnArbor.com.

(Thanks to Nancy Millichap)

Silicon Valley should step up, help Iranians

In a recent SF Gate Open Forum Post, Cyrus Farivar, a freelance technology journalist from California, looks at the ways in which technology has been used as a tool in the pro-democracy movement, official efforts to thrwart that, and technology developments that had made it more difficult for them to do so. He writes

But now that Iran has been experiencing turmoil surrounding its recent election, many Bay Area technology leaders finally realize the importance their technology and services can play in shaping world events. As foreign media have been kicked out of the country, information technology services suddenly have become a crucial tool to get and receive information from Iran.

Twitter famously received a call from the U.S. Department of State nearly two weeks ago asking the company to postpone its scheduled maintenance to suit those in Tehran’s time zone, rather than those on Pacific time.

Facebook recently added Persian language support for its iconic social networking site. Google took things to an entirely new level by launching its Persian version of Google translate, which allows for decent machine translation between English and Persian and vice versa. But why this newfound attention to the Persian language (and Iran) took so long remains a mystery. Google’s translation capability for Estonian even came online before Persian.

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So instead of superficial support, like Twitter users changing their avatars to green to support Iran’s reformist movement, Silicon Valley minds and money should pool resources as a way to help Iranians get around this information blockade by providing easier-to-use proxies, anonymizers and maybe even unfiltered Internet access through hardware.

Long-range Wi-Fi, 3G, satellite or other wireless communications devices from Iran’s neighboring countries or even the Persian Gulf could be used to get faster and better information in and out of Iran. One Arizona company, Space Data, even advertises the capability to use helium-filled balloons to provide Internet and mobile phone access. Much of Iran could theoretically be covered with one or two such balloons.

All of that may sound crazy, but not helping Iranian reformers at their darkest hour would be even crazier.

Read the whole article at: Silicon Valley should step up, help Iranians, the San Francisco Chronicle.

NITLE Event: Video Conferencing for Global Education

Videoconferencing for Global Education: Tools for Teaching and Administration
August 13, 2009, 4:00 PM – 5:15 PM. EDT.

This session considers the uses of real-time audio and video communication tools in higher education, for both pedagogical and administrative purposes, with a particular focus on the widely used, free internet videoconferencing application, Skype. Todd Bryant, language technology specialist at Dickinson College, will discuss uses of the tool for the instruction of language, and present the Mixxer, an online application he developed for finding conversation partners for language learning. David Clapp, director of the Office of International Students and Off-Campus Studies at Wabash College, will discuss the use of Skype by his office to connect with students in advance of, during, and after programs, and the impact its use has had on recruitment for programs, student satisfaction, administrative effectiveness, and the costs of running programs.

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Registration Deadline, Friday, July 31st.

Students May Not Be as Software-Savvy as They Think

Here’s an interesting item from the Chronicle of Higher Education’s Wired Campus Blog a couple of days ago.  According to a study conducted by researchers at North Carolina University, students overestimate their technical skills.

Students correctly perceived their skill level only in PowerPoint, the study said, with 81 percent of students who thought they had at least an average skill level actually performing that way.

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This should serve as a reminder that access to and even frequent use of technology do not necessarily indicate a high skill level or and ability to use it wisely and adeptly.

When Computers Leave Classrooms, So Does Boredom

There is something of a backlash against the use of technology in the classroom, and this article,  When Computers Leave Classrooms, So Does Boredom,” from The  Chronicle of Higher Education is one example of it.

College leaders usually brag about their tech-filled “smart” classrooms, but a dean at Southern Methodist University is proudly removing computers from lecture halls. José A. Bowen, dean of the Meadows School of the Arts, has challenged his colleagues to “teach naked” — by which he means, sans machines.

More than anything else, Mr. Bowen wants to discourage professors from using PowerPoint, because they often lean on the slide-display program as a crutch rather than using it as a creative tool. Class time should be reserved for discussion, he contends, especially now that students can download lectures online and find libraries of information on the Web. When students reflect on their college years later in life, they’re going to remember challenging debates and talks with their professors. Lively interactions are what teaching is all about, he says, but those give-and-takes are discouraged by preset collections of slides.

Bowen makes good points.  It is an interesting article with a fair amount of food for thought.  For example, it is interesting, though not surprising, that in a study published in the April Issue of British Educational Research, students gave low marks to computer-assisted classroom learning activities.  Nor does it surprise me that,

“The least boring teaching methods were found to be seminars, practical sessions, and group discussions,” said the report. In other words, tech-free classrooms were the most engaging.

I am an advocate of teaching with technology, one might even say an evangelist.  But it is not used effectively and it is for this reason that students find it boring.  A great deal of the technology that is developed for pedagogical purposes is developed for individual learning and is not meant to be brought into the classroom to begin with.  That is not to say it is not appropriate for a course, but it should be integrated for the purposes for which it was intended.
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The second thing to remember is that technology for technology’s sake is never the end, so  technology should never be used for its own sake.  Unless technology is the subject of the course such as it might be in a course on new media or something of that nature, then it is a tool and should attract no more attention than the chalk board.   It should serve an end.

The one thing to always keep in mind is to put pedagogy first.  Before making use of any technology or tool from a DVD player to a complex video simulation, ask yourself what it will teach students and if the technology is the most effective way to do it..  You use a specific tool for a specific purpose, so that is the rule to love by.  One should never teach with blogs just to be teaching with them or with any technology simply for purposes of teaching with that technology, but rather for purposes of teaching, full stop.

Anyway, the expderiment at SMU is an interesting one.  Read the full article to check it out.