5. Is Cyberlearning Part of the Solution? Borgman, C. (2008), Fostering Learning in the Networked World: The Cyberlearning Opportunity and Challenge. Report of the NSF Taskforce on Cyberlearning. NSF, Arlington, VA.
21. ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology, 2009. http://www.educause.edu/Resources/TheECARStudyofUndergraduateStu/187215
22. ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology, 2009. http://www.educause.edu/Resources/TheECARStudyofUndergraduateStu/187215
23. “ Young people’s unfettered access to information (of both dubious and stellar quality) places greater demands on the university as an institution to be as flexible as Google in how we organize knowledge and information.” http://contexts.org/thickculture/2009/04/30/ graduate-school-fail/
24. Our web-savvy students see their curricula as old-fashioned - “an arbitrary set of hoops to jump rather than a carefully considered set of courses.” Undergraduate curricula “looks like Yahoo circa 1996 (i.e. knowledge organized in pre-selected categories).” http://contexts.org/thickculture/2009/04/30/ graduate-school-fail/
25. “ In contrast to biological research, undergraduate biology education has changed relatively little during the past two decades. The ways in which most future research biologists are educated are geared to the biology of the past, rather than to the biology of the present or future.” National Research Council (2003). Bio2010: Transforming Undergraduate Education for Future Research Biologists, Washington, DC, National Academies Press. http://www.nap.edu/books/0309085357/html/.
Allude to workshops – which we will mention at the end.
OK – So this is what we all face when we sit down to prepare a course. Information - I was going to put a graph here but I wasn’t sure which one to put – growth of data (genbank), growth in published research (pubmed), growth in the size of introductory textbooks. They are all J shaped curves. The conventional wisdom is that there are more technical terms introduced in an introductory biology course than words in a 1 st year foreign language course. Choices, choices, choices Technology – the ways that biology is done are evolving rapidly (related to the next point), the options to me as a teacher for finding content or using tools, the experiences students are coming to class with. Discipline – everything is inter-disciplinary, cross-disciplinary or trans-disciplinary my experience with bioinformatics.