The digital environment has had an immense effect on American society, learning, and education: we have more sources available at our fingertips than any previous generation. Teaching and learning with these new sources, however, has been a challenging transition. Students are confronted with an ocean of digital objects and need skills to navigate the World Wide Web and numerous proprietary databases. Writing and disciplinary habits of mind are more important than ever in this environment, so how do we teach these in the digital age? This presentation looks at the current digital environment that humanities faculty face in their teaching and explores new tools that might support collaborative writing and digital skills development for students. In particular, Thomas will showcase a multi-agent wiki system for writing called POND (Participating Online In-Depth) that is currently being used in a large lecture and intensive writing classes at the University of Nebraska and developed as a collaborative project between History, English, and Computer Science.

A major challenge for today's institution is finding cost-effective and relevant means of assessing emerging teaching and learning environments. What impact are flexible learning environments and technology enhancements having on faculty teaching and student learning, and how can institutions measure this effectively? Join us in a conversation about assessment questions, tools, and methods as we actively explore techniques used and data gathered from classroom research projects at Stanford University and San Jose State University from 2003 to 2009.

Digital practices in education—everything from remix assignments to posting of material on Blackboard—provide new challenges to educational copyright policies and stretch far past existing educational and library exemptions. The doctrine of fair use, which permits reuse of copyrighted material under some circumstances, has become an ever more vital tool. The best-practices model pioneered at American University has greatly expanded the utility of fair use for filmmakers, online video makers, media literacy teachers, archivists, and OpenCourseWare makers. Their experience is valuable to librarians as they begin the same process.

Tweeting in the classroom has started to take off, with some notable examples such as Monica Rankin's history class experiment at UT-Dallas and Cole W. Camplese's classroom backchannel at Penn State-University Park. Taking these experiments one step further, one Baylor University professor invited a librarian to participate in his First Year Seminar's Twitter experiment by becoming the class's Twitter-based reference librarian, visible in a Twitter stream and in the class's "motherblog" (class learning visualization). This presentation will highlight the professor's, librarian's, and students' experiences with the class, summarize best practices, and suggest opportunities for application within your own institution.

Avatars are used in virtual worlds to increase a user's sense of social presence. Into the virtual space we carry our sense of identity and race and tend to act out our real-life prejudices in interaction with avatars. This session will discuss recent research on social interaction and collaboration in virtual worlds for learning.

For nearly eight years, the annual Horizon Report (a joint publication of the New Media Consortium and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative) has tracked new technologies for teaching, learning, and creative inquiry. This session will highlight some of the major technological trends discovered over that time and use them as context for the official release of the 2010 Horizon Report and the current year's findings.

John Palfrey, a professor and vice-dean at Harvard Law School, will discuss the topic of his book, Born Digital (Basic Books, 2008). The talk will cover the first generation of digital natives. These young people are now coming of age, and soon our world will be reshaped in their image. Our economy, our politics, our culture, and even the shape of our family life will be forever transformed. But who are these digital natives? How are they different from digital immigrants? Palfrey will discuss a broad range of issues, from the highly philosophical to the purely practical. What does identity mean for young people who have dozens of online profiles and avatars? Should we worry about privacy issues, or is privacy even a relevant concern for digital natives? How does the concept of safety translate into an increasingly virtual world? Are online games addictive, and how do we need to worry about violent video games? What is the Internet's impact on creativity and learning? What lies ahead—socially, professionally, and psychologically—for this generation?

Incidental openness can happen. Institutional mandates typically create initiatives that are weighed down by policy and inefficiencies. At Penn State we have seen an explosion of openness due to the implementation of new platforms for use in teaching and learning. With these platforms in place, we have worked to rethink concepts such as e-portfolios, faculty development, collaboration, OER, and course management systems. During this session, we will describe what Penn State has done, show examples of the impact on teaching and learning, and provide an open forum to discuss our approach and practice to generating open teaching, design, and learning.

In the fall of 2002, Stanford University opened Wallenberg Hall, the new home for the Stanford Center for Innovations in Learning (SCIL). This building has provided innovative, technology-enhanced, tool-rich spaces to support faculty experimenting with their classroom teaching. In this presentation, Bob will take a look back at the thinking, process, and expectations we started with in the design of that building. He will then trace how research and assessment programs have improved our understanding of what is effective classroom technology and learning space design, as well as deepened our understanding of the social phenomenon that is a class. Finally, he'll discuss how those findings are affecting Stanford's mainstream classrooms and guiding SCIL's research and design going forward.

Data mining is typically associated with business and marketing. For example, Amazon uses people's past purchases to suggest books they might be interested in buying. Similarly, academic analytics can be used to identify and predict students who might be at risk, by analyzing demographic and performance data of former students. However, there is no clear consensus on how to intervene with current students in a way they will accept and not associate with academic "profiling." Why should students think they are exceptions to our rules? This panel presentation will share how three institutions are approaching this problem and provide an overview of related issues.

Today's students are increasingly choosing to move beyond the traditional physical classroom educational model. The Internet has created an educational evolution fostering learner-centered environments to meet these new educational needs. Virtual worlds offer opportunities for faculty and students to expand their realities and explore new dimensions in learning, involving students in ways other online environments often struggle to achieve. Worlds like Second Life offer opportunities for creative thinking, social connections, simulated experiences, immersive field trips, and other interactive encounters where students discover learning from within and around themselves.

The presenters in this session will describe the results of ongoing research examining the predictors of student success and withdrawal for more than 250,000 fully online and blended students over five academic years. They will demonstrate data mining results for 1,200,000 student ratings, presenting decision rules for predicting, with 95% accuracy, the circumstances under which students assign excellent ratings to courses. Finally, they will demonstrate the need for contextualizing all research findings with the institutional culture.

Emerging technologies for communication and creation of content afford the possibility of the connected, "always on" educational environment. The Hyperlinked Campus is a model of open communication, transparency, social engagement, guided exploration, and creativity. This session will explore how some tools can extend the classroom beyond physical buildings to engage learners with their peers and with the world.

Large-enrollment undergraduate classes are an instructional ghetto in higher education. We know that hands-on experiential learning, especially in collaboration with other students, is a superior pedagogy, but how can this be provided in these classes? This panel presentation will introduce the Next Generation Course Redesign Process and will showcase courses that combine large and small group work with online activities to enhance and assess student learning outcomes. Methods to overcome the barriers to transformative institutional course redesign will be presented. Participants will be encouraged to apply lessons learned to course redesign projects on their campus.

The current educational technology debate is often framed as a contest between the CMS and the PLN, between centralized IT and individualized toolboxes. Mott argues that we should reject this "either-or" choice and instead embrace the possibility of a best-of-both-worlds "and" solution. Such a solution would combine the value of SIS integration and secure, assessment-related communication with the openness and persistence of the web.

Theoretically, the Kindle is a promising teaching and learning device for the mobile generation now attending institutions of higher learning. In piloting subsidized Amazon Kindles, however, Princeton University, Case Western Reserve University, Reed College and other institutions have been primarily interested in sustainability benefits, cost savings, and ubiquitous access to resources and only secondarily in how e-readers are impacting student learning. By contrast, our CLU (unsubsidized) Kindle pilot project's main focus was to explore and to identify the practices that would best optimize the Kindle's teaching/learning potential-a potential we recognize as promoting deeper student engagement in critical reading and writing.

Supporting an innovative program for teaching and learning is challenging even in the best of times. But when institutions face severe fiscal austerity, such support becomes a difficult task. We all face tough choices about what to emphasize and what to stop supporting. We find we must tax our creativity to the utmost to find new support strategies and resources. We are all asking ourselves similar questions: Is the cloud our salvation? Should we focus on support services and scale back on providing learning infrastructure? Can institutions collaborate on resource development? What are the core priorities that need to be retained? At this discussion, leaders in the field will discuss their ideas, programs, and the decisions they have made and are facing, and they will facilitate a brainstorming session with audience participants.

The Writing Across the Curriculum philosophy has become more timely and valuable within participatory Web 2.0 environments such as course management systems, blogs, and wikis. We highlight innovative teaching examples from Illinois that engage students within Web 2.0 environments by applying WAC principles: writing as process, writing as learning, the crafting of diverse writing activities, and so forth. We will model "WAC meets Web 2.0" techniques during our session and end by suggesting that Web 2.0 environments make possible a more radical adoption of multimodal assignments in any discipline, with students "writing" through thoughtful combinations of video, sound, word.

In his book, The World is Open: How Web Technology is Revolutionizing Education, Curt Bonk offers an intriguing look at 10 technology trends that he calls educational openers. When combined, the first letter of each opener spells the acronym WE ALL LEARN. This model helps make sense of the role of various technologies in open education and participatory environments, including e-books, podcasts, streamed videos, open courseware, online learning portals, social networking tools like Facebook and Ning, YouTube videos, wikis, and virtual worlds. Clearly, technology-based learning continues to open new learning pathways for all the connected learners of this planet. At the same time, thousands of organizations and individuals are sharing their course materials, expertise, and instructional ideas globally, thereby expanding learning opportunities and resources even further. As this occurs, members of the media, politicians, educators, students, parents, and others are asking important questions about the quality of such contents.

My vision for the 21st century: Computational thinking will be a fundamental skill used by everyone in the world. To reading, writing, and arithmetic, let's add computational thinking to every child's analytical ability. Computational thinking is an approach to solving problems, building systems, and understanding human behavior that draws on the power and limits of computing. Computational thinking requires thinking abstractly and thinking at multiple levels of abstraction. In this talk I will argue that computational thinking has already begun to influence many disciplines, from the sciences to the humanities, but that the best is yet to come. Looking to the future, we can anticipate even more profound impact of computational thinking on science, technology, and society-on the ways new discoveries will be made, innovation will occur, and cultures will evolve. The NSF Cyber-Enabled Discovery and Innovation initiative in a nutshell is computational thinking for science and engineering. Realizing this vision gives the field of computing both exciting research opportunities and novel educational challenges.