DIIA Blog

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) launched the National Broadband Plan in a forum at Thompson Conference Center on Monday. In a Daily Texan article today, Commissioner Meredith Baker said, “The Internet is a critical educational tool. We came to Austin first. It is a model for educational benefits over the Internet.”

Featured at the forum were high school students who have benefited from three UT-Austin Continuing Education programs–the UT Online High School, the Migrant Student Graduation Enhancement program, and the Language Learners at the University Center for Hispanic Achievement (LUCHA) program.

The venerable journal publisher Nature Publishing Group is known in academic circles and beyond as the heavy weight for publishing research in the sciences with Nature being its most well known title. In January, the publisher opened its doors to a wider community aimed at letting students and other learners to access content from extensive catalog through their education group. That a publisher of such stature has recognized the need and demand to open content for educational purposes beyond traditional academic circles is notable. This is especially so since it is clear that more and more students are getting information from the web and not necessarily from the pages of their oh so 20th century textbook technology, a fact that is not lost on Nature Publishing. Ars Technica has a nice little write up about this, but go directly to Scitable to see what Nature Education is doing.   

It is also not lost of Nature that providing online content needs to be as authoritative and legitimate as traditional journal publications, but also timely and accessible, something that textbooks have an increasingly hard time doing. You might say that the online content is even citable On the site, students and teachers can ask experts and form groups for collaboration and information sharing tailoring the features after popular social networking sites. In the Ars Technica article, Vikram Savkar, head of Nature Educational group, is quoted as saying

“ The goal, according to Savkar, is to provide the sort of dynamic social content that college students now expect—as he noted, biology study groups had already formed spontaneously on Facebook. “The old content models are out of date,” he said, “we all know that textbooks aren’t what students find interesting.”

Now if publishers in other disciplines can follow the lead of Science, the classroom of the 21st Century will be increasingly defined by the four walls of your device’s screen and not the traditional walls of the academia we have become so accustomed. The challenge of course will be how to keep this content free or affordable. Its free for now but for how long? The physical journal Nature is not an inexpensive publication. Also mentioned in the Ars article is another site worth checking out if science education is of interest to you. This is Understanding Science website which is funded through an NSF grant and housed on UC Berkeley servers.

Keene