I traveled to the outskirts of Queens yesterday to present at the 2014 York College Technology Symposium on the topic of “Enhancing Student Engagement with Open Source Software”. It was a great event featuring digitally engaged faculty from throughout the CUNY system.
I was motivated to give this lecture because the rising number of underperforming students in higher education is creating a problem that threatens many aspects of society. As more and more of our world is dominated by technology, disengaged students will need access to resources to compete. However access to technology is expensive and can be an additional barrier to academic engagement. Attendees to the presentation hopefully learned how students can be motivated to learn valuable academic skills if faculty are encouraged to infuse digital content into their curricula that is technically advanced, economically viable, and which stays true to the core value systems of these students.
The slides from the presentation can be found here