Half a million learners worldwide now use free content from OpenLearn

Half a million learners worldwide now use free content from OpenLearn "Half a million people in 160 countries are now using the free learning materials made available through OpenLearn, The Open University’s open content initiative."

eSchool News online - Virtual campus could aid in emergency

eSchool News online - Virtual campus could aid in emergency "The University of New Orleans has a plan for keeping instruction going and holding onto its students in the event of another Hurricane Katrina-like disaster, and it involves holding classes in the online virtual world "Second Life." "

Facebook Platform Could Be A Google-Like Market-Driven Growth Engine » Publishing 2.0

Facebook Platform Could Be A Google-Like Market-Driven Growth Engine » Publishing 2.0 "
Facebook Platform, which allows companies to build applications — and entire ad or fee-driven businesses — inside Facebook is a brilliant move, which could given Facebook the opportunity to become the next Google. The secret to Google’s success with AdSense was sharing revenue with publishers and letting them figure out how to optimize the revenue. At launch, Facebook isn’t taking a cut of any revenue generated by businesses using the Facebook Platform, but it could easily do so."

The Chronicle: Wired Campus Blog: Ancient Rome Restored -- Virtually

The Chronicle: Wired Campus Blog: Ancient Rome Restored -- Virtually: "A group of Virginians and Californians has rebuilt ancient Rome. And today they received the grateful thanks of the modern city's mayor."

The Chronicle: Wired Campus Blog: Connecting Alumni and Students Online

The Chronicle: Wired Campus Blog: Connecting Alumni and Students Online "Many colleges have started alumni groups on social-networking sites such as Facebook, but Anderson pointed out in a newspaper story on Sunday that many graduates did their graduating long before Facebook and online networking became popular. So Elon Town Square was conceived as an easy, less intimidating introduction restricted to the Elon community. It's also a way of connecting students of different generations, as well as opening up communication with faculty, staff, and even interested parents. People can set up personal profiles and find others with similar interests. "

Innovate - Reusable Learning Objects Through Peer Review: The Expertiza Approach

Innovate - Reusable Learning Objects Through Peer Review: The Expertiza Approach "Edward Gehringer, Luke Ehresman, Susan G. Conger, and Prasad Wagle describe how the Expertiza platform—a custom-designed software tool developed at North Carolina State University—expands the potential of peer review to engage students in active learning. Expertiza allows students to select tasks, submit their own papers or individually designed learning objects, and review work submitted by their peers, thereby helping students learn to improve their skills by working together. The learning objects produced by this system can be improved iteratively: The following years' class, for example, can improve upon the work of their predecessors. This article describes the advantages of courses centered around peer review, details how Expertiza can facilitate this approach, and explains how students themselves can improve the resources they use for their own learning."

Innovate - Backwards into the Future: Seven Principles for Educating the Ne(x)t Generation

Innovate - Backwards into the Future: Seven Principles for Educating the Ne(x)t Generation "Using examples drawn from an upper-level English course at the University of Auckland, Helen Sword and Michele Leggott outline seven key strategies for developing in today’s students the skills, aptitudes, and abilities needed to meet the challenges of the future without losing sight of the past. By relinquishing intellectual authority, recasting students as active producers of knowledge, promoting collaborative relationships, cultivating multiple intelligences, fostering critical creativity, encouraging resilience, and constructing assignments that look both forward to the future and back to the past, teachers in higher education can help their students equip themselves to carry the past with them into a complex, constantly evolving future."

Innovate - The Knowledge Building Paradigm: A Model of Learning for Net Generation Students

Innovate - The Knowledge Building Paradigm: A Model of Learning for Net Generation Students "In this article Donald Philip describes Knowledge Building, a pedagogy based on the way research organizations function. The global economy, Philip argues, is driving a shift from older, industrial models to the model of the business as a learning organization. The cognitive patterns of today’s Net Generation students, formed by lifetime exposure to interactive media, may prepare them for the heterogeneous, distributed systems that characterize tomorrow's learning organizations, but they do need to learn the processes of innovation, creativity, and collaboration that these organizations will value. Knowledge Building, which engages students in building knowledge about a given question in an open, collaborative environment, provides one model for teaching these vital skills. In the knowledge-building paradigm, students form research groups through their interactions with one another and with an online learning environment called Knowledge Forum as they work on problems of understanding. This model, Philip argues, will prepare students for the distributed, collaborative work environments of learning organizations that value creativity and innovation."

Innovate - Questioning Assumptions About Students' Expectations for Technology in College Classrooms

Innovate - Questioning Assumptions About Students' Expectations for Technology in College Classrooms "In this article, Sarah Lohnes and Charles Kinzer argue for a more nuanced understanding of Net Generation students and their technology practices than received wisdom currently offers. The realization by college and university administrators that Net Generation students, having grown up digital, will learn differently and make new demands of their learning environment has led to changes in many sectors of academic life, with a particular focus on campus infrastructure, faculty development, and curriculum. However, these well-intentioned efforts to adjust to the perceived needs of Net Gen students are frequently made based on a vision of the Net Generation as a homogenous group of technology users. Lohnes and Kinzer argue that a much deeper understanding of student technology practices, and the intersection of these practices with student learning, is critical. To this end, they offer a small ethnographic study of liberal arts college students' technology practices, the results of which indicate that, contrary to common assumptions, we may not be at the point of changing the classroom practices of either professors or students. Addressing on-the-ground student technology practices, they conclude, may provide a better way of considering the complex picture of technology integration on campus."

Second Life as an educational tool: Episode 9 - edna.edu.au

Second Life as an educational tool: Episode 9 - edna.edu.au: "3-D virtual worlds are bold new frontiers for educators who are looking for ways of making learning a more engaging, interactive experience. Of these, Second Life is the one getting the most press. But is the environment that Second Life provides really worth the time and effort it takes to learn how to use it? And with issues such as bandwidth limitations and limited access to up to date hardware - is it a viable choice as an educational tool? "

The Net Generation Goes to College

Technology News: Education: The Net Generation Goes to College: "In the eyes of students who have grown up with computers and the Internet, the quality of a college's technology has a lot to do with its quality of education. In fact, they'll often view an institution's tech level as a major factor in deciding where to attend college. They're looking for places that provide various media outlets to receive classroom content, however many universities are slow to adapt."

The Chronicle: Wired Campus Blog: A Library Makes Its Debut, in Second Life

The Chronicle: Wired Campus Blog: A Library Makes Its Debut, in Second Life: "Santa Clara University's new library building won't be completed until the autumn of 2008. But people on the campus can experience what it might be like inside the building, and offer advice to its designers, by exploring a three-dimensional model of the library in the online virtual world Second Life"

Are Cellphones and the Internet Rewiring Our Brains?

CBC News In Depth: Technology: "Try reading this article to the end without checking e-mail. Find you can't? Before making assumptions of addictive behaviour, you should know there's a positive side to switching tasks often.
You may actually be training your brain to become faster and stronger.
Studies are beginning to show that cellphone-toting execs and Facebook-friendly teens may be multi-tasking their way into taking on even more, by rewiring their brains to handle it. "

The Chronicle: Wired Campus Blog: A Virtual World for Education

The Chronicle: Wired Campus Blog: A Virtual World for Education: "Many college professors are turning to Second Life, the popular virtual-reality world, to provide distant students with a colorful, three-dimensional environment for learning. Aaron E. Walsh, an adjunct faculty member at Boston College's Woods College of Advancing Studies, also sees a need for online worlds that are dedicated to education and devoid of sexually-oriented material that many complain is too prevalent in Second Life. "

D-Lib Featured Collection May/June 2007: Harvard's Library Collections to the World

D-Lib Featured Collection May/June 2007: Harvard's Library Collections to the World "The Harvard University Library, the largest university library in the world, is a system of more than 80 libraries with overall collections of more than 15.8 million volumes, as well as journals, primary source materials, images, audio and video recordings, and digital resources that span a wide range of subjects, languages, and dates. These include a vast number of rare-and often unique-books, manuscripts, photographs, maps, ephemera, and other materials that constitute Harvard's special collections."

Using Wikipedia to Extend Digital Collections

Using Wikipedia to Extend Digital Collections "In May 2006, the University of Washington Libraries Digital Initiatives unit began a project to integrate the UW Libraries Digital Collections into the information workflow of our students by inserting links into the online encyclopedia Wikipedia. The idea for this project grew out of our reading of OCLC's 2005 report Perceptions of Libraries and Information Resources [1] which states that only 2% of college and university students begin searching for information at a library web site. It is, therefore, incumbent upon Librarians to look for new ways to reach out to our users where they begin their information search."

EDUCAUSE REVIEW | May/June 2007, Volume 42, Number 3

EDUCAUSE REVIEW May/June 2007, Volume 42, Number 3: "Which IT issue is of top concern to technology leaders in higher education today? Did the number-one issue of 2006—Security and Identity Management—continue to be of prime importance to college and university IT leaders? Did new issues emerge on the top-ten list? Did issues from last year drop off the list this year? The eighth annual EDUCAUSE Current Issues Survey has the answers"

YouTube - Wikis in Plain English

YouTube - Wikis in Plain English Good visual representation of how wikis work.

The Virtual Future of Academic Libraries

http://www.mcfls.org/librarycouncil/lcacademic.pdf Paper given at the Library Council of Southern Wisconsin (USA) Annual Conference

[video] Is Facebook cooler than MySpace? | CNET News.com

[video] Is Facebook cooler than MySpace? CNET News.com: "Facebook and MySpace do some serious trash talking in this spot spoofing Mac ads. The video features CNET's Josh Lowensohn as Facebook, Tim Moynihan as MySpace and Veronica Belmont as the poker"

The Chronicle: Wired Campus Blog: Inventor Markets 'Smart' Pen to College Students

The Chronicle: Wired Campus Blog: Inventor Markets 'Smart' Pen to College Students "A smart pen unveiled Wednesday at a digital-technology conference in Carlsbad, Calif., isn't even on the market yet, but Rodney Brooks, director of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is already hailing its potential to change the way people process information, according to an article in The New York Times. The pen, which looks like an ordinary ballpoint, is embedded with a computer that photographs whatever is being written. The pen is also equipped with a microphone that records what is being spoken, so that people using the pen to take notes can later play back the recording and elaborate on their notes. In a docking station, the pen can transfer files to and from a PC. Jim Marggraff, inventor of the device, says he plans to market the pen for less than $200 to college students in the fall."

The Chronicle: Wired Campus Blog: Envisioning the Future of Handhelds

The Chronicle: Wired Campus Blog: Envisioning the Future of Handhelds: "The next generation of handheld devices will come with plenty of nifty accouterments — GPS sensors, accelerometers, cameras that come paired with image-recognition software. "

The Chronicle: Wired Campus Blog: iTunes Opens a Special Section for Free Collegiate Content

The Chronicle: Wired Campus Blog: iTunes Opens a Special Section for Free Collegiate Content "Today the iTunes store unveiled its new iTunes U portal, a spot on the site that will collect college lectures, commencement speeches, tours, sports highlights, and promotional material, all available at no cost. "