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dScribe, short for "digital and distributed scribes," is a participatory and collaborative model for creating open content. It brings together enrolled students, staff, faculty, and self-motivated learners to work together toward the common goal of creating content that is openly licensed and available to people throughout the world. It was first developed by students and faculty at the University of Michigan to leverage the interest and talent of students in working with faculty and staff to transform educational material into open educational resources (OER). The dScribe model encourages students, faculty, staff, and other interested individuals such as alumni and community members to get involved in not only creating open content, but also generating awareness about the benefits of creating and sharing educational content with a global learning community.

This document is a code of best practices designed to help those preparing OpenCourseWare (OCW) to interpret and apply fair use under United States copyright law. The OCW movement, which is part of the larger Open Educational Resources (OER) movement, was pioneered in 2002, when the Massachusetts Institute of Technology launched its OpenCourseWare initiative, making course materials available in digital form on a free and open basis to all. In 2005, MIT helped to organize with the support of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation a group of not-for-profit organizations interested in following the OpenCourseWare model and standardizing the delivery of OCW material. This group of institutions, known as the OCW Consortium (OCWC), has grown into a concern of more than 200 universities worldwide promoting universal access to knowledge on a nonprofit basis. The mission of OCWC is "to advance formal and informal learning through the worldwide sharing and use of free, open, high-quality educational materials organized as courses."

This will be a great resource as we help faculty/students put more content online. "This document is a code of best practices designed to help those preparing OpenCourseWare (OCW) to interpret and apply fair use under United States copyright law. The OCW movement, which is part of the larger Open Educational Resources (OER) movement, was pioneered in 2002, when the Massachusetts Institute of Technology launched its OpenCourseWare initiative, making course materials available in digital form on a free and open basis to all. In 2005, MIT helped to organize with the support of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation a group of not-for-profit organizations interested in following the OpenCourseWare model and standardizing the delivery of OCW material. This group of institutions, known as the OCW Consortium (OCWC), has grown into a concern of more than 200 universities worldwide promoting universal access to knowledge on a nonprofit basis. The mission of OCWC is "to advance formal and informal learning through the worldwide sharing and use of free, open, high-quality educational materials organized as courses."

Many teachers go to school each day, teach their students and leave. If they're struggling with how to teach a lesson that will engage their students, they might ask for advice from the teacher down the hall, but a lot of times, they struggle alone.  That's not the case for educators who have built a network of people who share resources, advice and techniques, whether they call it a personal learning network or something else. Here's why educators should start a personal learning network, or PLN.

* This brief article provides an overview of Creative Commons relevant to educators. While copyright laws provide some provision for educational uses, materials (e.g., texts, videos, audio, images, etc.) released under one of the Creative Commons licenses are actually much easier to incorporate into course content. Rather than just linking to a source, you may have the licensed right to incorporate and edit the material directly

KSC Faculty at Institute on Global Learning This summer, a team of Keene State faculty members from all three academic schools will participate in "Shared Futures: General Education for a Global Century," an institute sponsored by the American Association of Colleges and Universities to help faculty integrate global perspectives across the curriculum. The institute will be held in Ellicott City, Md., from July 31 to August 5, and will draw faculty from 32 colleges and universities. During the fall 2011 semester, the core Keene State team will draw in faculty and staff from across campus to implement the goals and strategies developed at the institute. By building a network of educators dedicated to this integrative work, Shared Futures facilitates curricular change and faculty development on campuses nationwide. Through an online social network, the initiative hopes to create new connections between educators and new opportunities for partnership and learning. Keene State faculty members attending the institute include professors Charles Weed (political science), Margaret Henning (health sciences), Patricia Pedroza (women's and gender studies), and Rich Blatchly (chemistry). For more information, contact Prof. Weed at cweed@keene.edu or visit the Shared Futures page.

from news and events

10 of the best Apple and Android apps for higher education in 2013

If you're interested in learning something new, this article is for you.  Broken down by subject and/or category, here are several top-notch self-education resources I have bookmarked online over the past few years.

10 most popular Pinterest pages in higher education Good for 11/16/12 presentation....

"5 Reasons Why Educators Should Network"

There are several widely-accepted rubrics (Quality Matters, the ION one in Illinois, etc.), but in my opinion, they focus on course design, not on teaching the course. When I was at Black Hawk College, we created a Best Practices for Exemplary Online Teaching set of standards based on the Chickering and Gamson's "7 Principles of Good Practice for Undergraduate Education" meta-analysis. Individual best practices for online teaching were pulled from the literature and listed as possibilities under each of the 7 principles, and an 8th was added with some of the course design elements not already mentioned in the first 7. In other words, we created a local document that could assist faculty in doing self-assessment, peer evaluations of each other's courses, and potentially institutional review of online courses. However, our instrument was not used for institutional assessment because it was not approved as part of the faculty [union] contract. It is important for a document like this to be shared with the faculty ahead of time so that they know how their courses are going to be evaluated. I also think it is helpful to have several people evaluate various aspects of online courses, such as someone who is an expert in online education who can evaluate the learning experiences and course design elements of the course, someone from the faculty member's department who can evaluate the quality and accuracy of the course content, as well as the administrator whose job it is to evaluate teaching. If the institution uses a type of rubric or assessment document when evaluating face-to-face teaching, it needs to be vetted by online experts to determine if it emphasizes appropriate, comparable variables in the online environment. For example, if activities to promote student engagement is on that form...what does that look like online? Not all administrators or faculty who have not taught online would know what to look for as indicators of student engagement.

10 Foundational Principles for Using and Safeguarding Students' Personal Information High-quality education data are essential for improving students' achievement in school and preparing them for success in life. When effectively used, these data can empower educators, students, and families with the information they need to make decisions to help all learners succeed. Everyone who uses student information has a

After a whirlwind nine months that has witnessed a rapid rebirth of online education at elite U.S. universities in the form of massively open online courses, or MOOCs, Harvard University has thrown its hat into the ring - along with the largest investment yet in technology aimed at bringing interactive online education to hundreds of thousands of students at a time for free.

I realized something tonight as I read the story of how Virginia Tech professor John Boyer landed a Skype interview for his World Regions class with Aung Sun Suu Kyi, leader of the democratic movement in Burma - I don't give near enough credit to Skype as a disruptive educational technology.

Several Ways To Tell The Difference Between Good & Bad Education Research

I am conducting a series of workshops in Florida and was asked to share a rubric to help teachers evaluate educational apps as part of the workshop. In 2010 Harry Walker developed a rubric, and I used his rubric (with some modifications by Kathy Schrock) as the basis for mine.

The mission of the Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy is to promote open scholarly discourse around critical and creative uses of digital technology in teaching, learning, and research. Educational institutions have often embraced instrumentalist conceptions and market-driven implementations of technology that overdetermine its uses in academic environments. Such approaches underestimate the need for critical engagement with the integration of technological tools into pedagogical practice. The JITP will endeavor to counter these trends by recentering questions of pedagogy in our discussions of technology in higher education. The journal will also work to change what counts as scholarship - and how it is presented, disseminated, and reviewed - by allowing contributors to develop their ideas, publish their work, and engage their readers using multiple formats. We are committed first and foremost to teaching and learning, and intend that the journal itself - both in process and in product - provide opportunities to reveal, reflect on, and revise academic publication and classroom practice.

For many years the rhetoric and substance of national reports written by bands of technologists eager to see electronic devices work their wonder on children and adults in schools have puzzled me. I am especially puzzled now as I try to make sense of the mountain of data I have collected at Las Montanas, a 1:1 laptop school in northern California (see posts of August 7, 13, and 20).  In these national reports issued periodically by U.S. government sponsored agencies (e.g., Office of Technology Assessment, the National Education Technology Plan) or privately-funded groups (e.g., CEO Forum on Education and Technology), I noted two things.

One of the best, most concise explanations of why the antipathy to technology in education.~JB The conflict between computers and schools is really a conflict between educational paradigms. The traditional and dominant paradigm is rooted in the book and the pedagogy is one of transmission. Teachers, who have presumably read more books than their students and listened to more scholarly lectures, transmit what they've learned to their students in a similar fashion. The students who do best within this system are those who can capture the transmission - as unfiltered as possible - and mirror back to the teacher what they have delineated. Within this model, digital technology can provide improvements, but they are cosmetic. Teachers can enhance their lectures with presentation software, videos and other forms of multimedia, but the methods stay the same. For teachers who don't understand how these new tools can enhance what they are teaching, then technology can be a distraction. Within this system of learning, (Inquiry based and student centered) there is real value in having the widest range of technological tools for not only consuming information in all its multimodal forms, but for creatively demonstrating what one has learned.

Higher education conferences over the past few years have been full of presentations, papers and panels on the processes involved in migrating a campus and its people to Google Apps for Education. While it is useful to hear about marketing tchotchkes, data validation, and the pros and cons of web clients, what seems to get ignored is the process that led to the decision to move to Google Apps in the first place. At North Carolina State University, where students were already using Google Apps, the decision to move employees involved almost as much time, effort and heartache as the technical migration. As the users saw it, they had a working system, even if that system only worked because of huge expenditures of time and money both on the backend server maintenance and the client need to implement terribly complex workarounds for simple functionality. The end result: a 94-page white paper and the realization that it's hard to sell ice to Eskimos1 , even if you show them that their ice has already melted. This paper and presentation will discuss the information gathering and needs assessment done by NC State prior to the decision to move employees to Google Apps, and the successes and difficulties involved.