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Power to the People! Jennifer Ditkoff, Keene State College Give students the power to guide their own education. Using Wallwisher an instructor gains insight on student needs and opens up a classroom discussion. After library instruction short tutorials are posted on Voicethread. Students experiment with the concepts, actively participating in assessing their own research efforts, as well as their classmates. Students have control over their own learning experience and can revisit the course materials throughout the semester to add content, ask questions, and receive feedback. Diigo is used rather than a static handout. Students provide links to helpful materials for their peers, highlighting the community aspect of ongoing education. Jennifer Ditkoff has worked in academic, public and medical libraries, learning every type of classification system, including the elusive Cutter system. When she is not troubleshooting electronic resources, she teaches information literacy, staffs the reference desk, and shows up early to committee meetings. She enjoys learning about new technologies.

Here's a valuable set of resources for Health Sciences education: "60 public access virtual patient cases released under a Creative Commons licence for open use and reuse. Cases were created working with subject experts in workshops across the province. Using the open-source OpenLabyrinth platform the PINE project has a research and development theme investigating common simulation, gaming and narrative patterns in educational case design. This is facilitated by the use of the Vue topic mapping toolset that allows authors to create visual representations of activities and decision making processes."

Education both online and hybridized has benefited greatly from the contributions of the course management system Blackboard (and, more recently, Angel). No matter the subject, teachers have found ways to use the program to make their classes run so much smoother. But maneuvering the interface can seem a little intimidating at first, and that's where advice from several different educational institutions comes in handy! Beyond the basics, they illustrate some of the best streamlining tips and tricks that Blackboard has to offer. However, please keep in mind that such an ever-changing technology may render many of these tidbits obsolete - or only viable in certain versions. Should any of the ideas presented here prove incompatible, contact the school in question's tech support/computer services center for more personalized instruction.

education built on the industrical model and based on elightenment view of people and learning that no longer applies.

the reality is that tuition for online schools is not consistently lower than tuition for traditional schools across the board. How much you'll pay depends on the type of school and its prestige, as well as your personal financial aid package-whether you're studying online or in a classroom.

The Horizon Report points out that behind these emerging technologies/practices are four trends: The abundance of information available online today is challenging traditional notions of what it means to be educators from keepers of information to coaches and sense-makers.People expect to work and study anywhere and anytime.Technologies are increasingly cloud-based. (For more on cloud-computing, click here.)The work of students is increasingly collaborative and multidisciplinar

n his Edge feature "Gin, Television, and Cognitive Surplus", Clay Shirky noted that after WWII we were faced with something new: "free time. Lots and lots of free time. The amount of unstructured time among the educated population ballooned, accounting for billions of hours a year. And what did we do with that time? Mostly, we watched TV." In "The End of Universal Rationality", Yochai Benkler explored the social implications of the Internet and network societies since the early 90s. Benkler has been looking at the social implications of the Internet and network societies since the early 90s. He saw the end of an era: For those of us like me who have been working on the Internet for years, it was very clear you couldn't encounter free software and you couldn't encounter Wikipedia and you couldn't encounter all of the wealth of cultural materials that people create and exchange, and the valuable actual software that people create, without an understanding that something much more complex is happening than the dominant ideology of the last 40 years or so. But you could if you weren't looking there, because we were used in the industrial system to think in these terms.

AMSER is a portal of educational resources and services built specifically for use by those in Community and Technical Colleges but free for anyone to use.

Built to be used by professors and administrators, AcademicPub features real-time copyright clearance, and the ability to include materials from anywhere - articles from the web, lectures of your own, content from our library - almost anything. Distribute digitally, or in print - your choice. Students get lower-priced, up-to-the-minute materials and Educators get a fast, easy way to expand educational horizons.

Welcome to the Centre for Bioscience, the Higher Education Academy, ImageBank.This resource consists of freely available images contributed by academics, researchers, Learned Societies, industry and individuals with rights cleared for educational purposes.

Something similar is happening today in academia. Just like Augustine marveled, in the year 400, at the sight of Ambrose reading in silence, many members of academia marvel (or react with rejection) at the rapid changes in the production and dissemination of scholarly work and interaction between academics and those "outside" academic institutions. Thousands of scholars and higher education institutions are participating in social media (such as Twitter), as an important aspect of their research and teaching work.

Fear, uncertainty and doubt (or, FUD). These exist about GoogleApps for Education, even though it's a solution that could save Texas school districts money. I've heard FUD myself, firsthand, and it's curious to see others discuss it. 

The LMS market is in flux. According to a 2010 survey conducted by the Campus Computing Project, Blackboard's dominance of the higher education market declined from 71 percent in 2006 to 57 percent in 2010. Open source alternatives Moodle and Sakai have continued to make inroads, as has Desire2Learn--together they now control over 30 percent of the market. The entry of Instructure, whose Canvas LMS recently scooped up the business of the Utah Education Network, provides an additional plot twist. And hanging over it all is the imminent migration of hundreds of legacy Blackboard clients to new systems as their existing platforms are retired.

using twitter as an education tool

Open Educational Resources come in many shapes and sizes. This partial list of sources introduces the scope of OER and the organizations cultivating its increasingly vital role in opening higher education up to the greatest number of people worldwide.

"Babson Survey Research Group (BSRG) just released its annual survey of online learning in US higher education (press release here). This year they have moved from use of survey methodology for the online enrollment section to use of IPEDS distance education data. Russ Poulin from WCET and I provided commentary on the two data sources as an appendix to the study."

While I was revisiting the topic of the 21st century pedagogy which I have covered in several posts here in Educational Technology and Mobile Learning, I come across this awesome graph created by our colleague Andrew Churches. I couldn't find better and more comprehensive graphic than the one below. Andrew did a fantastic work in capturing most of the concepts that make 21st century pedagogy. I know it could have been richer in information if  definitions or explanatory snippets  were added to some concepts ( like for instance information literacy, media fluency, technology fluency ) but still that does not lesson from its importance as a starting point to ponder on the topic of 21st century pedagogy. For those of you who are not familiar with the terminology included in this graphic please refer back to the posts I have published here a while ago particularly : 14 technology concepts every teacher should know about, and 6 Learning concepts for the 21st century teacher.

"Online education: A review of the literature"

Below are some of the iPad resources we have reviewed here in Educational Technology and Mobile Learning. Divided by function

How can people learn from material and content delivered directly to their mobile devices? There are many organizations interested in this subject, and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) is one of them. This website provides access to their working paper series on mobile learning, instructional videos, and external websites. The question is a timely one, as there is the hope that this mode of delivery can "supplement and enrich formal school and make learning more accessible, equitable, personalized and flexible for students everywhere." In the Working Paper Series area visitors can read four different papers, including "Mobile Learning for Teachers in Latin America." Additionally, the site contains recent issues of the Mobile Learning Newsletter