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Google has developed this helpful web-based tool to help citizens, journalists, and others stay abreast of various political campaigns throughout the United States. Visitors can view and interact with a clickable map of the United States to find out information about each candidate and his (or potentially her) activities. Additionally, visitors can use the Issues area to track news items on topics like the economy, immigration, healthcare, and others. This version is compatible with all operating systems

Any author (with or without a disability) can use the Accessibility Checker feature to find potential accessibility issues and instructions for how to fix them. This article provides details on the issues the Accessibility Checker looks for, and gives some information on how to resolve them. Through notifications in the Backstage View and a task pane that helps authors navigate to, and resolve issues in their file, the purpose of the Accessibility Checker is to help authors improve the accessibility of documents, spreadsheets, and presentations that they create.

It started with an announcement in February that a University of Georgia instructor would start a crowdsourcing project to find out more about working conditions and salaries of adjuncts. Last month, a graduate student at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro announced that she was attempting something similar for graduate student employees. Both projects are attempts at gathering information -- on the salaries of adjuncts and graduate students -- where rigorously researched data is difficult to come by. Read more: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/04/02/crowdsourcing-contingent-salary-data#ixzz1quha2YCW  Inside Higher Ed 

Stats about college graduation rates by state. A ton of information...haven't had the time to determine how accurate it is yet or their POV

Posted on this site are excerpts of original manuscripts, each of which has been annotated by undergraduates who have spent a semester critically evaluating the work and assessing the authors' own perspectives. Deep research by UGs. By including their interviews with primary investigators, links to background information, and tips for understanding and critically interpreting data, these undergraduates have developed a unique pedagogical tool that should enhance their peers ability to navigate and understand the primary literature. Developing scholars will benefit from their colleagues' insights as they are invited to explore the living history of a scientific inquiry.

In an effort to expand access to large data sets and information about their work, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) has created this website to provide access to such materials. 

a website that catalogs infographics from across the web. Visual.ly has more than 5,000 infographics arranged in twenty-one categories. Some of the infographics are useful displays of information and others, like the one below are just for fun.

book publisher W.W. NORTON & CO originally created this blog for students and teachers of sociology, and it is informative and quite accessible for those familiarizing themselves with this field. Visitors will find its pledge to "keep things interesting" refreshing. The pledge is accomplished by ensuring that "all of the posts on this site will pass the 'so what?' test that some academic research frankly does not." The blog entries are written mainly by those individuals who have doctoral degrees in sociology, along with a smattering of posts by sociology students. Visitors who prefer to get their daily dose of sociological thought in video form should check out the "Video" tab to watch sociologists speak on a range of news stories and other timely topics. The videos are generally just a few minutes long, and have recently covered such topics as "Commodifying the 'Ghetto'", "Communities Becom[ing] Poverty Traps" and "Fears about Halloween Candy Poisoning

Colleagues, Last semester 30 faculty and staff participated in a reading group focused on Clayton Christensen and Henry Eyring's "The Innovative University." The reading group came together face-to-face on a number of occasions and continued the rich discussion online. It was a great experience and a fascinating book. This semester the faculty and staff participating in the American Democracy Project recommended that we invite the campus community to come together to read "A Crucible Moment: College Learning and Democracy's Future." The work was completed by the National Task Force on Civic Learning and Democratic Engagement, under the leadership of the American Association of Colleges and Universities. It's a brief volume, rich in examples, on how colleges and universities must reclaim responsibility for civic learning. "A Crucible Moment" is available in PDF here: http://www2.ed.gov/rschstat/research/pubs/college-learning-democracys-future/crucible-moment.pdf The reading group will meet once in March and once in April, with opportunities for online discussion. More information will follow later in the month. In the meantime, if you're interested in joining us for this discussion, please email Kim Schmidl-Gagne (kgagne@keene.edu). If you would like to commit to the reading group, but would prefer to read in hard copy, Kim will also order a copy for you. I look forward to this discussion, and I hope you will consider joining us for our spring reading group. Mel

The Modern Language Association likes to keep up with the times. As we all know, some information breaks first or only on Twitter and a good academic needs to be able to cite those sources. So, the MLA has devised a standard format that you should keep in mind. Its form is:

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.

"Keene Info Lit Bank"

The developing themes have influenced the design and strategy of media production at SCE, including: Strategizing videos to tie directly to course assignments and/or assessment Advising faculty members to use conversational language in production; also encouraging them to use humor and draw on past experiences Adding audio/visual elements to the video that supplement the content; the videos should not convey information that students could just read as text Producing high-quality videos (despite mixed findings related to production values, elements such as professional sound, lighting, and graphics are considered important when creating high-quality media) Keeping the four-minute view time as a design consideration, especially when producing longer-form content lectures that can be broken up into shorter segments

"This page offers an introduction to IMS Learning Tools Interoperability® (LTI®), a brief history of the development of the specification, and details about current work being done by IMS and its members around LTI. Links to other resources and information about how to get involved in the LTI work or to begin implementing the specification are also provided."

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.

"The American Democracy Project for Civic Engagement is a national, multi-campus initiative that seeks to foster informed civic engagement in the United States. The project seeks to create a greater intellectual understanding and commitment to participate in the civic life of the United States."

It's FREE! Processing videos with filesize up to 300 MB Analyse video files and provide in-depth information such as video codec, bitrate, resolution, frame rate... Video converter supporting all well known file formats (3GP, AMV, ASF, AVI, FLV, MKV, MOV, M4V, MP4, MPEG, MPG, RM, VOB, WMV). - Simple mode: select output video format only - Advanced mode: wider range of settings available video settings: video codec, resolution, bitrate , framerate audio settings: audio codec, bitrate, sampling rate, channels Add watermark text to a video file Cut video by setting new start and end time Crop video with just few clicks Merge several video files into a single one Demux video files (extract audio, video or subtitles from a file) Record video from a webcam or any other available input device Take video snapshots (make video thumbnails) Add (hard-coded) subitles to a video file Download flash videos from more than 20 video sharing sites

ArcGIS Explorer is a free virtual globe that is much more than just a fun and easy way to explore the world in 2D and 3D. You can use it to add your own data to your maps and combine it with free data from ESRI. You can also customize your maps by adding photos, reports, videos, and other information.

GeoTagging: The process of attaching geographic information to digital media, most often photos. Here, we focus on geotagging, geocaching, and even orienteering for schools, clubs, and organizations. See: http://edgis.org/geotag