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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 

There are many online word cloud generator out there for web users, but getting by free and good ones is not that easy. That is why I am sharing Nine Excellent (Yet Free) Online Word Cloud Generator Read more: http://www.smashingapps.com/2011/12/15/nine-excellent-yet-free-online-word-cloud-generators.html#ixzz1qz18Cybm

Think-Pair-Square - Students share with two other students after they have completed Think-Pair-Share (4-square). Think-Pair-Pod-Share - A "Pod" is a sharing with a small group (a table group) - prior to sharing with the whole group. Students first share with a partner. Then bring all thoughts together as a table (pod) prior to sharing out with whole group. Think-Write/Draw-Share -  Students write or draw their own ideas before they pair up to discuss them with a partner. This allows students to more fully develop their own ideas before sharing. Think-Pair-Share (reading strategies) - During "think" part students are asked to think in terms of summarizing, questioning, predicting, visualizing. Once students understand all four of these areas, groups can be asked to use a variety in a single "think-pair-share". (One (or more) groups summarize, one (or more) groups visualize, etc…) Think-Pair-Share (various perspectives) - After posing a question, ask pairs to "think" in terms of a different perspective. A character in a story, a career, a historical figure. Etc…

Illustrations to Dickens http://digital.libraries.ou.edu/cdm4/browse.php?CISOROOT=%2Fdickens2 During his life, Joseph Clayton Clarke was known for illustrating the novels of Charles Dickens. Born in 1856, Clarke also designed postcards and cigarette cards. His first illustrations of Dickens' work appeared in 1887 in Fleet Street magazine, and he continued by publishing complete illustration collections in books like "The Characters of Charles Dickens". This digital collection from the University of Oklahoma Libraries brings together 185 of his illustrations from this fine tome. Visitors can read the description of each illustration on the site, and view each item listed by character name. Here visitors will find such Dickens favorites as Clarence Barnacle from Little Dorrit and Martin Chuzzlewit from the novel of the same name

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.

Welcome to TED Books: an imprint of short nonfiction works designed for digital distribution. Shorter than traditional books, TED Books run fewer than 20,000 words each -- long enough to explain a powerful idea, but short enough to be read in a single sitting.  

Frequently when one hears about the Native American experience in the United States, the focus is on the loss of traditions, folkways, and language. In contrast, this website was created to highlight a recent documentary by Anne Makepeace that focuses on the ways in which Native American languages have recovered and thrived in recent times. On the site, visitors should start by clicking on the interactive "Language Map". Here visitors can learn about twelve different languages, including Crow, Cherokee, Dakota, Euchee, and Lakota. Clicking on the "Voices" area gives visitors the opportunity to listen to Native Americans from different tribal communities speaking in their mother tongues. Additionally, visitors can send an electronic postcard from the site, read the site blog, and learn more about the project and the documentary [Scout Report]

lThe course introduces pre-service teachers to the applications of different instructional technologies in mathematics classrooms (K - 12).  Students will examine and interpret the meanings of effective and appropriate use of technology through readings and activities.  Using technology along with existing school curriculum, either as an aid or as a supplement, students will learn to create, adapt, and find technological resources.  Students will be exposed to and use Web-applets and other resources on the Internet, computer-based learning software, multimedia presentations, mathematics forums, interactive whiteboards, spreadsheets, dynamic geometry software, calculators, and calculator based laboratories (CBL).  

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.

"Let's say we're designing a course that will help widget sales people overcome buyers' objections. The objection we're focusing on right now is this one: "I've read that your widget creates a lot of heat." We have a specific way we'd like our sales people to respond to that objection. Some people in our audience are familiar with the concerns about heat, while new people might not know as much. How do you think most training designers would approach this? I think they'd do it like this."

Good tips for desiging a classroom blogging project. Geared at k12 but applicable to HE. Writing, commenting, reading

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

The online degrees therefore cater to musicians whose careers prevent them from moving to Boston. Applicants with professional experience can submit their portfolios and receive up to 30 prior learning credits. Read more: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/10/31/berklee-college-music-launches-first-accredited-bachelors-degree-programs-music#ixzz2jJ7Obpkh Inside Higher Ed

Open educational resources (OER) are any resources available at little or no cost that can be used for teaching, learning, or research. The term can include textbooks, course readings, and other learning content; simulations, games, and other applications; syllabi, quizzes, and assessment tools; and virtually any other educational material. Open resources are issued under a license that spells out how they can be used: Some may only be used in their original form; in other cases, resources can be modified, remixed, and redistributed. OER expand the access to educational resources to more learners, more of the time, and they have the potential to spur pedagogical innovation, introducing new alternatives for effective teaching.

Radbox works through a simple bookmarklet that you click whenever you're on a page with a video you want to save. The basic compatibility list reads "YouTube, Vimeo, Metacafe, DailyMotion, CollegeHumor, Hulu, Blip.tv, Megavideo, TED, etc." In my own testing, I liked the way Radbox lined up and played my selected videos with a note about when I saved them, but found that, about half the time, I'd need to click on a video and bring it up on its original site (i.e. click embedded YouTube clips and view them on YouTube) to ensure the Radbox bookmarklet picked up the video for sure. Radbox is a free service, requires a quick sign-up to use

kCELTER's - we can use this to frame our conversation about WHY use Twitter. Nice and simple post to get started. How do you actually do it? I'm going to leave behind the pedagogy (mostly) in this post, and instead offer some practical advice for teaching with Twitter. I'll cover six aspects of Twitter integration where it pays to plan ahead of time (i.e. sometime last week): organization, access, frequency, substance, archiving, and assessment. I'll deal with of each of these areas in turn, but before I do, and if you're new to Twitter, I want to urge you to read Ryan Cordell's comprehensive ProfHacker primer on Twitter. Ryan addresses many common questions about Twitter, and his guide is perfect for sharing with colleagues-and students-before you move into the nuts-and-bolts aspects of teaching with Twitter.

Te OPEN edition - must read

SweetSearch came about as the byproduct of making findingDulcinea, an aggregator that terms itself the "Librarian of the Internet." It's a database of about 35,000 web sites vetted by researchers, librarians, and teachers, with priority given to spots like the Library of Congress, Smithsonian, and other public and academic sources. It sweeps away the pseudo-science, forums, and sites that read like paraphrased summaries.

And the choices are a bit eccentric; men who were famous for their interesting and numerous notebooks are well-represented but also included are a few from the past and present that just happened to cross our path during the course of our research. Where images of the notebooks were available they have been shown; in their absence a description will have to do.  Read more: http://artofmanliness.com/2010/09/13/the-pocket-notebooks-of-20-famous-men/#ixzz0zYHzA7ur