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More than 50 percent of the students surveyed said they want course material to be avaalble to them even after the complete a course. According to the report, "They expressed interest in accessing online material in their professional lives, after their coursework is complete." Sixty percent even indicated a willingness to pay for lecture capture services.

Delicious is the Rome, Jerusalem, and Paris of my existence as an academic these days. It's where I make my friends, how I get the news, and where I go to trade. All this from a little server that does nothing but share bookmarks in public.

I've been building a taxonomy -- the way some people use wikis, the way my boyfriend uses that utterly cool personal software, "the brain;" the way my father uses his vertical file, the way my DC friends use their rolodexes -- so I sort out all the information I take in, annexing technology to memory, sorting factoids and spare threads and notable evidence in neat, interlocking piles where I can find information again, draw connections, and create new connections.

The forty American history students I teach are instructed to go to my delicious page for writing help, research help, maps, and images relating to the class.

The program—called the Virtual Computing Initiative—would expand a concept that has been in use at N.C. State since 2004, when the school and IBM started the virtual lab, which university students can use from remote locations. N.C. State also said it would make the programming code that underpins the system available to other universities around the world, so they can set up similar cloud-computing systems for schools in their regions.

The only requirements to participate are broadband internet access and a computer or mobile device capable of accessing the internet.

The other benefit that comes out of that, especially with group work, is you can see what students are doing as they are doing it....

you know what is going on, and you can see from the interaction they are having and the contribution of material in the wiki.

Mader talks about powerful ways to use wikis in education, content ownership issues, and how wikis tend to be used--and why.

In higher ed, there are really three ways I think a wiki can be useful: teaching, research, and administration.

teachers can work together using a wiki to write curriculum and lesson plans for courses, to develop assignments, and so forth. If you have multiple teachers teaching sections of a course and they need to teach from the same materials, they have a central hub to which they can collaboratively contribute material ... and then from which they can teach and keep all their sections.

St Johns Grammar is encouraging mobiles as part of an Australian-first trial to promote the benefits of mobile technology in increasing fluency in foreign languages.

The Year 10 students, studying Indonesian, are given a mobile each which they use to call up an automated service that guides them through a menu. They choose from conversations about booking a hotel to a menu and are prompted to go through the details in Indonesian. Their answers are uploaded on to a website and get marked on their use of the language.

unique trial by the the Government's Le@rning Federation's Mobile Applications for Language Learning project.

The factor that will close that “enthusiasm gap” is the growing use of distance education by well-respected universities, Mr. Zogby predicts in the book, The Way We’ll Be: The Zogby Report on the Transformation of the American Dream (Random House).

Which “national surveys” is Ms. Blumenstyk referring to? I would like to see the citation. The Sloan Foundation has completed many national annual surveys that find Ms. Blumenstyk’s statement to be a myth. Furthermore, she is mixing apples and oranges – she could be referring to an Eduventure’s study that shows many employers are wary of students with degrees from completely online universities, but that has nothing to do with the perception toward distance or online learning in general. Jeffrey Seaman from the Sloan Consortium notes that “virtual universities,” where “100 percent of the applicant’s courses were taken online, represents less than 1 percent of all institutions offering online programs.” Mr. Zogby’s prediction that the growing use of distance education by “well-respected universities” will make distance learning more popular is accurate, but it is not new. Distance education is already more popular and has seen a steady increase in enrollments for the many years.

More cognitive and affective experiences lead to more thinking, more synaptic connections, and more learning. To this end, we have sought to leverage guesswork, repetition, stories, context, in-depth discussion, etc, to offer what Siemens might call ’frequency, diversity, and depth of exposure’ to the content. I’ve always maintained that learning is multi-dimensional, and deepened when you approach the subject from different angles.

we are connectors, or resources who point learners at key patterns or elements that help strengthen their connection to a piece of information (and emphasize the skill of being able to identify patterns).

Teachers do NOT provide digital access to notes and materials, and students are quizzed regularly about the content on which they have taken textual notes to see if this traditional “broadcast/spray model” of learning has been effective. (Or at least if the items included in the quiz have temporarily been stored in short term memory.) We MUST move beyond this traditional “banking model” of education, and I’m convinced the impetus for these changes is NOT coming and is not GOING to come from “inside the system” of traditional education.

If we want to improve learning ~today~, we have to meet learners where they are ~today~. And today and for the foreseeable future the overwhelming majority of learners will be going to schools and universities where their teachers will adopt textbooks based on things like the name recognition of the author(s), the quality of the textbook, supporting instructional materials like test item banks and PPT notes, and the availability (and marketing!) of review copies.

having said that, there are some additional, very practical benefits of an open textbook for the faculty member who has to make the adoption decision. For example, when the license and the technology allow the faculty member to remove chapters from the book, change the order of chapters in the book, or even edit chapters in the book directly (e.g., adding locally relevant examples) BEFORE her/his students ever see the books online or in print, this gives the faculty member much greater control over the instructional experience. Most faculty members couldn’t care less about “open” for openness sake, but give them greater control over the instructional experience, and suddenly openness is translated into a concrete benefit - a difference beyond “openness for openness sake.”

The Plus in our CC By-NC-SA Plus will indeed be More Permissions - it will grant blanket permissions for anyone and everyone to make Commercial Use of FWK-published textbook materials in the context of the FWK Marketplace. The Marketplace will be an area of the FWK site where people can post and sell their own study guides, audio chapters, flash cards, videos, case studies, and other study materials related to FWK textbooks at whatever price they set (of course, they can alternately choose to openly license the things they put in the Marketplace, too). The Marketplace will be an “eBay for study materials,” and like eBay when somone sells material through the Marketplace, a small portion of the sale will come back to FWK and be shared with the textbook author whose work has been derived from or augmented by the new material.