Universities are losing their grip on higher learning as the Internet is, inexorably, becoming the dominant infrastructure for knowledge - both as a container and as a global platform for knowledge exchange between people - and as a new generation of students requires a very different model of higher education. The transformation of the university is not just a good idea. It is an imperative, and evidence is mounting that the consequences of further delay may be dire.
SOPHIE is an open source tool maintained by USC that allows for creating and reading rich media documents in a networked environment. Sophie authors can easily combine a variety of media - text, images, video and audio into a sophisticated multimedia work.
This is part of a Pew Research Center series of reports exploring the behaviors, values and opinions of the teens and twenty-somethings that make up the Millennial Generation
Show Me Whats Wrong is a very ambitious site w/ a great idea. This would be a site that is designed for people who need help w/ their computer issues. For example, one would go to Show Me Whats Wrong, type in name and email address and it generates a unique URL.
Taking the Mystery out of Copyright is a site from the US Library of Congress that uses animations to teach about copyrights and copyright laws. It's fun and educational and easy to understand.
The Library of Congress also has a lot of other great resources for educators.
Encyclomedia is a free site that contains a huge variety of videos on history, science, nature, people, travel, entertainment and much more. They have designed it as an online video encyclopedia with descriptions and information about each video. You can browse by category or search for different videos.
There are a bunch of popup/linked ads, but they have to keep the site running somehow.
Clarify is an OS X app (a Windows version is promised, currently in a free beta period, that allows you to take multiple screenshots, annotate them, and combine them into a single document. This creates an easy-to-follow set of instructions for just about any task.
Watch2gether is a great site for watching YouTube videos w/ others. This site allows users to discuss YouTube videos via a text chat that opens up on the right side of the window.
Socrative is a smart student response system that empowers teachers to engage their classrooms through a series of educational games and exercises via smartphones and tablets.
you know what hits me about this is that we need to consider lowering our sights on the technology that we promote campus wide to faculty and use the peer tutoring method to engage more faculty in the common easy to use technologies. Still work on the emerging tech with the tech savy and work more one-on-one with the biggest chunk of faculty using/exploring other technology. Did I just define 3 levels of engagment with faculty? hhmmmm