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"The emergence of the networked information economy is unleashing two powerful forces. On one hand, easy access to high-speed networks is empowering individuals. People can now discover and consume information resources and services globally from their homes. Further, new social computing approaches are inviting people to share in the creation and edification of information on the Internet. Empowerment of the individual -- or consumerization -- is reducing the individual's reliance on traditional brick-and-mortar institutions in favor of new and emerging virtual ones. Second, ubiquitous access to high-speed networks along with network standards, open standards and content, and techniques for virtualizing hardware, software, and services is making it possible to leverage scale economies in unprecedented ways. What appears to be emerging is industrial-scale computing -- a standardized infrastructure for delivering computing power, network bandwidth, data storage and protection, and services. Comsumerization and industrialization beg the question "Is this the end of the middle?"; that is, what will be the role of "enterprise" IT in the future? Indeed, the bigger question is what will become of all of our intermediating institutions? This volume examines the impact of IT on higher education and on the IT organization in higher education."

Voices Carry I was feeling really restless early last week about our ability to run and manage new and emerging services in a World where change happens at a pace that is nearly out of control. I thought my post, Why Run a Service would be a signal that I've come to a conclusion that there are real reasons to try and keep up. I didn't honestly expect it to strike the chord it did, but when you ask people interesting questions you sometimes get more interesting questions in return that demand to be explored. Lots of killer conversation going on in the comments of that post … one particular thread emerged about how encouraging open writing and blogging can generate greater depth of connections within our community. That last word is the really important piece to us - how we work to engage our community to embrace these emergent trends is what we think will ultimately make what we do more interesting and important. The more they participate, the more we can contribute opportunities to change teaching and learning.

"My suggested assumptions in MOOC include: * people would learn in a self-directed manner * Knowledge is distributed * Knowledge is negotiated * Knowledge is emergent * Knowledge is rhizomatic (thanks to Dave's video posted - refer to How to be successful in MOOC?) * Learning is capacity to construct, navigate and traverse across networks * personal learning networks would be a far better way for people to learn * people like to learn via social networks * people know how to connect (people have the communication, literacy and critical literacy skills) * people know how to use the technology to connect * people are self motivated (intrinsic motivation) * people like to accept challenges, chaos and complexity is just part of the learning process * people don't need to follow a course or qualification for learning to be effective * Learning is emergent, and is based on connections, engagement and interactions * Learning is open * Identity in networked learning is based on individual's "participation, interaction" in the networks, and is reflective of ones involvement in the media, it's dynamic, adaptive * Individual and social learning is emphasised - cooperation * Sensemaking and wayfinding are important"

The Future of Work - good-bye martini lunches, hello working poolside Posted by Erik Larson at 04:28 PM Will social networking and instant messages replace the standard business phone call, the client lunch and the handshake? The Acrobat.com team recently completed a survey with Directions Research, Inc. that points toward an evolution in office workplace culture, including the changing ways white-collar workers are interacting and coordinating their tasks, and how business will be conducted in the social media-rich environment of the 21st century. The survey identified four key categories of knowledge workers: Leaders - Young professionals who use a variety of emerging technologies both at work and in their personal lives Actives - Largely over-35 year old professionals who have adapted to emerging technologies to meet the changing demands of the workplace Followers - The less technically-inclined who rely on e-mail at the exclusion of other technologie Resistors - Generally older workers who are reluctant to adjust to shifts in the workplace and office technologies

After exam boards have been conducted, letters signed and mailed to students, external examiners thanked and supplementary assessments created, there is a moment - a fracture in time - where academics breathe, reflect and consolidate. Before writing courses for the September start, I take a week to think about the semesters that have passed. I review my teaching journal, think about student reviews and locate the literature that has emerged in the past few months while I've been buried in marking, moderating and examining. This year has been special. All my students - from first year through to doctoral candidates - have been engaged, challenging and provocative. They have big personalities, work hard and care about both personal success and wider social justice. There was Alex who saw every concept, from postFordism through to information literacy, through the gauze of Lady Gaga. Toby never knew how extraordinary he was until the final seminar of his first year when fellow students burst into spontaneous applause in response to one of his comments. Aimee thought deeply, read widely and arrived 30 minutes before each lecture to make sure she did not miss it. Sophie discovered Google Scholar early in the course and proceeded to give her colleagues updates of the conference papers she had read during the week.

There are growing expectations among college students to be able to access and manage their course materials over the World Wide Web. In its early days, faculty would create web pages by hand for posting this information. As Internet technologies and access have matured over the past decade, course and learning management systems such as Blackboard and Web CT have become the norm for distributing such materials. In today's Web 2.0 world, wikis have emerged as a tool that may complement or replace the use of traditional course management systems as a tool for disseminating course information. Because of a wiki's collaborative nature, its use also allows students to participate in the process of course management, information sharing, and content creation. Using examples from an information technology classroom, this paper describes several ways to structure and use a wiki as a course management tool, and shares results of a student survey on the effectiveness of such an approach on student learning. Keywords: Wiki, Course Management, Collaboration, Web 2.0, Content Creation, Student Learning.

About the Project For four years, Bosnia and Herzegovina was torn by the bloodiest and most ruthless European conflict since World War II. Its capital, Sarajevo, was the focus of an epic siege. Its territory was riven into ethnic enclaves, and accounts of mass killing and rape shook the world's conscience. With the signing of the Dayton accords last December, Bosnia is emerging from that torment. Now it faces the challenge of reconstruction and reconciliation, of carrying out free elections and of bringing accused war criminals to justice. "Bosnia: Uncertain Paths to Peace" is both a photographic chronicle and a worldwide discussion of this crucial passage in Bosnia's struggle. An interactive photo essay by the French photojournalist Gilles Peress, with the photographer's narrative, documents the last weeks of the siege of Sarajevo in February and March, including the exodus of Serbs from the suburbs from which the siege had been mounted. A collection of forums for discussion, led by scholars, diplomats, artists, humanitarian leaders and other experts, will be active for one month, starting June 10, and open to contributions from the entire Internet community. Connections have been established in Sarajevo, at the war crimes tribunal in The Hague and at the United Nations to encourage participation by those closest to the Bosnian conflict and its resolution. And resources for context are available, including chronologies, maps, links to other Internet sites, a glossary and who's who, a reading list and recent coverage of the Bosnian events from The New York Times. We welcome your feedback about this project.

The University of California, Berkeley is the preeminent public research and teaching institution in the nation. From classic literature to emerging technologies, the curricula of our 130 academic departments span the wide world of thought and knowledge. Supported by the people of California, the university has embraced public service as an essential part of its mission since 1868.

December 2005/January 2006 | Volume 63 | Number 4 Learning in the Digital Age Pages 8-13 Listen to the Natives Schools are stuck in the 20th century. Students have rushed into the 21st. How can schools catch up and provide students with a relevant education? Marc Prensky School didn't teach me to read-I learned from my games. -A student Educators have slid into the 21st century-and into the digital age-still doing a great many things the old way. It's time for education leaders to raise their heads above the daily grind and observe the new landscape that's emerging. Recognizing and analyzing its characteristics will help define the education leadership with which we should be providing our students, both now and in the coming decades. Times have changed. So, too, have the students, the tools, and the requisite skills and knowledge. Let's take a look at some of the features of our 21st century landscape that will be of utmost importance to those entrusted with the stewardship of our children's 21st century education. Digital Natives

As the internet replaces library databases as students' primary research option, a new discussion is emerging in academic circles: Is the vast amount of information at students' fingertips changing the way they gather and process information for the better--or for worse? In a recent Atlantic Monthly article titled "Is Google Making Us Stupid," author Nicholas Carr asserts that technology has changed the way we think, making our minds a "high-speed data-processing" machine under the influence of internet search engines. But he questions whether this development has led to a focus on surface-level skimming at the expense of deeper reading.

"IBM Social Computing Guidelines Blogs, wikis, social networks, virtual worlds and social media In the spring of 2005, IBMers used a wiki to create a set of guidelines for all IBMers who wanted to blog. These guidelines aimed to provide helpful, practical advice-and also to protect both IBM bloggers and IBM itself, as the company sought to embrace the blogosphere. Since then, many new forms of social media have emerged. So we turned to IBMers again to re-examine our guidelines and determine what needed to be modified. The effort has broadened the scope of the existing guidelines to include all forms of social computing. Below are the current and official "IBM Social Computing Guidelines," which continue to evolve as new technologies and social networking tools become available."

wealth of networks online as a wiki Table of Contents From Yochai Benkler - Wealth of Networks Jump to: navigation, search The Wealth of Networks by Yochai Benkler * 1. Introduction: A Moment of Opportunity and Challenge 1 * Part One. The Networked Information Economy 29 o 2. Some Basic Economics of Information Production and Innovation 35 o 3. Peer Production and Sharing 59 o 4. The Economics of Social Production 91 * Part Two. The Political Economy of Property and Commons 129 o 5. Individual Freedom: Autonomy, Information, and Law 133 o 6. Political Freedom Part 1: The Trouble with Mass Media 176 o 7. Political Freedom Part 2: Emergence of the Networked Public Sphere 212 o 8. Cultural Freedom: A Culture Both Plastic and Critical 273 o 9. Justice and Development 301 o 10. Social Ties: Networking Together 356 * Part Three. Policies of Freedom at a Moment of Transformation 379 o 11. The Battle Over the Institutional Ecology of the Digital Environment 383 o 12. Conclusion: The Stakes of Information Law and Policy 460 * Notes 475 * Front Matter * Epigraph: John Stuart Mill, On Liberty * Acknowledgments * Library of Congress data

Changing Nature of Physical Spaces Each Saturday I meet my friend and colleague, Scott McDonald, at a local coffee shop for an hour or so to discuss some emerging research topics we're working towards. Each week we are amazed at the number of people in Saint's sitting on their laptops working - most of them are doing browser based work like google docs, Facebook, and the like. It is rare that I see anyone not using the browser as the primary mode of work. That is a big change from even a year or so ago. The same can typically be observed if you walk onto our campus and into the student union building. You see table after table of students on laptops, living in their browsers - Facebook, gmail, and ANGEL seem to be what I see. Rarely do I observe work happening in "real" applications. I am guessing that will only get more common as the Blogs at PSU gain wider adoption for writing and students begin to weave google docs into their daily workflow.

Perpetual Beta Posted on March 27th, 2009 by Harold Jarche It hadn't really occurred to me before that pilots are an almost inextricable aspect of Enterprise 2.0. Of course the 'iterate and refine' concept can be implemented in other ways, but I think it's fair to say that organizations absolutely need to get good at running pilots, if they're not already there. It is a key facet of the path that leads to improved organizational performance. So says Ross Dawson in pilots as a key instrument for improving organizational performance in a complex world. If you take the cynefin approach for working in complex environments you first Probe then Sense and then Respond in order to develop emergent practice. There are no good or best practices that will work for your context in a changing complex environment, so probing (AKA: piloting or Beta releases) is necessary to see what works. However, changing from a highly designed approach to an agile method is difficult. I previously recommended that instructional design adopt agile methods but even in the programming world, letting go of old ways is difficult as Sara Ford at Microsoft explains in how I learned to program manage an agile team after six years of waterfall.

Turning a College Lecture into a Conversation with CoverItLive Alfred Hermida by Alfred Hermida, April 13, 2009 Tagged: coveritlive, journalism school, social media, twitter, university of british columbia Journalists who also teach will know that one of the challenges of teaching a large, undergraduate class is the sheer number of students. It can be hard to foster a discussion in a lecture hall, where many students may be too intimidated to speak up. So instead the lesson often becomes a lecture, as the professor stands up in front of the class and talks at them for the best part of an hour. In this instructor-centered model, knowledge is a commodity to be transmitted from the instructor to the student's empty vessel. There is a place for the traditional, one-to-many transmission. This is the way the mass media worked for much of the 20th century and continues to operate today. But the emergence of participatory journalism is changing this. Most news outlets, at the very least, solicit comments from their online readers. Others, such as Canada's Globe and Mail, use the live-blogging tool CoveritLive both for real-time reporting and for engaging readers in a discussion, such as in its coverage of the Mesh conference in Toronto. Tools such as CoveritLive or Twitter can turn the one-to-many model of journalism on its head, offering instead a many-to-many experience. The same tools may also have a use in the classroom, as a way of turning the traditional university lecture into a conversation.

Dubbed "the explainer" by Wired magazine, Michael Wesch is a cultural anthropologist exploring the impact of new media on society and culture. After two years studying the impact of writing on a remote indigenous culture in the rain forest of Papua New Guinea, he has turned his attention to the effects of social media and digital technology on global society. His videos on culture, technology, education, and information have been viewed by millions, translated in over ten languages, and are frequently featured at international film festivals and major academic conferences worldwide. Wesch has won several major awards for his work, including a Wired Magazine Rave Award, the John Culkin Award for Outstanding Praxis in Media Ecology, and he was recently named an Emerging Explorer by National Geographic. He has also won several teaching awards, including the 2008 CASE/Carnegie U.S. Professor of the Year for Doctoral and Research Universities.

great model for staff dev program on web 2.0 in T&L About Learning 2.0 @ Mac What is Learning 2.0 @ Mac & why are we doing it? Learning 2.0 @ Mac is a hands-on, immersive learning programme that provides an opportunity to explore Web 2.0 tools and the impact these tools are having on libraries & library service. All participants are encouraged to use the programme as an opportunity to check out 2.0 technologies and think about ways in which McMaster Libraries can use these tools to deliver innovative library services. Learning 2.0 @ Mac is all about exploration, discovery, and play! How does it work? For 12 weeks (starting February 12, 2007), participants will use freely available online tools (such as Blogger, WordPress, Bloglines, and del.icio.us) to complete a number of activities. Each week focuses on a specific type of tool (e.g. blogs, RSS, wikis) and each activity will give participants a chance to explore the tool and consider the ways in which it can be used in a library environment. Participants are encouraged to use their blogs (which they will set up in week 2) to discuss their thoughts about and reactions to the tools and technologies they explore.

The Meyer and Land Threshold Concept "The idea of threshold concepts emerged from a UK national research project into the possible characteristics of strong teaching and learning environments in the disciplines for undergraduate education (Enhancing Teaching−Learning Environments in Undergraduate Courses). In pursuing this research in the field of economics, it became clear to Erik Meyer and Ray Land [1−6, 7−12], that certain concepts were held by economists to be central to the mastery of their subject. These concepts, Meyer and Land argued, could be described as 'threshold' ones because they have certain features in common." Glynis Cousin, An introduction to threshold concepts Over the past five years this concept has been embraced by many disciplines outside economics; indeed the above quote is from Glynis Cousin's excellent short introduction to the concept written for earth scientists. The threshold concept has been seen as a valuable tool, not only in facilitating students' understanding of their subject, but in aiding the rational development of curricula in rapidly expanding arenas where there is a strong tendency to overload the curriculum (Cousin, [1, 13]). This web page will describe, briefly, the characteristics of a threshold concept and list selecteted references to the work of those examining its value in the engineering and computer sciences, the physical and biological sciences, economics, accountancy, mathematics and statistics.

The present and future of Personal Learning Environments (PLE) - 9 comments This post is recast from an assignment I completed about four months ago in a Masters Degree course entitled Innovative Practice and Emerging ICT, in which I investigated what PLEs are meant to be and where they might be going. It was originally part of a class wiki. Contents 1. Introduction 2. Towards a Definition 3. Driving Forces 4. Developments to Date 5. Barriers 6. Future Potential 7. References 8. Web Links Introduction A definition for the term Personal Learning Environment (PLE), remains elusive. Conception about what should constitute a PLE depends on the perspective of the commentator. For example, the priorities for a PLE are different for a tertiary student, a university administrator, an instructor, a working professional, or an adult who persues an eclectic path of lifelong learning. Metaphorically, an individual may engage in a learning process that is either more acquisitional or participatory (Sfard, 1998). There are inconsistencies across these positions about what a PLE should do. But whether constructively and defensively, interest in PLE appears to be growing. At the time of writing this introduction (August 2006), no particular product or service exists that can definitively be categorised as a PLE, although some prototypical work is in progress. An inclusive, authoritative account about PLEs does not yet exist. Only a handful of articles have appeared in the academic and public press about PLEs since the term gained currency in 2004. This article has been compiled after tracking recent conversations in the blogosphere and following social bookmarks.

"ast week, one of my media course (ed PD) classmates talked about the ongoing struggle to help students make sense of the flood of information online. She cited a negative experience with wikipedia, which resulted in an energetic exchange about the merits (and challenges) with open online content. It's not about "authority" nor should it be As a long time defender of the open web and open content, I wanted to point out that the educational bias towards "authoritative" or "received" sources, though relevant, is also highly political/ideological - especially in relation to emergent sources of knowledge (i.e., Open Content). Ideological in the contexts of: 1) who has access or control of the means of knowledge power and production 2) who endorses or authorizes those voices and 3) "what" forms are accepted as "valid"."