Group items tagged

These skills and competencies for digital curators include seven areas: 1) Communication and interpersonal competency: This competency is required for clear and effective communication with a variety of audiences, including users, creators, managers, researchers and collaborators. 2) Curating and preserving content competency: This competency is required to understand and carry out a range of activities as defined in the digital curation lifecycle model, including the creation, acquisition, management, representation, access, organization, transformation and preservation of digital content. 3) Curation technologies competency: This competency is required to identify, use, and develop tools and applications to support digital curation activities. The context of this competency is the information technology infrastructure, including the tools and applications deployed to support digital curation. 4) Environmental scanning competency: This competency is required to identify and use resources to stay current and on the leading edge regarding trends, technologies and practices that affect professional work and capabilities within the field of digital curation. 5) Management, planning and evaluation competency: This competency is required for planning, coordinating, implementing, and assessing programs, projects and services related to digital curation. 6) Services competency: This competency is required to identify, understand and build services to respond to a community's and/or institution's digital curation needs. 7) Systems, models and modeling competency: This competency is required for high-level, abstract thinking about and critical analysis of complex systems, workflows and conceptual models related to digital curation.                                                                      Robin Good

"Most Significant Metatrends for the Next 10 Years 1. The world of work is increasingly global and increasingly collaborative. 2. People expect to work, learn, socialize, and play whenever and wherever they want to. 3. The internet is becoming a global mobile network--and already is at its edges. 4. The technologies we use are increasingly cloud-based and delivered over utility networks, facilitating the rapid growth of online videos and rich media. 5. Openness--concepts like open content, open data, and open resources, along with notions of transparency and easy access to data and information--is moving from a trend to a value for much of the world. 6. Legal notions of ownership and privacy lag behind the practices common in society. 7. Real challenges of access, efficiency, and scale are redefining what we mean by quality and success. 8. The internet is constantly challenging us to rethink learning and education, while refining our notion of literacy. 9. There is a rise in informal learning as individual needs are redefining schools, universities, and training. 10. Business models across the education ecosystem are changing. Excerpts of the 10 top metatrends identified in A Communiqué from the Horizon Project Retreat, January 2012, an NMC Horizon Project publication under Creative Commons attribution license. "

"At a recent retreat to mark the tenth anniversary of the New Media Consortium's Horizon Project, which produces an annual report on technology trends affecting higher education, participants identified 28 important metatrends. The 10 most significant are: the world of work is increasingly global and increasingly collaborative; people expect to work, learn, socialize, and play whenever and wherever they want to; the Internet is becoming a global mobile network -- and already is at its edges; the technologies we use are increasingly cloud-based and delivered over utility networks, facilitating the rapid growth of online videos and rich media; openness is moving from a trend to a value for much of the world; legal notions of ownership and privacy lag behind the practices common in society; real challenges of access, efficiency, and scale are redefining what we mean by quality and success; the Internet is consta ntly challenging us to rethink learning and education, while refining our notion of literacy; there is a rise in informal learning as individual needs are redefining schools, universities, and training; and business models across the education ecosystem are changing"

"The Institute for Scholarship of Teaching and Learning at Mount Royal University is pleased to announce our 2011 Centennial Symposium on Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, November 10-12, 2011 in Banff Alberta Canada. This gathering of teacher/scholars is a "practitioners conference" dedicated to developing individual and collaborative teaching and learning scholarship, sharing nascent data and findings, going public with compelling results of completed research projects, and building an extended scholarly community. The goals of this event, and the Institute for Scholarship of Teaching and Learning at Mount Royal University, include understanding and improving student learning through systematic scholarly inquiry and building collective knowledge for the future."

"The author of the best-selling What the Best College Teachers Do is back with more humane, doable, and inspiring help, this time for students who want to get the most out of college-and every other educational enterprise, too. The first thing they should do? Think beyond the transcript. The creative, successful people profiled in this book-college graduates who went on to change the world we live in-aimed higher than straight A's. They used their four years to cultivate habits of thought that would enable them to grow and adapt throughout their lives. Combining academic research on learning and motivation with insights drawn from interviews with people who have won Nobel Prizes, Emmys, fame, or the admiration of people in their field, Ken Bain identifies the key attitudes that distinguished the best college students from their peers. These individuals started out with the belief that intelligence and ability are expandable, not fixed. This led them to make connections across disciplines, to develop a "meta-cognitive" understanding of their own ways of thinking, and to find ways to negotiate ill-structured problems rather than simply looking for right answers. Intrinsically motivated by their own sense of purpose, they were not demoralized by failure nor overly impressed with conventional notions of success. These movers and shakers didn't achieve success by making success their goal. For them, it was a byproduct of following their intellectual curiosity, solving useful problems, and taking risks in order to learn and grow."

"The wait is almost over. A weeklong exercise in withdrawal from social media usage will end for the campus community at Harrisburg University of Science and Technology shortly. The Pennsylvania university, which performed a similar move last year, has been blocking network access to 10 popular sites, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace, Bebo, Orkut, Hi5, Twitxr, and Plurk, as well as texting outlets. This year's activity has been dubbed, "Back to Blackout." The intent of the blackout is to inspire thinking about how, when, and where people use and abuse social media, according to Eric Darr, executive vice president and provost. "We believe that technology is not inherently good or bad. Rather, technology becomes useful or destructive in the hands of users. This exercise is an attempt to better understand an important technology, social media, that clearly impacts how we live and work. It might inspire students, faculty, and staff to think more about their social media habits and to further raise awareness about the impact that social media has on daily life and work.""

"The Rental Phenomenon In the past two years, the post-secondary textbook rental market has exploded. Driven by the outcry over book prices, federal legislation, readily available pricing information on the Internet, and sophisticated web-based rental management platforms, old and new competitors are disrupting the $10 billion college textbook business. Book rental isn't really a new phenomenon-a few college stores have been renting books since the Civil War. The National Association of College Stores (NACS) proclaimed fall 2010 as the "Year of the Rental." Players include long-timers like Follett and Budgetext, institutional stores and fast-growing start-ups. BookRenter, started in 2008, netted $40 million from investors in a funding round this past February. Chegg, started in 2007, has raised $200+ million in venture capital and attracted senior management from Yahoo and Netflix. The same drivers are growing trade in used books, eBooks, and online instructional content. Rental is also driving new business models for sourcing and distributing educational materials that may carry the industry forward into digital. Having book inventory isn't necessarily required-at least one high-flying firm, BookRenter, exists mainly as an online marketplace. Read on to see how this change in distribution is impacting the higher education market. Next month we'll look at what all this means for K-12."

"U of C Student Success Centre Goes Mobile Students at the University of Calgary can stay connected to services offered by their Student Success Centre (SSC) with a new custom mobile application. The application allows students to read recent news, to register for workshops or seminars, to book appointments with advisors, writing tutors, career and academic development specialists, and to access the SSC events calendar 24/7. "We are committed to effective communication with students and to making it easy for them to access the programs and services we offer," says Joel Wilkinson, Director of the Student Success Centre. "Most students do almost everything online and our new application will allow them to stay connected with the resources and events available to support their path to success." The application was developed by the company 4abyte Inc., which was founded by Charles Newton Price, a recent U of C graduate student. "We were pleased to be part of this project," says Charles. "Given the prominent presence of smartphones on campus, going mobile has become indispensible for post-secondary institutions." SSC's sharp, attractive, and easy application, available for iPhone, Android, and Blackberry Torch devices, adds to the University of Calgary's steps to remain at the forefront of student engagement. The application is available for download on iTunes (iPhone only) or via the SSC website at: http://ucalgary.ca/ssc "

"Define Your Boundaries How you choose to set boundaries on the kinds of communication you have with colleagues and students will ultimately be a personal decision, albeit shaped by campus policy (on office hours or the use of email) and departmental culture (some departments expect your attendance at frequent social events, and others don't). Because the language of social media (following and friending) tends to blur boundaries, it's very important that teachers communicate carefully with students about their own practices (I and many other faculty simply have a rule of not friending students on Facebook, for example) and especially when social media are included in course requirements. Jason and Alex's discussion of the creepy treehouse problem offers some good suggestions on making your reasons for using social media for the course transparent. "

"It found that more structured on-boarding tactics made employees happier and more confident, and more likely to believe they fit both the job and organization. In turn, those who went through a structured program were significantly more likely to feel engaged and loyal to their employer than those that didn't the researchers estimate "In most organizations, they think of the on-boarding process as primarily imparting information, which is necessary, but that's not enough," Prof. Gruman said. Additionally they need to create opportunities for employees to quickly develop a social network, establish where to get information and support, provide work that's engaging enough to make them feel they are making a contribution and feedback that they are valued, the researchers found."

"This is the 6th annual conference on blended learning sponsored by COHERE (Collaboration for Online Higher Education & Research) and CSSHE (Canadian Society for the Study of Higher Education). It will feature Dr. Tony Bates, the well known scholar and commentator on the use of technology in higher education. His latest book is Managing Technology in Higher Education: Strategies for Transforming Teaching and Learning (Jossey-Bass, 2011). In addition to taking an active part in the entire conference and doing the conference wrap-up, Tony will deliver the following keynotes: Meeting the challenge of technology: are we failing as managers? Designing university teaching to meet the needs of 21st century students The conference will also feature a number of concurrent sessions, for which we invite proposals related to one of the following streams: 1. Taking stock of blended learning in higher education: Management, policy, and research issues 2. Case studies of teaching and learning issues related to blended learning"

"March 1, 2011 Designing Online Courses with Course Updates in Mind By: Patti Shank, PhD, CPT in Online Education Add Comment Online courses are rarely "done." Over time, things change, including the curriculum and content (because of changes in the field and changes to available content) and the technologies (ways that the content can be delivered and tools for interacting with it and with others in the courses, including you). Bottom line: Just like initial course development, updating courses can be quite a lot of work. You can reduce the hassles and work (but not eliminate them) by designing your online courses with updating them in mind. That is, design so that updating is built into the process, not tacked on as an afterthought. Identify change-likely elements"

This article might really help us decide how to keep our courses updated more effectively.

"Open education builds upon the best traditions of educational innovation and the open source movement. It is a field that foresees remarkable transformations in institutions and teaching and learning at all levels. This course explores innovations in open education from a variety of perspectives. It examines the various dimensions of open education from traditional to contemporary. It explores the micro impacts impacts at the course, curriculum, and program levels as well as the macro impacts, those at the university and national educational policy levels. Finally, the course examines the remarkable transformative potential of open education on individuals and institutions."

"Colleges themselves are also finding a need to craft multiple identities online, setting up a different Facebook page and Twitter account for every department or research lab. The University of Virginia's library has 14 Facebook accounts. (One focuses on the science-and-engineering library, another on the fine-arts library, and so on.) Many colleges now count dozens of official Twitter accounts, plus a tangle of pages on Facebook, channels on YouTube, and photo collections on sites like Flickr. In the past year, more colleges have tried to get a handle on their many online identities, crafting social-networking policies and creating a new job position-social-media strategist-to try to bring some sort of order to the chatter."

"What is lost with this settlement is the chance for something better. The shift away from Access Copyright in recent months has led to a growing awareness of the large number of licensed materials on university campuses, the benefits of open access, the emergence of open educational resources, and the move to digital course materials. Investing in new open materials - which pay the creator but allow for more flexible use and reuse - would offer innovative teaching materials at the very time that Canadian higher education should be rethinking how course materials are developed and disseminated in a digital world. This is hard work as new models require real investment, commitment from faculty, and patience from students. The payoff would have been significant, but the AUCC is seemingly more interested in "cost certainty" than in education innovation. The big question now is whether its members feel the same. My guess is that most will sign, but perhaps some will carefully assess their experience of operating outside the collective and see some short term pain for long term gain. "

New agreement re ACCESS copyright this week.