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I heard a great interview with the founder of The Noun Project on CBC's The Spark. This project offers some excellent simple, clean icons for easy use. Food for thought!

"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. "

There is a small town, about 12 miles east of Austin, Texas, where a high school devoted to teaching every subject to every student through project-based learning (PBL) opened five years ago. On its own, this would not have been a noteworthy event. The list of schools across America deepening the learning process through PBL has been growing for quite some time. But few schools have fine-tuned the process like Manor New Technology High School in Manor, Texas, where 98 percent of seniors graduate and 100 percent of the graduates are accepted to college

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

A colleague of mine just finished his masters in special education.  This is a link to his capping project.  It contains tips on how to work with students who have asperger's syndrome.

"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"

"Blackboard is buying out two major players in the open source services space: Moodlerooms and NetSpot. Blackboard has also brought onboard Sakai Project founding architect Charles Severance. With these additions, the company is also launching its own open source division: Blackboard Education Open Source Services. Moving into Open Source Services Teams from both Moodlerooms and NetSpot will make up Blackboard's new open source group. Both of those companies provide commercial services for institutions that use Moodle, including support, consulting, installation, and hosting services."

"A study by the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project confirms the idea that young adults-particularly undergraduate and graduate students-are more likely to use the Internet and own tech devices than is the rest of the general population. But nonstudents ages 18 to 24 were more active on social networks than were college students, sending more updates to Facebook and Twitter."

"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."

"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 "

"Mobile Initiatives 'Breaking Down the Walls of the Classroom' at Abilene Christian U Small private college Abilene Christian University has entered the fourth academic year of its mobile education initiatives, and the program's momentum and influence is still growing. The Texas institution, which has added the Apple iPad to its list of devices made available to students and faculty, along with the iPhone and iPod touch, recently hosted a Connected Open House, with attendance by people from dozens of other schools. The university is also running numerous mobile-oriented research projects among its faculty and recently opened three new mobile research centers sponsored by a sizeable grant from AT&T."

A new tool (or at least new to me) for concept mapping, collaborating and sharing ideas.

This resource from Colorado state provides easy access to information on how to make components of your course accessible using UDL.