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"If compared to the majority of businesses out there, universities and colleges have an advantage when it comes to social media: the student community. For the majority of students, the years spent at university is usually one of the most important and remarkable times. This makes it a good start point for colleges in social media - when you have a happy community of consumers who like what you have to offer, things are much easier."

"It was about 12 or 13 years ago, that we decided to design a class website template. It seemed that student materials were heading online and at Melbourne Business School we opted for a faculty-designed solution. For those days, it was pretty slick and it was the main template used for about a decade. A few years ago, wanting more features the School moved to Blackboard. And when I got to the University of Toronto there Blackboard was again. My kids' school uses Blackboard. It is everywhere and it is terrible. While it has all the features you could want and it has some integration with University systems, it is very cumbersome to use. So much so that I kept its use to a minimum for my course this semester and opted for my own WordPress hosted solution."

"Whether it's via the administration, the professors, or the students, serious investments in edtech are coming to major universities. Which startups are going to be called upon to help make the transition?"

Online versions of college courses are attracting hundreds of thousands of students, millions of dollars in funding, and accolades from university administrators. Is this fad, or is higher education about to get the overhaul it needs?

"This isn't your childhood library. The Hunt Library at North Carolina State University is beautiful. The main floor looks more like a sleek Apple showroom than a stuffy library. And instead of a Genius Bar, there's an Ask Me alcove, where you can get help on everything from laptops to flash drives."

"While students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology pay thousands of dollars for courses, the university will announce a new program on Monday allowing anyone anywhere to take M.I.T. courses online free of charge - and for the first time earn official certificates for demonstrating mastery of the subjects taught. "

"A tiny number of ideas can go a long way, as we've seen. And the Internet makes that more and more likely. What's happening is that we might, in fact, be at a time in our history where we're being domesticated by these great big societal things, such as Facebook and the Internet. We're being domesticated by them, because fewer and fewer and fewer of us have to be innovators to get by. And so, in the cold calculus of evolution by natural selection, at no greater time in history than ever before, copiers are probably doing better than innovators. Because innovation is extraordinarily hard. My worry is that we could be moving in that direction, towards becoming more and more sort of docile copiers. MARK D. PAGEL is a Fellow of the Royal Society and Professor of Evolutionary Biology; Head of the Evolution Laboratory at the University of Reading; Author Oxford Encyclopaedia of Evolution; co-author of The Comparative Method in Evolutionary Biology. His forthcoming book is Wired for Culture: Origins of the Human Social Mind."

A PARADOX of American higher education is this: The expectations of leading universities do much to define what secondary schools teach, and much to establish a template for what it means to be an educated man or woman. College campuses are seen as the source for the newest thinking and for the generation of new ideas, as society's cutting edge.

The Social Computing Symposium 2012 focuses on the changing nature of "the public," and is held on the campus of New York University in the Interactive Telecommunication Program space on January 12-13. Since 2004, Microsoft Research (MSR) has sponsored an annual symposium on social computing that has brought together academic and industry researchers, social startups, writers, and influential commentators in order to open new lines of communication among previously disconnected groups.

You can learn a lot about the world from Wikipedia, sometimes without reading the articles. Kalev Leetaru, a researcher at the University of Illinois, has been looking at the capacious volunteer-written encyclopedia as a Big Data resource, concentrating on the connections between cities around the globe over time. To understand these connections, he focuses on the type of language used to talk about a particular place, to see whether the writers have a generally positive or negative sentiment toward the place at that time.

This autumn more than a million students are going to take part in an experiment that could re-invent the landscape of higher education.

itunes for universities

The Oxford Internet Institute is a research department of the University of Oxford, focusing on the social implications of the Internet and other advanced ICTs. Our multidisciplinary research faculty include political scientists, sociologists, lawyers, and economists who are engaged in a variety of research projects covering the themes of: Everyday Life, Governance and Democracy, Network Economy, Science and Learning and Shaping the Internet. One of our key missions is to stimulate and inform debate about the Internet, and to shape policy and practice around its (re)invention and use.

"When campus president Wallace Loh walked into Juan Uriagereka's office last August, he got right to the point. "We need courses for this thing - yesterday!""

"A list of all the best places to learn for free online."

"In 1956, Benjamin Bloom with collaborators Max Englehart, Edward Furst, Walter Hill, and David Krathwohl published a framework for categorizing educational goals: Taxonomy of Educational Objectives. Familiarly known as Bloom's Taxonomy, this framework has been applied by generations of K-12 teachers and college instructors in their teaching. The framework elaborated by Bloom and his collaborators consisted of six major categories: Knowledge, Comprehension, Application, Analysis, Synthesis, and Evaluation. The categories after Knowledge were presented as "skills and abilities," with the understanding that knowledge was the necessary precondition for putting these skills and abilities into practice. While each category contained subcategories, all lying along a continuum from simple to complex and concrete to abstract, the taxonomy is popularly remembered according to the six main categories."