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Announcement for NEBHE's program to be held October 15, 2012 in Boston, focusing on disruptive online education initiatives and open education models and the implications for traditional university education. Preliminary program available at: http://www.nebhe.org/info/pdf/events/conference/october2012/UniversityUnbound_PreliminaryAgenda.pdf

Abstrat: "Higher education institutions face a number of opportunities and challenges as the result of the digital revolution. The institutions perform a number of scholarship functions which can be affected by new technologies, and the desire is to retain these functions where appropriate, whilst the form they take may change. Much of the reaction to technological change comes from those with a vested interest in either wholesale change or maintaining the status quo. Taking the resilience metaphor from ecology, the authors propose a framework for analysing an institution's ability to adapt to digital challenges. This framework is examined at two institutions (the UK Open University and Canada's Athabasca University) using two current digital challenges, namely Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and Open Access publishing."

In February 2009, the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) commissioned RAND Europe to review approaches to evaluating the impact of research as part of their wider work programme to develop new arrangements for the assessment and funding of research - referred to as the Research Excellence Framework (REF).

Each year, the members of the EDUCAUSE Evolving Technologies Committee identify and research the evolving technologies that are having - or are predicted to have - the most direct impact on higher education institutions.

Abstract: "UK public policy makers have a growing interest in collaborative research, where academics work with public, private or third sector partners on a joint project which supports the partner's aims. This paper reports on the findings of five case studies, looking at how information is sourced, managed, used and shared within collaborative research projects. It finds that researchers within collaborative projects have similar information management issues as are known to exist within academia more broadly, but that the specific conditions which govern research collaborations mean that interventions to improve or support information management must be carefully tailored."

Teaching with the HIGHBROW Annotation Browser

At the European level, the Digital Agenda for Europe 2020 identifies 'opening up public data resources for re-use' as a key action in support of the Digital Single Market. 2 The European Commission is reviewing the Directive on Re-Use of Public Sector Information. The Commission's The New Renaissance report 3 , published in January 2011, emphatically endorsed open data. At the national level, for example in the UK, the higher education community has issued the Open Metadata Principles 4 calling on metadata to be openly available for innovative re-use.

The Growth of 'Citizen Science' "Big data" is changing the sciences as well as the humanities (The Chronicle, June 4). We asked three experts to comment on the phenomenon. Here are their responses:

In the June 4 issue, The Chronicle published an article on what Google Books could mean for researchers. We asked some leading scholars to comment on how "big data" will change the humanities. Here are their responses: