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An article in EDUCAUSE by Randy Bass. The article is about how the formal curriculum is being disrupted as "high-impact educational practices" and "the experiential co-curriculum" move from the margins of higher education into common practice. He also addresses how the current "participatory culture " and the trend toward "informal learning" are affecting the curriculum. The article concludes with recommendations for instructors on how they can change their teaching practices to "keep pace with our expanded understanding of learning." - the description provided by Christopher Price, Director, Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching (CELT), The College at Brockport, State University of New York.

"The benefits to a Wikipedia assignment are extensive. Asking students to interact with the largest reference work in the world creates a unique educational experience: namely, a Wikipedia assignment provides a real-life application of the skills and knowledge students develop in the classroom. Asking students to participate in a Wikipedia project challenges them to examine and refine the ways in which they interact with digital resources. Students must develop their media literacy as they assess the reliability of online sources, their online etiquette as they interact with editors around the globe, and their critical thinking skills as they identify articles that need improvement. When students edit articles, they must produce material that is relavant to Wikipedia and consumed by actual readers beyond their classroom. They are confronted with immediate feedback to their work and must learn how to collaborate with writers around the globe. "

"Moving from a disposable research essay to a Wikipedia essay carries several benefits: Students gain a sense of confidence in their knowledge by contributing to a source that they know and use. Students trade the audience of one instructor for a broad readership (one of the students this semester revised an article on Japan's military Unit 731 that got more than 70,000 views in just December) Students improve their digital literacy through a better understanding of Wikis a medium. Students learn about source authority, especially the increasingly common semi-anonymous and anonymous web sources which so often fill their bibliographies. Instructors trade a stack of homogenous research papers for a variety of formatted essays. Essays are subject to open-review on the web."

"Welcome to a "flipped classroom" at Byron High School--where the lectures are homework, and problem solving with the teacher is class time." Great article about how one school flipped their math program.

Journal devoted to Community Service-Learning Research. PDFs of articles can be downloaded for free and full journals can be purchased from this site

This is a very interesting article from the University of Montreal about open access journals, the cost journals, profits of major journal publishers and what the impact of all this is on post-secondary institutions.

While the article is about leadership in educational technology, almost all of it applies to leadership in any area of educational innovation. "The conventional wisdom in education is that any school reform--be it curriculum, instruction, assessment, or teacher professionalism--is most likely to take hold in schools that have strong leadership. The same holds true for technology. Any educator will tell you the most successful implementation of technology programs takes place in schools where the principal sees him or herself as a technology leader."

This article takes Chickering & Gamson's "Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education" (1987) and applies it to online courses.

An interesting article exploring the teaching-research nexus in higher education - ie. the interplay (or not) of teaching and research roles.

"Skype Announces Free Group Video Calling for Teachers is an article in the School Library Journal describing a new program Skype has for teachers (thanks to Justin Baeder for the tip)."

The research studies noted in the article include a mix of K-12 and higher education. "There have been many interesting studies done about iPads in the classroom and the effects on both students and teachers. I've pulled together a list of various study results regarding iPads in the classroom below. Check out just how much of an influence studies show iPads in the classroom are having on education."

Brand new article that just came out in the Higher Education Research and Development journal. It features researchers from La Trobe University in Australia, but may be of interest to people at the U of S.

An interesting article discussing the benefits of higher education to society (and how to measure them). This flips the current trend in the discussion of higher education and its benefits from an individual to a more global focus.

"Exasperated by rising subscription costs charged by academic publishers, Harvard University has encouraged its faculty members to make their research freely available through open access journals and to resign from publications that keep articles behind paywalls."

"Making sense of methodologies: A paradigm framework for the novice researcher" - Article introducing different methodologies for research on teaching and learning (and other social sciences)

"Tagxedo turns words -- famous speeches, news articles, slogans and themes, even your love letters -- into a visually stunning word cloud, words individually sized appropriately to highlight the frequencies of occurrence within the body of text." Thanks for Erika for pointing this out to me.

Article - "Development and Use of the Approaches to Teaching Inventory " by Keith Trigwell and Michael Prosser - explores faculty conceptions of teaching (from transmission oriented/teaching focused to conceptual change oriented/student focused).

This website, maintained by Mick Flanagan at University College London, is the most comprehensive online site gathering information, references, videos, and articles about threshold concepts. It includes overviews about threshold concepts, as well as an alphabetical listing of threshold concepts discussed in the literature across the disciplines.

This article has some validating, and some surprising results from a study done on attendance policies in post-secondary classrooms.

"Think Twitter is just a waste of time? Think again. Its organizational structure makes it an effective tool for connecting with students and others online" While this article is aimed at K-12, it also applies to higher ed.