I grab feeds from external blogs all the time that are related to UMW an pull them into our sitewide “tags” blog (the name tags here is confusing, it is simply a republishing of everything in the entire WPMu install) with FeedWordPress. For example, I stumbled across this post in the tags blog on UMW Blogs tonight, which was actually being pulled in from a WordPress.com blog of a student who graduated years ago, but regularly blogs about her work in historic preservation.  This particular post was all about a book she read as an undergraduate in Historic Preservation, and how great a resource it is.  A valuable post, especially since the professor who recommended that book, W. Brown Morton, retired last year. There is a kind of eternal echo in a system like this that students, faculty, and staff can continue to feed into a community of teaching and learning well beyond their matriculation period, or even their career.

what we are doing as instructional technologists, scholars and students in higher ed right now is much bigger than a particular blogging system or software, I see my job as working with people to imagine the implications and possibilities of managing and maintaining their digital identity in a moment when we are truly in a deep transformation of information, identity, and scholarship.

we’ll host domains that professors purchase and, ideally, map all their domains onto one WP install that can manage many multi-blogging solutions from one install.  The whole Russian Doll thing that WPMu can do with the Multi-Site Manager plugin. So you offer a Bluehost like setup for faculty, and if that is too much, allow them to map a domain, take control of their own course work, and encourage an aggregated course management model that pushes students to take control of their digital identity and spaces by extension.  Giving students a space and voice on your domain or application is not the same as asking them to create, manage and maintain their own space.  Moreover, it doesn’t feed into the idea of a digital trajectory that starts well before they come to college and will end well after they leave.  This model extends the community, and brings in key resources like a recent graduate discussing an out-of-print historic preservation text book a retired professor assigned to be one of the best resources for an aspiring Preservation graduate student. This is what it is all about, right there, and it’s not gonna happen in silos and on someone else’s space, we need to provision, empower, and imagine the merge as a full powered move to many. many domains of one’s own.

a site that wants to look at the intersection of productivity, technology, and pedagogy in higher education

showing that the barrier of entry to this new stuff is lower than it seems

One hundred percent of this stuff we bring into our own classroom. If the slogan for software development is to eat your own dog food, we are always eating our own dog food. These are our assignments, our best practices.

the noise is worse than ever. Indeed, it is being magnified every day as more people pile onto Twitter and Facebook and new apps yet to crest like Google Wave. The data stream is growing stronger, but so too is the danger of drowning in all that information.

the fact that Seesmic or TweetDeck or any of these apps can display 1,200 Tweets at once is not a feature, it’s a bug

if you think Twitter is noisy, wait until you see Google Wave, which doesn’t hide anything at all.  Imagine that Twhirl image below with a million dialog boxes on your screen, except you see as other people type in their messages and add new files and images to the conversation, all at once as it is happening.  It’s enough to make your brain explode.

In an effort to engage former students with events on campus, Colgate University is using Webcast technology to allow even the most remote alumni to watch and participate when prominent writers visit the school.

“There’s a real appetite for intellectual engagement among our alumni,” he says. “They miss the classroom and the Colgate liberal-arts experience, and now we have the means to give it to them again.”Mr. Mansfield says that while the class might be costly for the English department -- authors don’t come cheap -- the decision to pay for the universal broadcast was a “no brainer” since the school already had the technology and had to pay only a “negligible” monthly fee to run the site on Livestream.

M.I.T.’s bloggers, who are paid $10 an hour for up to four hours a week, offer thoughts on anything that might interest a prospective student.

“High school students read the blogs, and they come in and say ‘I can’t believe Haverford students get to do such interesting things with their summers,’ ” he said. “There’s no better way for students to learn about a college than from other students.”

“We saw very quickly that prospective students were engaging with each other and building their own community,”

a trend toward the integration of service learning into study abroad and global studies more generally at the liberal arts colleges I work with

an element to the study abroad experience that goes beyond cultural immersion. Students grapple with important and timely issues

I am currently working with Andy Wallis from Whittier College and Chris Boyland from Bryn Mawr College on planning a virtual program for later the Fall semester, and the integration of service learning with international education was one of the issues that most resonated on the survey we are conducting to help us develop a program responsive to the needs and interests of folks at NITLE’s participating colleges.

Most of the criticisms center around the Kindle's weak annotation features, which make things like highlighting and margin notes almost impossible to use, but even a simple thing like the lack of true page numbers has caused problems, since allowing students to cite the Kindle's location numbers in their papers is "meaningless for anyone working from analog books."

it is important to involve faculty in technology decisions, especially concerning in-classroom technology.  Educational technologists have a responsibility, whenever able, to inform faculty of the pros AND cons of particular technologies and how they might affect the classroom experience.