Group items tagged

Title: Companies are Erecting In-House Social Networks, June 26, 2011, This article intrigued me from the get-go because: 1) it speaks to the desire for people to be connected socially in their work; 2) it provides forums (opportunities) for the distantly-connected worker(s)/network member(s) to 'trickle-up' by sharing innovative practice/ideas; 3) it resembles Facebook for its ease of participation and entry level; 4) it creates a social network, which is the beginning of conversation, which is the beginning of collaboration, no? :-) We know that high school students LOVE the SLI because it gives them the opportunity to meet and greet and sometimes talk about meaningful social justice issues. But the hook is social, then learning. We have been talking about trying Facebook this year to ease the way in for up to 200 kids, but many school districts do not allow students to access Facebook from school computers. Maybe we need to explore Yammer or Chatter or look to see if there is a comparable open source app?

By Nick DeSantis, technology column, The Chronicle of Higher Education April 15 2012. According to this article, at present most student-related data (grades, course selection, graduation rates, etc.) is "locked-up" within colleges. In this new era of "open data" the Dept of Ed and others are calling on colleges and universities to make this data more accessible to developers -- including students in their own institutions.

By Marybeth Green and Lauren Cifuentes in Journal of Interactive Learning Research, vol 22 (1), 2011. The major finding of this article seems to be that "online follow-up with peer interaction increased the likelihood of completion of the professional development task." Abstract only available on this page. For full article check with your library.

A national center founded by (U.S.) Congress in 2011; funded by Dept of Ed, some start-up money, and foundation support.  The center looks at the possibilities that educational technology offers.  Much of the outreach work is done using Ideascale (see Grand Challenges and League tabs). See tag digital_promise for more. 

"Online collaboration delivering on-target solutions Doing business in today's world means stepping up to the plate to meet complex and fast moving challenges. To make critical business decisions, you need world-class expertise, preferably on-demand. How can you harness this knowledge for virtually any industry or functional area, anywhere, any time? The answer is 10EQS Online Collaboration. With 10EQS' global platform, you leverage a next-gen "workforce in a cloud" combining proven management consulting techniques with on-line mass collaboration."

By David Nagel, in Policy & Advocacy section of THE Journal, April 23 2010. The article announces the newly published National Educational Technology Trends: 2010, Innovation Through State Leadership report, published by State Educational Technology Directors Association (SETDA). Trends include "enhancing teacher effectiveness" through professional development and "scaling up success" by expanding innovative programs that have worked. Report is bookmarked as well, see trends_edtech tag.

This "network of researchers interested in research about education and the use of digital technologies to improve teaching and learning" launched in March 2010. While the network focuses primarily on Australian research, they are looking for evidence-based researched from all over the world. Users can follow the network on Twitter, or via RSS feed. Free sign-up is required.

By Steve Lohr, July 7, 2009 in Technology section, The New York Times. A contest set up by Netflix offered a $1 million prize for improving its movie recommendation system.

By Catherine M. Casserly and Marshall S. Smith. This is a free pdf download of a chapter from the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching publication, Opening Up Education: The Collective Advancement of Education through Open Technology, Open Content and Open Knowledge.

The headline is an April Fools joke. nuPOLIS is "the Internet presence of the Innovation Network for Communities (INC)" and a favorite site of Susan and Diana. However, their 15-month start-up grant is coming to an end, and this organization that concentrates on social innovation must decide how -- and if -- they will move forward. Stay tuned to see what happens.

"Connecting the nonprofit world with news, jobs, and ideas," the Chronicle of Philanthropy is a good site to keep up to date with philanthropy, non-profits, and foundations.

Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching. This resource hosts communities for members to contribute and share learning and teaching materials. The communities are categorized by higher education disciplines. In addition to contributing materials, members can comment about outside learning materials that are used, share information about themselves and knowledge about their discipline, put together personal collections to use in the classroom and become a Peer Reviewer of learning materials in member's discipline. In addition to discipline communities, there is the Community of MERLOT Partner Academic Support Services (COMPASS). This community is made up of ePortfolio, Faculty Development, Library and Information Services, Online Courses and Pedagogy. The ePortflio Portal centers educational resources around ePortfolio use in higher education, among students and faculty. Partner Communities like GLOBE extend the MERLOT network. The Global Learning Objects Brokered Exchange (GLOBE) alliance was established between ARIADNE Foundation in Europe, Education Services Austrailia, LORNET in Canada, National Institute of Multimedia Education (NIME) in Japan and MERLOT with the goal to "work collaboratively on a shared vision of ubiquitous access to quality educational content." The majority of MERLOT members are faculty/instructors and the balance are students, campus administrators, librarians and other members of higher education who are concerned with online learning materials, technology, teaching and learning, and innovation.

TED has set up an education Brain Trust of short lectures that it says anyone may contribute to. Should be fascinating.

"Corporations use TWO process form, BOTH missing entirely from dowdy lazy sloppy dishonest (Harvard) universities; a) process weaves----emediated process flows PUNCTUATED with mass workshop EVENTS b) pulsed systems---rhythms of engagement with disengagement, sameness with difference, local with global---so that mere addition of connectedness is not allowed to destroy all creativity. "

very interesting article on Forsyth County schools in GA (I just drove through there the other day and had no idea of their innovativeness!) encouraging students to bring their own technology to classrooms to use in project and inquiry based learning. Amazing openness by school district to open up learning.

Posted by Morten Mystad on the blog Myrstad's Blog, May 27 2011. For more on the topic, see tag ed_curation

"Unlike most traditional academic conferences, sessions at an unconference don't consist of one or three or five people delivering papers to an audience. Instead, they might feature project demonstrations, discussions, creative work sessions, or other formats that build on the knowledge and expertise of whoever attends. For the Texas THATCamp (and I think this is fairly typical at others), participants posted session ideas beforehand on the website, followed by a 45-minute scheduling process as THATCamp began. Topic headings generated by those initial session ideas were posted on the walls of a large meeting room, and participants circulated through the space to meet up with others interested in similar topics. After some productive chaos (which admittedly tested my structure- and schedule-loving personality a bit) the group developed a schedule of sessions that represented not only a variety of interests but also the desire to cluster certain topics into tracks. Like any conference, I frequently wanted to be in two places at once - which I see as one marker of the event's success."

"The community platforms market has been heating up for the past few years. Today, there are more than 100 vendors in the space, and we evaluated the top 5 in our most recent Wave: Lithium, Jive, KickApps, Telligent, and Mzinga.*"

Part of the Solve for X project, posted on YouTube by wesolveforx on Feb 7 2012. Crow is president of Arizona State University and his "moonshot project" (in the parlance of Solve for X) is to re-think higher education. In this brief video, he describes some of the changes he's brought to ASU in the last 10 years. For more on this project, follow tag solve_x.

Doesn't talk about technology, per se, but does talk about the need to shake up the institutions.

"An accessible and safe discussion space for conversations with more of your community. EngagementHQ has everything you need to engage your community effectively, efficiently and safely. PDF Brochure."