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by Jon Marcus on The Hechinger Report, December 26, 2011. Open University, a successful British online public university to be used as a model in the U.S. The goal is to help students who are intimidated by higher education adapt to and succeed in college. Next Generation Learning Challenges, a Gates funded initiative, will adapt two free Open University, at-your-own-pace online courses for use at about a dozen U.S. colleges and universities this academic year: one to help students be more comfortable with math so they do better on placement tests or move more quickly through remedial courses, and another to teach students skills to prepare them for college.

According to Professors Anderson and McCormick, the Ten Principles may help designers to construct pedagogically sound e-learning materials and related activities. The principles may also help teachers to choose resources; design teaching and learning activities based on those resources; and support such activities while they take place.

Open Access journals are freely available on the web. Like other scholarly journals, some are peer-reviewed and others are not. This directory, published by Lund University Libraries (Sweden) helps users to navigate nearly 7000 journals, over 3000 searchable at article level (as of 8/2/11).

This site might be helpful for searches as you conduct your own scholarly research, and also as you consider publishing research.

Posted by Clarance Fisher on his blog Remote Access, July 19 2011. Per his post, Fisher first wrote about a tool that would help "global kids in global classrooms to connect with each other." He then used the site vworker.com, where people post their projects, inviting coders to bid on them. Once he had a price for his project, he used ChipIn.com (for only one week) to raise the money for his project.

I've bookmarked for several reasons: (1) Love the idea of online community for kids around the globe (2) Vworker.com sounds like a great resource (3) Very interesting to see a social fundraising tool like ChipIn.com in action

By Soha El Borno on Idealware, August 2012; originally published by TechSoup. Article focuses on nonprofits, but walks readers through some major ideas behind crowdsourcing, including pooling knowledge, microvolunteering, and crowd creation. Real-world examples are given for each.

From the blog Connectivism by George Siemens, December 14 2011. Siemens argues the importance of artifacts to help students make sense of their experiences in MOOCs and other online learning experiences.

Thinking about the critical nature of artifacts to learners making sense of their e-experience makes me wonder how to encourage submission of such "sensemaking" artifacts to our Jams and e-communities.

By M. Ginsburg and S. Weisband, Proceedings of the 37th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences - 2004. Written in 2004, this article is somewhat dated (e.g. before the notion of the "social network" really took hold). That said, the article looks at a subscription-based virtual community, the Internet Chess Club, and finds that the real key to success is a carefully structured 3-tier approach to volunteering. Some volunteers help/coach new users; others are available to handle administrative tasks and volunteer managers run on-demand tournaments. Volunteers gain status and recognition, as well as the benefit of a private sub-community in which they can communicate with each other. NOTE: As of Jan 2012, the club is still in existence.

Librarian notes: While much here does not apply to the current manifestation of our e-communities, the structure and function of the various volunteer roles is very interesting, as is the "communication segmentation strategies" to filter out information overload. An impressive database of the community's work (in this case chess matches) is discussed as well.

By Colin Harrison in Education and the Knowledge Society: Information Technology Supporting Human Development by Tom J. van Weert, October 2004 (Springer, via Google Books).  Harrison's article is pp 244-246. He looks at how an online barter system (like his proposed Cybertroc) might facilitate ride-shares. One interesting idea is how this barter might help to build social capital in the area in which it is implemented and provides an interesting service to some who might otherwise be uninterested in "Information Society." Frustratingly, no details on the implementation of such an idea, other than to refer readers to a ride-share enacted during a 2003 French transportation strike. 

By Laura S. Quinn, Idealware, January 2012. Looks at a variety of software tools that can support program evaluation. Report includes a category on Analyzing and Displaying Your Measures, which might be most relevant. There are recommendations for report builders, tools that help create data visualizations, both quantitative and qualitative analysis tools, and dashboard recommendations.  Also reference to an organization called Innovation Network, which might be of interest.

According to the About page, Tagasauris helps it's user-clients to generate metadata for their photos and other "knowledge-work." Users upload photos and a distributed network of Tagasaurus on-demand employees generate the metadata. Users are charged a fee for this service.

As of Sept 2012, video & audio are "coming soon." I'm not sure if they are yet equipped to handle "knowledge work." Also unclear where true crowdsourcing comes in. It sounds like they provide the (selected) crowd, rather than this being a platform one can employ to open work to the larger crowd.

iRubric is a tool that helps faculty design rubrics for assessment. This tool is part of the Rcampus suite of opensource tools.

By Robin Good and Daniele Bazzano for MasterNewMedia, June 7 2010. This article explains the whys and hows of wireframing, and includes descriptions of 10 free web-based tools that can help.

Zotero is a free, Firefox extension to help you collect, manage, cite, and share your research sources.

Produced by VideoUserManuals, 2010. This is a manual for developers who create websites using WordPress (as a CMS). There are some helpful tips; they even share their own standard process for new site development.

Presented by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, April 2010. This guide, "is the result of a year-long cross-foundation effort to develop common principles, approaches, and taxonomies to help staff decide how best to allocate time and resources for data collection and analysis." Link to the PDF of the full guide from this page.

Published in Spectrum > Mobile Learning, Libraries, And Technologies, March 12, 2009. "MLE-Moodle is an out-of-the-box mobile Learning (mLearning) system, designed for mobile phones." With MCNC in particular, we've discussed how it might be helpful to be able to engage students/faculty/administrators in Polilogue via mobile phone in addition to computer.

By Lloyd Armstrong, Jr., in his blog Changing Higher Education, June 15 2010. This post refers to a Georgetown University report titled Help Wanted: Projections of Jobs and Education Requirements through 2010, which argues that there will not be enough people in the workforce with Associate's degrees (or better) to fill the job needs of 2018.

A program of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Statway focuses on helping community college students learn basic skills in statistics, data analysis, and quantitative reasoning as part of a one-year pathway. The ultimate goal of this pathway is preparation for college-level statistics. This home page to Statway also includes links to the project blog (called Pathways Connection) and to the project's mailing list. There are 19 community colleges affiliated with this project.

By Will Richardson, on his blog "weblogg-ed: learning from the read/write web," posted 22 June 2010. Richardson's main focus seems to be K-12 (as is the focus of many of the very interesting comments that this post has received), but the questions he asks are relevant to students of all ages and at all levels: how do we measure more esoteric qualities like the ability to follow "passion," how to "earn...a living solving problems and helping to make the world a better place." It's as much about the quality of education as of assessment.

Published by Center for Community College Student Engagement, 2010. This report looks at the Survey of Entering Student Engagement (SENSE), launched fall 2006. From the report, "To date, more than 91,000 students from 197 colleges in 37 states have participated in SENSE, thereby helping to create a wealth of new and actionable data about the entering community college student experience."