Group items tagged

Originally prepared by Robin Good and Daniele Bazzano for MasterNewMedia, and first published on June 29th, 2009. This guide offers some of the advantages of self-publishing, along with reviews of 15 companies that produce self-published books.

By Joe Wikert, part of the TOC podcast series, on O'Reilly Radar, April 2 2012. Wikert interviews Hugh McGuire, founder of PressBooks, a newly developed publishing platform. PressBooks, which will be available both to commercial publishers and to the general public, uses WordPress as a CMS/platform on which to put a book together. The output can be a printed book, an e-book, or a podcast. This page provides an intro to the podcast, including the major themes of the approach (and the time-stamps for each).

An interesting idea, particularly for self-publishing.

WHEN a college textbook, "Principles of Biology," comes out from the Nature Publishing Group in January, one place it won't be is on the shelves of school bookstores. Enlarge This Image An interactive graphic in "Principles of Biology," an electronic textbook from Nature Publishing, teaches students about the symptoms of a stroke. Enlarge This Image An interactive graphic from Wolfram Research lets readers change the display parameters of an oil spill. That's because the book was designed to be digital-only. Students will pay not for a printed edition at a bookstore, but for permanent access on the Internet ($49).

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.

By Ros Smith, published by JISC, Sept 6 2010. Announcement and podcast posted on the JISC site. This newly published guide raises questions about the meaning of assessment, and how more effective assessment (ideally taking advantage of current technologies) might also promote the idea of students becoming lifelong learners. There is a 13 minute podcast with Ros Smith, the author. The new guide can be downloaded by chapter, of full guide (as PDF or Word docs). Also, until Oct 31, 2010, printed copies can be ordered for free.

By David Hayward and originally published in April 2009 Integrating Technology column of Beyond Penguins and Polar Bears; here it is part of the blog Expert Voices published by the National Sciences Digital Library. The post provides a great overview of Diigo, with advice on how middle school teachers can use it.

Goog*lio noun (1) a hybrid next generation e-portfolio that utilizes emerging open, social, web2.0, and Google applications such as blogs, wikis, social networks and software to create a student created and controlled personal learning environment and lifelong content management system that can be shared and viewed from different perspectives, within various contexts, and for multiple purposes. noun (2) a free and easy to use portfolio web site for individuals to design as a space, story, and system that functions as a workspace and showcase for learners to collect, select, reflect, publish, link, archive, and demonstrate knowledge, skills, reflections, through multimedia artifacts. verb (3) "googlio it" to publish and connect a digital artifact to your webfolio. origin: rooted in the word folio (as in Da Vinci) + Google (as in all the free Google Apps & Tools) and evolved from portfolio -->

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.

From the homepage description, "gRSShopper is a personal web environment that combines resource aggregation, a personal dataspace, and personal publishing."

The current issue, Vol 34, #3, 2011 looks at the theme of collaboration, with articles ranging from a look at online collaborative experiences, to digital publishing and collaboration, to an opinion piece titled From Us vs. Them to We: Collaborating for Change.

I have not yet read this issue, but many articles appear to be of interest.

Published by the National Institute for Excellence in Teaching (NIET), March 2012. This paper argues that, based on two recent studies, "job-embedded PD can be highly effective, but only when there is a sufficient infrastructure in place to support it." NIET's own program, TAP: The System for Teacher and Student Advancement, is such a program. Cited studies: Biancarosa, G., Bryk, A.S., & Dexter, E.R. (2010, September). Assessing the value-added effects of Literacy Collaborative professional development on student learning. The Elementary School Journal, 111(1), 7-34. -- and -- Saunders, W.M., Goldenberg, C.N., & Gallimore, R. (2009, December). Increasing achievement by focusing grade-level teams on improving classroom learning: A prospective, quasi-experimental study of Title I schools. American Educational Research Journal, 46(4), 1006-1033

While this analysis seems somewhat biased (clearly written in support of NIET's own program), many of the characteristics of their program match work that KPI has done in PD.

Posted by Melissa Terras in her eponymous blog, April 3 2012. Terras, a scholar in the Digital Humanities in the UK first uploaded her published papers to her school's digital repository and then blogged and tweeted about the papers. She has seen great growth in the download rate for these papers, though not across the board. To wit, she's increased her prominence (and that of her papers), but some of her papers are of greater interest than others. In future, she hopes to track her citation index over time, though it's too soon to measure at present.

This nicely summarizes Terras's lessons learned: "If (social media interaction is often) then (Open access + social media = increased downloads)."

Created by the Advocacy & Policy Center of the CollegeBoard and published in 2012. From About the Arch, "The Completion Arch is a web based tool that provides quick and easy access to national, state and initiative-level data that describe the progress and success of community college students." Click "Explore the Arch" for an overview and to get started.

Published by American Association of Community Colleges, April 2012. From this page, you can download a PDF of the full report, as well as video about the report, information on the 21st-Century Commission on the Future of Community Colleges, and coverage of this report in the media.

Resources for "makers," DIY folks who innovate, create and share projects & ideas. These resources include a subscription based magazine, a blog, videos & podcasts, shared project ideas, a forum/community and a store. Additionally, Maker Faire is an annual conference for the Make audience. Make Magazine, published quarterly by O'Reilly is a hybrid magazine/book "(known as a mook in Japan)".

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.

Published by CMA (Cox, Matthews, and Associates, Inc.), Diverse is an online magazine that looks at higher education through the lens of diversity. In addition to looking at basics like news, opinions, and jobs, the site also provides special reports and a variety of multimedia offerings. Currently on the home page, a searchable database of Top 100 Minority Degree Producers with subsets for AA, undergrad and graduate degrees

Pachyderm is an easy-to-use multimedia authoring tool. Designed for people with little multimedia experience, Pachyderm is accessed through a web browser and is as easy to use as filling out a web form. Authors upload their own media (images, audio clips, and short video segments) and place them into pre-designed templates, which can play video and audio, link to other templates, zoom in on images, and more. Once the templates have been completed and linked together, the presentation is published and can then be downloaded and placed on the author's website or on a CD or DVD ROM. Authors may also leave their presentations on the Pachyderm server and link directly to them there. The result is an attractive, interactive Flash-based multimedia presentation.

This is no longer managed by NMC. The website for the Pachyderm open source community is http://www.pachyforge.org/

Published by Rita Kop on her blog, Jan 5 2012. Kop is working as a researcher looking at Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and Personal Learning Environments (PLEs).  In this bibliography, she shared her recent research on the MOOC PLENK2012 (a MOOC about PLEs). 

Posted by Clay Johnson, 10/25/2011 on ExpertLabs In the context of experts' conversations with government, the author of this post argues that tools such as IdeaScale, Google Moderator and UserVoice are useful for brainstorming but not the best method for a true dialog. These tools give government an excuse to "not" participate with people where they are. The comments on a government site, i.e. the dialogue on evolving data.gov (via IdeaScale) shouldn't replace "participating with practicitioners," which should happen where they are. (i.e. in a Jam, I.F.) Expert Labs aims to get more people involved in order to make policy better. Expert Labs publishes reports, constantly updates their blog and has developed a tool, ThinkUp, that enables users to automatically archive data and communications across Facebook, Twitter and Google+, encouraging engagement on these networks.