By Gail O. Mellow, Diana D. Woolis, and Diana Laurillard in Change, May-June 2011. Co-PIs Mellow and Woolis, along with Diana Laurillard, write about the GSCC project. Full article is available by subscription only; check with your local library for access.

Gao, F. & Sun, Y. (2010). In C. Maddux et al. (Eds.) Research Highlights in Information Technology and Teacher Education. Article examines how to use VoiceThread to support online learning communities for professional development in teacher education

In ScienceDirect - Procedia Computer Science, Volume 1, Issue 2, Pages 2773-2998 (2010)

By Paul Signorelli in American Libraries, Feb 15 2011. Arguing that libraries should offer effective e-learning programs, despite the fact that "libraries are far behind other organizations...."

By Richard A. Schwier and published June 2011. This page offers free download of the .epub. Schwier is at the University of Saskatchewan and studies virtual learning communities. For more, see the scheier tag.

By Debbie Garber, The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, vol 5 (2), August 2004. This paper goes beyond technology to look at "the social process on which an online learning community if it is to flourish and be useful." Also stresses "importance of nurturing the community's health, and the natural life cycle of a virtual community...."

Professor of Educational Technology and Design at the University of Saskatchewan. Schwier does a lot of work on virtual learning communities (vlc).

By Richard Schwier, Proceedings of EMEDIA 2009, Association for the Advancement of Computers in Education, June 2009. Schwier works out of the Virtual Learning Communities Research Laboratory at the University of Saskatchewan, and this paper looks at some of their key findings.

Posted by dskmag on the blog Design for Learning, May 28 2011. This blog is written by Dean Groom, who has an interest in "embedding new pedagogical classroom practice to create authentic, realistic and relevant learning for today's learners." This post describes ways to make LMS (and online courses) more engaging, following a gaming/Xbox model.

"As of June 2 2011, all PDFs of books published by the National Academies Press (NAP) will be downloadable free of charge." -- more than 4,000 titles. This site is now an excellent resource for free e-books.

By Kara Spak, Chicago Sun-Times, May 31, 2011. This article cites a recent report released by the Alliance for Excellent Education, which finds that "as many as one-third of students entering higher education need to take some sort of remedial or developmental course...." Putting a human face on these statistics is the profile of one student who graduated from high school with a 3.0 GPA and a B in "College Algebra" but still needed to take a non-credit developmental math course when she got to community college.

By Tina Marie Macias in the advertiser. com (Louisiana), May 20, 2011. The author cites analysis by The Daily Advertiser (the print newspaper) that "the majority of 2010 ACT-tested Lafayette Parish students did not meet college readiness benchmarks." The article also compares the ACT as an indicator against TOPS (Taylor Opportunity for Students Award, a local grant).

By Kristen Amundson, Op/Ed, The Washington Post, May 27 2011. Amundson argues that the state of Virginia is doing itself a disservice by allowing high school students to graduate with a "standard diploma." The diploma requires only three years of math, leaving many students unprepared for college math and thus required to enroll in developmental math.

By Jennifer Howard in the Technology section, The Chronicle of Higher Education, May 29 2011. Interview with Nancy Sims, lawyer, librarian and copyright-program librarian at the University of Minnesota Libraries. A basic overview of copyright law, particularly in academic setting, includes a list of additional copyright resources at the end of the article.

on nancydixonblog.com. May 3, 2011.

This is the "Education Policy" topic from the larger collection of working papers published by Harvard's Kennedy School (HKS). This collection includes "works-in-progress" and the education policy papers cover a range of topics (K-12 as well as post-secondary) in the U.S. and abroad.

The Content Management Comparison Tool "To put it simply Wordpress is much smaller and some would argue less powerful than Joomla or Drupal. Joomla or Drupal tend to be used for large business and community sites with lots of different types of content where there is more specific needs. Wordpress tends to be used by SME's, bloggers and charity's because it's very easy to use but you can hit that usability ceiling despite it's excellent plugin library."

By Christian Kohls (Knowledge Media Research Center, Germany); Joachim Wedeknd (Knowledge Media Research Center, Germany), Hershey, PA: Information Science Reference. 2011. Design patterns have become popular in the domains of architecture, software design, human computer interaction, Web 2.0, organizational structures, and pedagogy as a way to communicate practical knowledge. Patterns capture proven solutions for recurrent problems with respect to fitting context. This publication addresses both e-learning practitioners and researchers, using an accessible language to communicate sophisticated knowledge and important research methods and results.

An overview by Diana Laurillard. On ALT Open Access Repository. From OLWeekly, March 11

Mashable.com is a very popular site for learning more about important social media tools, with information on trends, lists (e.g. 11 Essential Social Media Resources You Might Have Missed), and how-tos, included guides to Twitter and Facebook.