By Dennis M. Walcott, National column, The Atlantic.com, May 1, 2012. Walcott is the chancellor of New York City's public schools. In this post, he discusses how the City has improved high school graduation rates, but must still raise the bar on preparedness. One step is adoption of the Common Core standards. This page also includes a link to New York City's Common Core Library, instructional resources created by NYC teachers.

From this page, "The Peer Review of Teaching Project (PRTP) provides faculty with a structured and practical model that combines inquiry into the intellectual work of a course, careful investigation of student understanding and performance, and faculty reflection on teaching effectiveness." The site was developed as an "international repository for course portfolios written by faculty...."

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.

Blog "devoted to documenting significant initiatives relating to Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), digital badges, and similar alternative educational projects."

This three-part series from American Radioworks looks at the American higher education system and asks "what's the right kind of education to get? And why are so many Americans failing to finish college." The programs include: Some College, No Degree; Don't Lecture Me (also bookmarked); and Who Needs and English Major.

Part of American Radioworks' Tomorrow's College series, this podcast looks at the changing face of the college lecture. You can listen to the program online or download an MP3 (runs just under 1 hour) or you can read the transcript. Program materials include Emily Hanford's "Report's Notebook."

A "digital memory" tool. Make levels of connections that realign based on term selected. Evaluating for KPI's glossary terms. -IF

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 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.

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)."

Blog post about her company/community, Powerful Learning Practice, on the blog Connected Educators, posted Dec 18 2011. Nussbaum-Beach founded Powerful Learning Practice, with creates virtual CoPs, primarily with K-12 educators. Their model is to collect teams from several schools to work together in a larger CoP. In the first year, participants share in an action research project; if they chose to continue for a second year, they "collaboratively create" a classroom unit.

Many of the ideas here -- specifically those around engagement and various assessments/measures of success -- seem akin to KPI's own findings. Interesting project and interview.

Like InnoCentive, NineSigma is an open Innovation service provider.

From About page: "InnoCentive is the open innovation and crowdsourcing pioneer that enables organizations to solve their key problems by connecting them to diverse sources of innovation including employees, customers, partners, and the world's largest problem solving marketplace." Innocentive works with corporations, non profits, government, etc. *See Resources section for white paper and webinar.

Microsite produced by The Chronicle of Higher Education, March 2012. This space provides data and analysis about completion for all aspects of the college spectrum: public universities, community colleges, private colleges, and non-profits. All data is from the cohort that began college in fall 2004.

Users of Aggregage are Bloggers, Marketers and Readers."Aggregage creates online communities by bringing together content from the best sources around particular topics. We identify a topic (Social Media, eLearning, Careers, Leadership, etc), find high-quality blogs around that topic, and then display their posts on a new site dedicated to that given topic. The original site on eLearning has become the highest traffic site on that topic."

By Haydn Shaughnessy on Innovation Management. Published October 2010. "This major case study from Innovation Management "How to Build Innovation Communities" looks at the practical steps of one innovation community, in the mobile sector. The initiative captured over 1,000 new ideas, 29 going through to implementation, in its first six months online, and galvanised wider community activity and loyalty for the company. The document outlines best practice case in innovation community development..."

The term ideagora is used as the space for sharing ideas. The ideagora should operate as an ecosystem, one that allows processes to evolve organically. (InnoCentive and NineSigma mentioned in this article.)

By Frank Mattes, on Innovation Management. June 22, 2011.This article, and others offered on the site, feature for profit organizations. "R&D-driven open innovation is a powerful lever for enhancing the firm's innovativeness since it multiplies the firm's R&D resources. Two examples may highlight the point: Procter&Gamble has 9,000 people employed in its various R&D units - and estimates the global number of experts in its technology fields to be two million. And Merck Inc. estimates that although it is a global leader in its field it produces only one percent of the relevant global patents every year. Both of these firms see open innovation as an effective way for engaging the innovative potential of the thousands of brilliant minds outside the firm."

This is written as a guide for starting an open innovation community. At the beginning, it lists links to a number of innovation communities, including Dow Chemical 'Hewlett Packard, and Nokia, among others.

Edited by Dan Cohen and Tom Scheinfeldt, MPublishing, 2011. (Print edition forthcoming) This site is an open-access version of a volume of over 300 responses to questions posed by the editors in their social networks. Contributors were allowed only one week to respond. The approach, encouraging interactivity as well as a time limit, and the questions intended to provoke thinking on how digital media and technology can beneficially reform the academy. The editors convincingly state a good case for their choice of the word "hack." (originally bookmarked September 9, 2011. The previous link is no longer active.)

A special feature in the Technology section of The Chronicle of Higher Education, Feb 26 2012. The 12 Innovators run the gamut and include an advocate for mobile learning, edu-Punk and digital storytelling (ds) 106 guru, ideas about open learning from Carnegie Mellon, and the director of Hathi Trust's digital library. None of these profiles is in-depth, but each might launch a more in-depth look at the individual or his/her project.

Related: Hacking the Academy. One of the innovators mentioned in this article, Dan Cohen, is at George Mason University, the institution behind Hacking the Academy.