By Douglas Thomas and John Seeling Brown, Lexington, KY: CreateSpace. 2011. (Worldcat) Authors state a case for a new culture of learning that embraces technology.

beta620: Experimental Projects from The New York Times. "The Recommendation Engine allows us to leverage the power of distributed computing to reference each user's personal browsing history, then leverage connection via our semantic tags...." Deep Dive offers the ability to dig deeper on a requested piece of content and bring connected items together.

By Jennifer Zaino on semanticweb.com, January 30, 2012. Education sector not mentioned in article but this tool could be applicable when looking at data sets of any unstructured data.

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.

By Noel Harmon, Ph.D. and published by IHEP (Institute for Higher Education Policy), this is the first publication in a new series Lumina MSI Models of Success. Per the abstract, it highlights MSI institutions that "enroll more than 2.3 millions students or close to 14 percent of all students...." The full document is available as PDF download from this age.

Information about the upcoming conference on networked learning in higher education and lifelong learning

Wiki of the P2P (peer to peer) foundation that studies "the impact of Peer to Peer technology and thought on society." Topics include collaboration, "open" business models, "change institutions," etc.  Librarian's note: found this site while trying to learn more about cybertroc (online barter)

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 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 Rishab Aiyer Ghosh, First Monday, Vol 3(3), 2 March 1998. Nearly 14 years later, many of the impressions of and language about the Internet in this article seem quaint and outddated. However, the author offers the "cooking pot" model to explain how much content and code is shared for "free" on the Internet. In the Internet cook pot model, since physical proximity and distribution are not truly issues, the "pot" can grow (and be widely shared) by as much as people chose to put in it.

This article does not look at internet barter per se, but helps to explain how all the ideas around barter and trade look different on the internet than they might look in the physical world.

Manuel Lima presents on networks (vs. hierarchies) using visualization examples. On TheRSA.org, December 8, 2011

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). 

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. 

From the White House Briefing Room (website).  Release is not dated, but the URL is dated Sept 15 2011.  This release announces the details of Digital Promise, a national center. For additional information, follow tag digital_promise.

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.

"ThinkUp is a free, open source web application that captures all your activity on social networks like Twitter, Facebook and Google+"

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.

"World's largest private nutrition R&D network..."

MDEC serves post-secondary education in Michigan with a network for educators to research and share best practices, refine strategies for quality programs, and to advocate for developmental education. This is not an online network - most meetings "held using a conference call format."

The ONE-ITS Network Platform supports the ITS projects. The members of this network are researchers focused on solving problems related traffic concerns.