Knowledge in the Public Interest (KPI)

This graduate program at NYU's Steinhardt School of Education offers an MA in Digital Media Design for Learning, a PhD, and an advanced certificate in Digital Media Design for Learning. There is a lot of emphasis on games and gaming and the primary focus appears to be K-12.

Shared because there are likely affinities between some of the students (or faculty) in this program and our own interests.

Posted by Tony Bates to his blog on August 1, 2011. Bates, who runs a consultancy to teach about e-learning, argues that online learning is ever more important in post-secondary education (he writes from Canada, but his statistics are for all of North America), but that most post-secondary teachers have been trained very little in pedagogy and "teaching" at all, less so in online teaching and learning. He seeks comments and feedback to his argument.

Published by Edutopia, PD "courses" on a broad list of technology-related topics, ranging from how to use blogging or Xbox Kinect in your classroom, to blended learning.

Davidson's new book, Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn, was released in August 2011. Here, on her blog, you can learn more about the book and her thoughts on education and technology.

By Virginia Heffernan in Opinionator in the New York Times. A review of Cathy Davidson's new book,Now You See It. Heffernan's review suggests that Davidson's new book argues that we not hold current students to out of date standards for education. Educators must not just embrace new technologies, but understand the position of these technologies in the changing world. Follow the davidson tag for her blog.

A National Science Foundation Science of Learning Center, this site is a collaboration between the University of Washington, Stanford University, and SRI International, and is funded by the NSF. A quick scan of the Research tab shows publications in a wide-range of areas from "National Technology Plan 2010 - Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology" to "Learning Science in informal environments."

Hosted by The New York Times September 22, 2011, a panel of distinguished speakers (see Speakers on left navigation) on how technology can transform how students learn. A live stream of the conference will be available here on September 22.

By James Johnson in The Blog Herald July 30 2011. Instructions on how users of Google +'s "hangouts" video chat program can watch live streaming videos together via YouTube.

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

From Wikipedia, this definition of MOOC also provides outbound links for more information.

By Paul G. West and Lorraine Victor, prepared for The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, May 2011. This paper appears to be an excellent resource for collections of OER, both in the US and around the world.

Talkwheel is like instant messaging for a small group. Or as their materials describe, "Talkwheel creates a visual roundtable collaboration platform to allow groups in enterprises, e-learning and social networks to interact more effectively than anywhere else online."

From their About blurb, "HigherEd Live is a weekly web show focused on the emerging role of social media and digital media marketing in higher education."

By Darren Kuropatwa on his blog, A Difference, July 29 2011. In this post, Kuropatwa shares three presntations he gave at the 2011 Building Learning Communities conference. His presentations are rich (many of the individual slides have clickable links), but of course much is lost without his voice. There is a note that videos of the presentations will be included when they are available.

Eloquent blog on non-tenure faculty and short-term and long-term prospects of working in this manner.

provides a comparison of e-learning authoring tools

An organization (Gates funded?) that is devoted to educational k-12 reform. They are using social networking to "rate" and raise issues around ed reform, specifically about teacher hiring/firing. Interesting use of social networking for grass roots ed reform.

Many of ASU's virtual environments take place in Second Life, but it's interesting to see how they present their projects.

Might also be interesting model for the website, as they provide 4 categories of entry: Podcasts (great idea!), Grant Deadlines (how to fund similar projects), Conferences, and Workshops (they offer).

By Stephen Sawchuk in Education Week, published online August 5 2011. A look at some new teacher training programs that have been recently approved by the New York (State) board of regents. The article also briefly discusses some of the debate about practical teaching skills vs. theoretical ones.

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.