Knowledge in the Public Interest (KPI)

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.

Great curation tools to find and organize online resources

Press release from The Century Foundation, Feb 2 2012. With President Obama's increasing emphasis on community colleges, "The Century Foundation is assembling a task force of distinguished individuals from two-year and four-year institutions, scholars of higher education, and representatives of the business, philanthropic, and civil rights communities to consider strategies to strengthen community colleges. "

Unbelievable!!!!

"The "AI Commons" is a worldwide portal devoted to the fullest sharing of academic resources and practical tools on Appreciative Inquiry and the rapidly growing discipline of positive change..." The site is hosted by Case Western Reserve University's Weatherhead School of Management.

No author or date listed, this blog posts promotes a guide to Google+ for educators, written by Steven W. Anderson. I bookmark this post for two reasons. First, obviously, the opportunity for educators to learn more about Google+ and it's potential educational applications. But also the format, LiveBinder, is an interesting way to present and share resources.

Paper by Reuven M. Lerner, Dept. of Learning Sciences, Northwestern University, Sharona T. Levy, Faculty of Education, University of Haifa and Uri Wilensky, Depts. of Learning Sciences and Computer Science, Center for Connected Learning and Computer-Based Modeling, Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems, Northwestern University. Paper describes underlying principles of the Modeling Commons, a community for NetLogo modelers to share and collaborate.

Design principles for fostering public sharing and collaboration: Focus on artifacts; provide multiple entry points; be forgiving; maximize findability; provide flexible permissions; keep users informed.

Headed by Amy Bruckman, Associate professor at Georgia Tech, this Electronic Learning Communities center engages Ph.D. level students in studying the application of constructionist social learning online. They are doing some fascinating work, such as developing software to support leaders of learning communities, offering young A-A males the chance to be game testers and to use that experience credential as a route into computer science studies and careers, etc. These are but two research examples; there are more.

"An LMS for Elite MOOCs? March 7, 2012 - 3:00am By Steve Kolowich Google artificial-intelligence guru Sebastian Thrun made a splash last month when he left Stanford University to start a company based on an A.I. course he made freely available last fall to tens of thousands of students on the Web. Now, two of Thrun's former Stanford colleagues who conducted similar experiments have spun off their own free online courses into a for-profit venture."

By Jonathan D. Becker on his blog, Educational Insanity, August 9 2011. Becker makes recommendations not just on how we should reform education, but also why. And how we should talk about it. Thought-provoking.

The National Education Research and Development Centers are funded through IES's NCER. The mission of the R&D Centers is to contribute to the production and dissemination of rigorous evidence and products that provide practical solutions to important education problems in the United States. The R&D Centers achieve this mission by developing, testing, and disseminating new approaches to improve teaching and learning, and ultimately, student achievement. Each of the Centers conducts a focused program of education research in its topic area. In addition, each Center works cooperatively with NCER, conducts supplemental research within its broad topic area, and provides national leadership in defining research and development directions within its topic area. Currently, there are 18 National R&D Centers.

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.

A blog that features information about education-related MOOCs, with schedules, information about participants, and study groups (including one for librarians).

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.

Posted by Hans de Zwart to his blog, Technology as a Solution..., July 19, 2011. de Zwart conducted an experiment with his virtual team (18 people) asking them to "narrate their work," using the microblogging tool Yammer. He tried to make the rules as easy as possible, so there was no requirement on how frequently they blogged, etc. At the end, he conducted a survey, which is summarized in this post. I strongly recommend reading the original post as well (link in 1st paragraph).

Is this the equivalent of our "Rants and Raves" or coffee klatch? Would microblogging seem less onerous a task, so that we might do it more frequently? Is this the "killer app" for project management?

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.

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

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.

Part of the MERLOT project, this site is a "digital case story repository that hosts more than 70 discipline-specific multimedia stories." The stories themselves are interesting. Also of note, the Creating Stories tab, for more on the production of such collaborative multimedia stories.