Knowledge in the Public Interest (KPI)

Also, "The Official Social Network of the Global Education Conference." This social network, on ning, has over 9,000 members and 104 distinct groups. The Network offers the Global Education Conference, a collaborative, world-wide community initiative for students, educators and organizations at all levels. It takes place online (free) using the Blackboard Collaborate platform.

Pronounced "haystack," this is the website for the Humanties, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory. The site has all sorts of interesting features, including online groups (by topic) with open membership, notices of a wide variety of calls for papers and interesting blog posts and events. One of HASTAC's founders is Cathy Davidson (follow davidson tag for more). Membership is free and open to all.

Edudemic, an online journal that asks "What is the best way to improve education using social media?" is launching an iPad edition. Details available on this page.

From the blog Connectivism by George Siemens, December 14 2011. Siemens argues the importance of artifacts to help students make sense of their experiences in MOOCs and other online learning experiences.

Thinking about the critical nature of artifacts to learners making sense of their e-experience makes me wonder how to encourage submission of such "sensemaking" artifacts to our Jams and e-communities.

This video, by the "amazing" but otherwise anonymous Valerie, is posted to Nancy White's Full Circle website on Dec 13 2011. Nancy presented on change, social artists, and social artistry at a Change MOOC. This video attempts to both summarize and apply what Valerie learned from Nancy's presentation.

What do you think of the term "social artistry" to describe KPI? Or "social artists" to describe the work of the KPI team?

By Justin Reich on Educational Technology Debate on December 8 2011. Reich argues, from his research on the use of wikis in the schools, that educational technology tends to benefit affluent students, rather than under-served students, primarily because there are more resources for students and teachers in the affluent environment, so teachers can use technology to its best advantage. He recommends technology initiatives that specifically target low-income and under-served students as a solution, and cites some interesting programs.

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.

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

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.

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.

Identified by HubSpot--first one is on how outbound marketing has been eliminated by people's preferences for inbound marketing

By Rick Mullin on Chemical & Engineering News, June 13, 2011. Pfizer announced the third in its network of research partnerships with medical and academic institutions in and around Boston. The new partnership will join other hubs in Pfizer's Centers for Therapeutic Innovation (CTI) which launched last year. "Pfizer's partnership network is growing as the company cuts billions of dollars from its traditional research base"

"ISC provides consulting, facilitation, network building, leadership development, and training services so that our clients can innovate, think strategically and take vision to action. We build the capacity of all with whom we work by modeling the behaviors and transferring the skills and tools of collaboration. Today, one focus of our work is on integrating technology and new social media to achieve greater social impact in all of our collaborative efforts."

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.

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

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

The Annenberg Innovation Lab is affiliated with the Anneberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California. It is a vehicle for an ongoing knowledge exchange with public institutions and private sector firms that are on the front lines of technological change in communications. Annenberg has a number of Research networks including the Annenberg Research Network on Globalization and Communication - a community of scholars focused on advancing the study of globalization and communications

From About Us, "OpenIDEO is a place where people design better, together for social good." Using an online platform and a very structured approach to problem-solving (inspiration, concepting, and evaluation) are followed, ideally, by implementation, all the while, harnassing the power of crowd-sourcing. See How It Works tab for a video that more effectively explains the process.

I found the video inspiring. OpenIDEO's work is very similar to ours, though they use the power of the crowd while ours is (usually) at least somewhat restricted. But I love the clearly delineated process, the idea that more is better, and the fact that each of us might be stronger in one aspect of the process than the other(s). The website, too, is inspiring, as the homepage lays out all of the projects, with a barometer to describe where each project is in the process.

Tagline: Data sharing & collaboration made easy. Buzzdata allows users to share data sources, either within their own private network or more publicly. This data can then be used with other data (mashups) or for visualizations, or analyzed by journalists/academics.

If we are to achieve our goal of leading the world in education, we must be leaders in the design and implementation of a more effective education system. To that end, this plan calls for a new approach to R&D for education that focuses on four areas: