Knowledge in the Public Interest (KPI)

Organization "brings together game design, rigorous research practices and strong interdisciplinary partnerships to create, study and promote game-based materials, strategies and systems as critical tools for personal and social development."

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

Announcement of a grant from the Mellon Foundation for the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington to underwrite the Digital Humanities Commons.. "The Commons will enable faculty and graduate students to collaborate together with librarians, engineers and designers to animate their scholarship with new visualization tools and dynamic databases..."

"Based at New York University, the Institute brings together 14 game designers, computer scientists, and education researchers from 9 partner institutions, including Columbia, City University of New York, Dartmouth, NYU, NYU-Poly, Parsons, Chile's Pontifica Universidad Catolica, Rochester Institute of Technology, and Teacher's College. "

"The Global Development Network (GDN) is a leading International Organization of developing and transition country researchers, policy and research institutes promoting the generation, sharing, and application to policy of multidisciplinary knowledge for the purpose of development. "

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.

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.

About page on the group's wiki. This page goes into detail about the community. NMC campus is "Located in the virtual world of Second Life, it has been carefully constructed to provide researchers and students dozens of prebuilt settings for experiments in social interaction in 3D space."

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."

A Social and Professional Networking Site for Teachers and Educators

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

Pachyderm is an easy-to-use multimedia authoring tool. Designed for people with little multimedia experience, Pachyderm is accessed through a web browser and is as easy to use as filling out a web form. Authors upload their own media (images, audio clips, and short video segments) and place them into pre-designed templates, which can play video and audio, link to other templates, zoom in on images, and more. Once the templates have been completed and linked together, the presentation is published and can then be downloaded and placed on the author's website or on a CD or DVD ROM. Authors may also leave their presentations on the Pachyderm server and link directly to them there. The result is an attractive, interactive Flash-based multimedia presentation.

This is no longer managed by NMC. The website for the Pachyderm open source community is http://www.pachyforge.org/

Research arm of the U.S. Department of Education. This organization funds "top educational researchers nationwide to conduct studies that seek answers on what works for students from preschools to postsecondary, including interventions for special education students. ..."

WHEN a college textbook, "Principles of Biology," comes out from the Nature Publishing Group in January, one place it won't be is on the shelves of school bookstores. Enlarge This Image An interactive graphic in "Principles of Biology," an electronic textbook from Nature Publishing, teaches students about the symptoms of a stroke. Enlarge This Image An interactive graphic from Wolfram Research lets readers change the display parameters of an oil spill. That's because the book was designed to be digital-only. Students will pay not for a printed edition at a bookstore, but for permanent access on the Internet ($49).

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?