Knowledge in the Public Interest (KPI)

This site (currently in Beta) was founded by James Gee and is essentially a database of in-progress projects, begging for feedback/interaction/collaboration with and by others.

Another way to think about Pathfinder 2.0? Or an opportunity to working examples from our own work (guided digital environment? effective online communities?) in order to get feedback from others.

Blog post by Paul Farol in the Blog Herald, published July 20 2011. The post describes how one might keep regularly scheduled blog posts interesting. While the focus is on writing posts for a corporate client, the ideas should apply equally to the posts we (eventually) write for our KPI readers.

Posted by Clarance Fisher on his blog Remote Access, July 19 2011. Per his post, Fisher first wrote about a tool that would help "global kids in global classrooms to connect with each other." He then used the site vworker.com, where people post their projects, inviting coders to bid on them. Once he had a price for his project, he used ChipIn.com (for only one week) to raise the money for his project.

I've bookmarked for several reasons: (1) Love the idea of online community for kids around the globe (2) Vworker.com sounds like a great resource (3) Very interesting to see a social fundraising tool like ChipIn.com in action

By Avdi Grimm and a service of ShipRise LLC. This site does not appear to be updated too often, but contains podcasts and posts about "geographically dispersed" workers, or those who, like us, work on virtual teams. The tabs Tips & Hacks and Toolkit both seem useful.

Website for the new textbook Key Concepts in Geomorphology by Paul Bierman and Dave Montgomery, published by W.H. Freeman. This text is, in effect, being "crowd-sourced," with members of the community invited to vet the work and to submit "vignettes," which are brief electronic supplements.

JISC is a UK-based group that "inspires UK colleges and universities in the innovative use of digital technologies...." The e-learning program offers 5 tracks to will help teachers learn how to teach in the e-learning environment. Support includes OER.

A program of the College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales (Australia), this is an online project that aims to help teachers "gain a working understanding of successful online teaching pedagogies that they can apply in their own unique teaching situations."

Conference dates: July 11-14, 2011. Conference organizer Gary Stager. This annual convening is somewhat like an "unconference" and invites teachers to take on the role of learners for the duration. The focus is on personal project development, with lots of good resources in the form of guest speakers and "mentors." On this News page, you can see blog posts describing the conference. 2012 conference (5th annual) to be held July 9-12, 2012 in Manchester, NH.

Published by Institute for the Future for the University of Phoenix Research Institute, 2011. Rather than predicting actual careers or job types, this report looks at Six Drivers of Change, and the resulting 10 Key Skills needed in the future workforce, including Virtual Collaboration.

The authors find similarities between gaming and virtual collaboration and posit that, to be successful, virtual collaboration must include "immediate feedback, clear objectives and a staged series of challenges [in order to] significantly drive participation and motivation."

Published by the University of Nottingham (UK). This site is a "continually updated collection of peer-reviewed academic development resources...[ranging from] "2-5 minute videos [to] 500-1000 word texts...." There are a variety of entry points to access the materials, ranging from discipline areas (on this page) to themes (see Teaching & Learning themes at the top). I also like the Guest editor block (this page, lower left), where a faculty member writes a brief editorial and selects resources of interest.

Under the auspices of the US Department of Education, discussions are held via a listserve about professional development. This wiki contains an organized multi-day discussion on using video in teaching and staff development carried out through the list-serve. The list-serve is subscriber based but I guess both the discussion and accompanying wiki are open to the public. Issues for me: Should KPI consider offering the organized Jam transcript in the form of a wiki? Should it be open for discovery or only available to Jam participants?

OTAN--Outreach and Technical Assistance Network for adult educators may offer ideas for KPI to consider in working with national membership organizations of educators.

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.

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.

Posted by Bruce Trachtenberg on The Communications Network May 17 2011. A description of the 2011 Center for Effective Philanthropy Conference, which included Molly Martin on how to combine data and storytelling.

By Jennifer Gonzalez, Students section, The Chronicle of Higher Education, February2 2012. The new project is being led by the Center for Community College Student Engagement and will analyze data from four different surveys: Community College Survey of Student Engagement, the Survey of Entering Student Engagement, the Community College Faculty Survey of Student Engagement, and the newly created Community College Institutional Survey. Reports will be produced annually for the next three years. See CCCSE tag for first year's report.

Users of Aggregage are Bloggers, Marketers and Readers."Aggregage creates online communities by bringing together content from the best sources around particular topics. We identify a topic (Social Media, eLearning, Careers, Leadership, etc), find high-quality blogs around that topic, and then display their posts on a new site dedicated to that given topic. The original site on eLearning has become the highest traffic site on that topic."

"This collaborative blog and curated collection of free and open resources is produced by the Digital Media and Learning Research Hub, which is dedicated to analyzing and interpreting the impact of the Internet and digital media on education, civic engagement, and youth."

Posted by Melissa Terras in her eponymous blog, April 3 2012. Terras, a scholar in the Digital Humanities in the UK first uploaded her published papers to her school's digital repository and then blogged and tweeted about the papers. She has seen great growth in the download rate for these papers, though not across the board. To wit, she's increased her prominence (and that of her papers), but some of her papers are of greater interest than others. In future, she hopes to track her citation index over time, though it's too soon to measure at present.

This nicely summarizes Terras's lessons learned: "If (social media interaction is often) then (Open access + social media = increased downloads)."

By Joe Wikert, part of the TOC podcast series, on O'Reilly Radar, April 2 2012. Wikert interviews Hugh McGuire, founder of PressBooks, a newly developed publishing platform. PressBooks, which will be available both to commercial publishers and to the general public, uses WordPress as a CMS/platform on which to put a book together. The output can be a printed book, an e-book, or a podcast. This page provides an intro to the podcast, including the major themes of the approach (and the time-stamps for each).

An interesting idea, particularly for self-publishing.