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On the campus of Penn State University, a rivalry between a rogue campus blog and the official newspaper has become a fascinating mirror of the strife between old and new media.

During the 2007-2008 school year, Wireless Reach began funding Project K-Nect, a pilot project in rural North Carolina where high school students received supplemental algebra problem sets on smartphones (the phones were provided by the project). The outcomes are promising -- classes using the smartphones have consistently achieved significantly higher proficiency rates on their end of course exams. So what's so different about delivering problem sets on a cell phone instead of a textbook? The first obvious answer is that the cell phone version is multi-media. The Project K-Nect problem sets begin with a Flash video visually demonstrating the problem -- you could theorize that this context prepares the student to understand the subsequent text-based problem better. You could also theorize that watching a Flash animation is more engaging (or just plain fun) and so more likely to keep students' attention.

"Want to know how many people are microblogging in Australia? Or uploading photos online in Brazil? Or writing blogs in the Netherlands? There's a map for that - literally. TrendStream, who publishes the Global Web Index, has created a fantastic visualization that shows the penetration of different social technologies in major markets around the globe. The research is based on interviews with 32,000 Internet users in 16 countries." http://www.globalwebindex.net/

Open content could become more mainstream in higher education this year. The movement holds great potential for the higher education space where the New Media Consortium (NMC)--which publishes The Horizon Report annually in collaboration with Educause Learning Initiative--identifies it as a trend whose adoption rate will be one year or less.

Mobile News from Mashable: The Social Media Guide

Baraniuk is working on building global relationships with authors, educators and leaners so they can "create, rip, mix and burn" learning materials to a global open-access repository. He is creating a knowledge ecosystem that will empower anyone to take content and make of it what they want; to be translated into any language or to imbed any data which is updated in real time.

"Augmented reality will allow Frijj customers to interact with the brand by holding up a bottle in front of a webcam to gain access to a real- time environment. A Frijj Swamp Soccerette then appears to climb out of the bottle and perform an on-screen cheer." An interesting take on commercial use of AR.

This is the report for the Horizon project.

Shared by Hall Davidson at NetGenEd 2010 Discovery Education series on making real movies

'SixthSense' is a wearable gestural interface that augments the physical world around us with digital information and lets us use natural hand gestures to interact with that information.

Virgin Blue has launched a revolutionary, innovative new process to check in and board on domestic flights via a traveller's mobile called "Check-Mate". Gone are the days of booking the flight in advance at a desktop computer, getting to the airport, lining up to check-in and getting a printed boarding pass, with the new Check-Mate process eliminating all paper boarding passes in favour of electronic boarding passes on mobile devices including mobile phones, BlackBerry Smartphones and iPhones.