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not specific to education at all, but a fascinating & well-written article about innovation, risk-taking and societal choices.

"What is it like to be a college student in the digital age? Alison Head - lead researcher for the national study, Project Information Literacy, Berkman Fellow, and Research Scientist in University of Washington's Information School - presents a working typology of the undergraduate information-seeking process, including students' reliance on and use of Web sources."

This is a fantastic resource for anyone working on the research side of blogs. I've been looking for a meta-analysis of blog research for a while now, and this appears to be the home run so far. 311 articles reviewed. Millet - this is one example of how we might structure a lecture capture meta-analysis.

I need one of these for podcasting!

Outcomes from Abilene's mobile learning research.  This seems to be similar to our Faculty Fellows program, but just focused on mobile.

"The game EteRNA, which was started by the Stanford biochemist Rhiju Das and the Carnegie Mellon computer scientist Adrien Treuille, allows researchers to farm out some of the intellectual legwork behind RNA design to 26,000 players, rather than a relatively few lab workers. Players are given a puzzle design-an RNA molecule in the shape of a star or a cross, for example-that they must fill in with the components, called nucleotides, to produce the most plausible solution. The community of players then votes for the blueprint it thinks will have the best chance of success in the lab. The Stanford researchers select the highest-rated blueprints and actually synthesize them. The scientists then report back the results of the experiments to the crowd to inform future designs. The crowd-sourcing has produced results that tend to be more effective than computer-generated arrangements. "Computational methods are not perfect in making these shapes," says Mr. Das, "and as we get to more and more complex ones, they essentially always fail, so we know that there are rules to be learned." Players are figuring out these principles on their own, says Mr. Treuille. He says that while they're more like a grandmother's instructions on baking a cake than a strict scientific formula, they work remarkably well in practice. "EteRNA players are extremely good at designing RNA's," says Mr. Treuille, "which is all the more surprising because the top algorithms published by scientists are not nearly so good. The gap is pretty dramatic.""

Interesting example of crowdsourcing to work on scientific issues.

I know, I know, online research methods, but darn it if this doesn't just get me all excited.

Shades of the Shirky Symposium Keynote? At first glance this might seem frightening to the layman, but think about it: knowledgeable, trained doctors using an additional but social source to find information that augments peer reviewed journals.

I wonder how much time doctors have to devote to research in peer reviewed journals. Maybe they get to read JAMA. When Andrew needs to look up something medical, he often starts with Wikipedia or PubMed and then digs deeper from there.

This kind of visualization not scalable yet, but will it be soon? "Thanks to increasingly cheap, fast and efficient computing power, scientific simulations are now a crucial tool for researchers who want to ask once impractical scientific questions or generate data that laboratory experiments can't. "The human eye can pick out patterns in simulations that are are otherwise hard to describe, and they can do it better than any computer," said visualization scientist Joseph Insley of Argonne National Laboratory ."Plus, with the incredible amount of data gathered these days, it's difficult to analyze it any other way."

"Global Social Problems" course where students are asked to take on the role of a superhero and save the world through research, hands-on work on a local social issue, and imagining a solution to a broader social problem.

Doesn't look like a massively-open online course, but makes me think about setting up one of our own. I love how all of this (assignments, discussion, etc...) is completely exposed. With a course like this, I don't see the need for an LMS.

haven't read the book, but it might have some good stuff...

Example of online publishing as part of a grad program. 

jeff, I was very interested in this article and went looking for the "mountains of research" regrading success rates in online & f2f environments. after not having much success, I noticed that the author of the piece posted the 3 articles he used to support his argument in the comments section. you can draw your own conclusions from them, but I'll just say that I'm unconvinced of the 50%/75% gap that he mentions. retention & quality control are real issues in online education, and they are legitimate points to discuss. in terms of useful data, controlling for learner type would seem to be obvious; working adults are more likely to take online courses, and more likely to drop out. conflating these two findings is not all that useful, in my opinion, because working adults cannot always prioritize education the same way full-time 'traditional' students can.

The ATeam is researching tools and processes for captioning. This is one tool.

Very interesting - especially the higher use by African Americans.