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Social Media are not essential facilities. Those who claim that Facebook is a "social utility" or "social commons" must admit that such sites are not essential to survival, economic success, or online life. Unlike water and electricity, life can go on without social networking services.

Best practices for using blogs to supplement coursework and enhance student learning.

Great article that's about ethics of online technologies. Many of the analogies stuck me as similar to making sure technology enhances learning and not using it just for technology's sake.

MIT steps into credentialing world. sounds like they are adding interactive pieces, a la stanford's growing portfolio of courses, but also offering certificates for fee. interesting on many levels.

"Core Council Recommendation Letters"

Finally - a single place where many of the Core Council letters have been posted. These often contain recommendations such as the need to revise courses or offer more online versions. These units may not know about ways that TLT can help meet the recommendations in their letters. We can go to them with ideas.

"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.

Gamers have solved the structure of a retrovirus enzyme whose configuration had stumped scientists for more than a decade. The gamers achieved their discovery by playing Foldit, an online game that allows players to collaborate and compete in predicting the structure of protein molecules.

Good read on gaming and crowd sourcing to solve long-standing scientific problems.

In early 2010, Cole Camplese, then Director of Education Technology Services at Penn State, created a Web site (hereafter referred to as the OCDM wiki) that invited University Park learning designers and administrators to provide a summary of their unit's online course development models in order to capture a snapshot of practice at Penn State's main campus. In Summer 2010, an invitation was sent to the entire learning design community at Penn State to elicit the same information for other campus locations.  In January 2011, Ann Taylor, Assistant Director of the Dutton e-Education Institute in the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences and Chair of the Senate Outreach Committee, joined Camplese in his efforts to gather and analyze information about University-wide course development models. Several additional invitations were made to the University community, asking learning designers and administrators to update and/or to add their unit's online course development model summary to the OCDM wiki.

Interesting idea ... I've seen a lot of these kinds of features proposed in the emerging eText area.

GradeGuru is specifically designed to do this. http://www.gradeguru.com/home We took a look at it. Interesting idea - ratings of quality notes and note takers with the ability for top performers to earn real rewards. They proposed a cost of something like $2/enrollment/semester though - just not a model that would work for us.

very interesting article from the chronicle, touching on online teaching, innovation, instructional quality, faculty roles, and the needs of different student populations.

Amazing trend happening with open and online courses. This is the second one of these I have heard about in a week. Maybe we need to try something similar with CI597?

good discussion about this course from CS faculty. they bring up some excellent points and have a healthy skepticism about the project: http://computinged.wordpress.com/2011/08/18/stanford-on-line-ai-course-draws-58000-but-is-it-real/

A lot to think about here - How the practice of so many disciplines are changing due to changes in media How open Education doesn't just mean some pages put up on the web - Actually open people, not just open content. How the existing communications systems out there are the fertile ground that communities of practice sprout from, not institutional management systems. The future will be found at the confluence of these trends.

He demonstrated the cloud-based SlideRocket slide-show tool and the CoverItLive live blogging software. He explored cloud-based storage with Dropbox and Pogoplug. He created an easy, cloud-based recording with Screencast-O-Matic, which is billed as "the original online screen recorder. He demonstrated the cloud-based mind-mapping application Mindmeister. And he explored advanced classroom applications of Google Earth.

"Created by Wolfram Research, makers of the Wolfram Alpha computational search engine, the Computable Document Format (CDF) enables users to interact with online documents, input their own data, and generate results, live." Wonder if these will be usable on e-readers?

"Hoping to give its users a more intimate way to stay in touch, Facebook on Wednesday introduced video chatting inside its online social network through a deal with Skype, the Internet calling service. "

Interesting partnership between two communication giants. Much of the rest of the article discusses this as a counter-attack on Google+. Honestly, this must have been in the works for a while, but it's also okay if it is true. When companies feel the need to innovate to stay competitive, users win.

more thoughts on using wordpress to build "books".

Example of online publishing as part of a grad program.