Educational Development

Launch event for report on Web 2.0 in higher education A  report  that  explores  the  impact  that web 2.0 and the collaborative, social web are having on higher education in the UK will be launched on May 12, 2009. The report, produced by the committee of inquiry into the changing learner experience, also contains a comparative international review covering the USA, Australia, South Africa and the Netherlands. The report, titled ‘HE in a Web 2.0 World’, will be launched at an event at The Barbican, London and will be hosted by committee chair, Sir David Meville. He said, 'The report evaluates the challenges for universities and their staff in keeping pace with, and capitalising on, these trends and argues there are very strong drivers for change.' Ewan McIntosh, 4iP Digital Commissioner for Scotland and Northern Ireland will also be speaking at the event. The  committee was formed to investigate the impact of students’ widespread use  social  networking  technologies  such  as  Facebook,  blogs, twitter, podcasting,  YouTube  and  the  like  on  Higher  Education. Although an independent committee,   it   is   backed   by  all  of  the  principal  bodies  in  UK post-compulsory  education,  namely:  the  Higher  Education  Academy  (The Academy),  Universities  UK  (UUK), the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC),  the  Higher  Education  Funding  Council  for England (HEFCE), the Scottish  Funding  Council  (SFC), the Higher Education Funding Council for Wales (HEFCW),  the Department  for  Employment and Learning for Northern Ireland  (DELNI),  Lifelong  Learning UK (LLUK), Becta and the Learning and Skills Council (LSC). When 6pm – 8pm, 12 May 2009Where The Garden Room, Barbican Centre, Silk Street, London EC2Y 8DS

Exploring contributions to scholarship in e-learning: weighing up the evidence Filed in Articles on May.01, 2009 In this paper the authors examine three journal articles (two of them relating to e-learning and one to higher education in general), in order to draw some preliminary conclusions about the kind of contributions to discourse about e-learning which may be regarded as valuable in advancing the scholarship of teaching and learning.

The Flexner Report is a book-length study of medical education in the United States and Canada, written by the professional educator Abraham Flexner and published in 1910 under the aegis of the Carnegie Foundation. Many aspects of the present-day American medical profession stem from the Flexner Report and its aftermath.

The story of the frustrated student is the subject of a short video produced by students at Manchester Metropolitan University. The university is looking into alternative ways to communicate with students, specifically an SMS service in which messages are sent directly to students’ mobile phones. The system is incredibly simple: staff post a message to the Virtual Learning Environment (VLE), and if the message is urgent, the staff member begins the message with the keyword ‘urgent’. The next 160 characters are then sent as an SMS. It’s an opt-in system which students value - not least because they are more likely to receive the messages if they go straight to their mobile device.

We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us. - Marshall McLuhan

Cost of Peer Review Exceeds the Cost of Giving Every Researcher a Grant Scott Leslie passed this along. "We show that the $40,000 (Canadian) cost of preparation for a grant application and rejection by peer review in 2007 exceeded that of giving every qualified investigator a direct baseline discovery grant of $30,000 (average grant). This means the Canadian Federal Government could institute direct grants for 100% of qualified applicants for the same money." Ironically, this report is published in a subscription-locked peer-reviewed paper, the total cost of which is entangled in the mechanisms for selecting which papers are good enough to publish. Pot, meet kettle. A.J. Cann, Science of the Invisible, April 21, 2009. [Comment] [Link] [Tags: Subscription Services, Books, Canada]