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"University of the Future", an Ernst & Young report released a week ago is a six month study on the changes in Australian and international universities. According to the study Higher education institutions will need to fundamentally transform their business models to survive; "Over the next 10-15 years, the current public university model in Australia will prove unviable in all but a few cases...".

EDUCAUSE announced today a new initiative to advance analytics at U.S. colleges and universities. EDUCAUSE will work with the higher education community to provide thought leadership and education to develop institutional capability for analytics.

Excellent exa,mple of game theory, or indeed problem based learning in a university course.

EdX is a joint partnership between The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harvard University to offer online learning to millions of people around the world. EdX will offer Harvard and MIT classes online for free. Through this partnership, the institutions aim to extend their collective reach to build a global community of online learners and to improve education for everyone.

Kieran Mathieson, an Associate Professor at Oakland University who has developed an online site at CoreDogs.com where he publishes lessons, tools, a textbook and more, commented and shared his work.

Emerging Practice in a Digital Age draws on recent JISC reports and case studies and looks at how colleges and universities are continuing to embrace innovation and respond to changes in economic, social and technological circumstances in a fastchanging world. The focus of this guide is on emerging practice rather than emerging technology.

How can Twitter, which limits users to 140 characters per tweet, have any relevance to universities and academia, where journal articles are between 3,000-8,000 words long? Can anything of academic value ever be said in just 140 characters? A new Twitter guide published by the LSE Public Policy Group |and the LSE Impact of Social Sciences blog |seeks to answer this question, and show academics and researchers how to get the most out of the micro-blogging site. The Guide is designed to lead the novice through the basics of Twitter but also provide tips on how it can aid the teaching and research of the more experienced academic tweeter.

"A growing appreciation for the porous boundaries between the classroom and life experience, along with the power of social learning, authentic audiences, and integrative contexts, has created not only promising changes in learning but also disruptive moments in teaching." (Randy Bass (bassr@georgetown.edu) is Associate Provost and Executive Director of the Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship at Georgetown University. )

= notetaking, sharing resources, commenting, amplifying, asking questions, helping one another, offering suggestions, building community, and opening the classroom (from Derek Bruff, the Assistant Director at the Center for Teaching at Vanderbilt University)

...a new open source platform that will give individual educators and universities the ability to create MOOCs of their own

In our new world of online plenty, "no matter what you are interested in you can go online and join a group of people attracted to something because they want to learn about it", ... "It also means education, knowledge and achievement are opening up to a much broader range of students, particularly visual learners who didn't have a chance to shine in text-based education systems, international e-learning expert Marc Prensky says. "What many educators often forget is that reading and writing, although they have enjoyed primacy for hundreds of years, are very artificial ways to communicate, store and retrieve information," he says." ... "We have to get over the myth that mobile phones have eaten the brains of our children and talk productively about using new communications tools. "There is an untapped reservoir of interest and enthusiasm, and if you can find the right tasks [that] empower students, it's like reaching a [teaching] tipping point," Allen says.

Trinity College Foundation Studies at the University of Melbourne began an iPad pilot in August 2010. We launched the pilot with roughly 50 students and 20 staff exploring the use of technology in the classroom.

"I JUST can't see the point of doing research if no one is going to read it," says Simon Chapman, professor of public health and director of research at the University of Sydney.

University of Adelaide science needed a device for seamless access and the exchange of information so students could learn to educate themselves so they chose the iPad.