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"January 23, 2012 Invisible Gorillas Are Everywhere By William Pannapacker By now most everyone has heard about an experiment that goes something like this: Students dressed in black or white bounce a ball back and forth, and observers are asked to keep track of the bounces to team members in white shirts. While that's happening, another student dressed in a gorilla suit wanders into their midst, looks around, thumps his chest, then walks off, apparently unseen by most observers because they were so focused on the bouncing ball. Voilà: attention blindness. The invisible-gorilla experiment is featured in Cathy Davidson's new book, Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn (Viking, 2011). Davidson is a founder of a nearly 7,000-member organization called Hastac, or the Humanities, Arts, Sciences, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory, that was started in 2002 to promote the use of digital technology in academe. It is closely affiliated with the digital humanities and reflects that movement's emphasis on collaboration among academics, technologists, publishers, and librarians. Last month I attended Hastac's fifth conference, held at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. Davidson's keynote lecture emphasized that many of our educational practices are not supported by what we know about human cognition. At one point, she asked members of the audience to answer a question: "What three things do students need to know in this century?" Without further prompting, everyone started writing down answers, as if taking a test. While we listed familiar concepts such as "information literacy" and "creativity," no one questioned the process of working silently and alone. And noticing that invisible gorilla was the real point of the exercise. Most of us are, presumably, the products of compulsory educational practices that were developed during the Industrial Revolution. And the way most of us teach is a relic of the s

"December 31, 2011 Let's Improve Learning. OK, but How? By W. Robert Connor Does American higher education have a systematic way of thinking about how to improve student learning? It would certainly be useful, especially at a time when budgets are tight and the pressure is on to demonstrate better results. Oh, there's plenty of discussion-bright ideas, old certainties, and new approaches-and a rich discourse about innovation, reinvention, and transformation. But the most powerful ideas about improving learning are often unspoken. Amid all the talk about change, old assumptions exert their continuing grasp. For example, most of us assume that expanding the number of fields and specialties in the curriculum (and of faculty to teach them), providing more small classes, and lowering teaching loads (and, hence, lowering student-faculty ratios) are inherently good things. But while many of those ideas are plausible, few have been rigorously evaluated. So maybe it's time to stop relying on assumptions about improving learning and start finding out what really works best. A genuine theory of change, as such a systematic evaluation of effectiveness is sometimes called, would be grounded in knowledge about how students learn, and in the best way to put that knowledge to work. The theory should also be educationally robust; that is, it should not just help colleges expose students to certain subject matter, but also challenge institutions to help students develop the long-lasting survival skills needed in a time of radical and often unpredictable change. And it must also have its feet on the ground, with a sure footing in financial realities. Above all, those who would develop a truly systematic way of thinking about and creating change must be able to articulate their purpose. Given the great diversity of institutional types, student demographics, history, and mission among American colleges and universities, it's hard to discern a shared sense of purpose. But when f

"February 2, 2012 Multiyear Study of Community-College Practices Asks: What Helps Students Graduate? By Jennifer Gonzalez Community colleges are brimming with programs and policies designed to help students complete their studies. Practices like requiring orientation and establishing early-academic-warning systems have sprouted since 2009, when President Obama announced that he wanted to make the United States the best-educated country in the world by 2020. Now the questions for the nation's community colleges are: Which of the practices work and why? And perhaps most important, how do colleges expand them to cover all students? A new, multiyear project led by the Center for Community College Student Engagement will attempt to get some answers. The research organization plans to analyze data from four different but related surveys and produce reports annually for the next three years. The surveys represent responses from the perspective of entering and experienced students, faculty members, and institutions. Kay M. McClenney, the center's director and a senior lecturer in the Community College Leadership Program at the University of Texas at Austin, says the project will allow community colleges to make more-informed decisions about how they spend money and about the type of policies and programs they want to emphasize. The first of three reports, "A Matter of Degrees: Promising Practices for Community College Student Success" was released last week. It draws attention to 13 strategies for increasing retention and graduation rates, including fast-tracking remedial education, providing students with experiential learning, and requiring students to attend orientation. The strategies specified in the report are not new. In fact, many of them can be found at two-year colleges right now. But how well those strategies are working to help students stay in college and graduate is another matter. The report found peculiarities among responses on similar topics, sugges

"What Does It Mean To Be an Academic? January 6, 2012, 4:21 pm By Nigel Thrift There is a fascinating moment when academics reflect upon their practices in ways that are not just emblematic but are clearly leading to real change in what the practice of being an academic actually means. I have been reminded of this fact twice recently as I have considered practices of teaching and research at a number of universities around the world. First, in the case of teaching, there was seeing some of the new educational technology which is coming into operation. I am not just talking about remarkable educational sites like the interactive simulation site for the physical sciences, PhET, which is used by so many science professors. As good as these undoubtedly can be at allowing students to reach a level of competence in particular problems before they come near a lecture, there is also the new software which allows real interaction in the classroom and the tracking of the reaction to that interaction in order to enable new rounds of inquiry. The consequences are only just being worked through but in time, I am now pretty sure, the lecture in its old form, understood as a direct oral presentation intended to present information or to teach students about a particular subject and delivered by a lecturer standing at the front of the room and giving out information and judgments, will become a minority teaching method. Instead, what were lectures will be recorded for students to consult-many universities have already produced a library of such presentations-and the time previously put by for lectures will be used as a surgery, as a time for problem-solving, clarification, and the like. This is a no less time-consuming method of teaching-indeed, it may involve more work. But I think it is likely to become the norm in many disciplines. Second, in the case of research, there has been reading Paul Rabinow's latest book, The Accompaniment, which includes a fascinating cha

"A Program Is Not a Plan January 13, 2011 By John N. Gardner and Andrew K. Koch One of the main thrusts of what has come to be called "the undergraduate student success movement" is misguided. Yes, we did mean to use the term "misguided." A strong word and a strong assertion, but we have equally strong evidence. Simply stated, higher education institutions in the United States focus heavily on student success programs, but rarely do they have a comprehensive plan to guide those programs. In the absence of a plan, redundancies and gaps occur, and retention stagnates. In short, a program or programs do not a successful plan make. Of course, making this assertion means that John Gardner, one of this essay's authors and a key architect in the national student success movement, has to admit that over the years he may not have given the best advice to all people at all times. For about three decades, Gardner has gone around the country telling college educators that their institutions need to adopt or adapt one form of student success program or another. Drawing from his experiences, the recommended program was often a first-year seminar -- a contemporary staple in the American college curriculum that dates back to the 1880s. And, in fact, research does correlate participation in first-year seminars with positive differences in student retention and graduation rates. At the same time that Gardner was advocating for first-year seminars in particular, he was also advocating for a broader philosophical approach to the first year. He coined the term, "the first-year experience," and meant it to encompass a total campus approach to the first year, not a single program. Upon reflection, it seems that speaking about one program extensively while at the same time advocating for a collective approach may have fostered a bit of confusion. And today the "first-year experience" can mean anything from a single course to a full-fledged coordinated effort to improve the fir

"January 22, 2012 MIT Mints a Valuable New Form of Academic Currency James Yang for The Chronicle By Kevin Carey The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has invented or improved many world-changing things-radar, information theory, and synthetic self-replicating molecules, to name a few. Last month the university announced, to mild fanfare, an invention that could be similarly transformative, this time for higher education itself. It's called MITx. In that small lowercase letter, a great deal is contained. MITx is the next big step in the open-educational-resources movement that MIT helped start in 2001, when it began putting its course lecture notes, videos, and exams online, where anyone in the world could use them at no cost. The project exceeded all expectations-more than 100 million unique visitors have accessed the courses so far. Meanwhile, the university experimented with using online tools to help improve the learning experience for its own students in Cambridge, Mass. Now MIT has decided to put the two together-free content and sophisticated online pedagogy­-and add a third, crucial ingredient: credentials. Beginning this spring, students will be able to take free, online courses offered through the MITx initiative. If they prove they've learned the materi­al, MITx will, for a small fee, give them a credential certifying as much. In doing this, MIT has cracked one of the fundamental problems retarding the growth of free online higher education as a force for human progress. The Internet is a very different environment than the traditional on-campus classroom. Students and employers are rightly wary of the quality of online courses. And even if the courses are great, they have limited value without some kind of credential to back them up. It's not enough to learn something-you have to be able to prove to other people that you've learned it. The best way to solve that problem is for a world-famous university with an unimpeachable reputat

"Ready for Change.edu? January 11, 2012 - 3:00am By Paul Fain Andrew S. Rosen takes the long view when talking about higher education. As CEO of Kaplan, Inc., he often defends the role of for-profit colleges in an evolving marketplace, peppering versions of his stump speech with tales about the creation of public universities and community colleges. His point is that some skepticism about for-profits is similar to the snobbery those older sectors faced from elite private higher education. Rosen goes further in his debut book, Change.edu: Rebooting for the New Talent Economy, which attempts to paint a picture of higher education's future as well as its history. He also takes a turn as a journalist of sorts - an interesting twist for the former general counsel of the Washington Post Co. - writing about his campus visits to other institutions, a couple of which are Kaplan competitors. The book is ambitious in its scope, particularly for an author with obvious vested interests. But most reviewers have given Rosen high marks. Kirkus Reviews writes: "Incredibly, his argument never comes off as self-serving; the author's thorough exploration of 'Harvard Envy' and the rise of 'resort' campuses is both fascinating and enlightening." Rosen recently answered questions over e-mail about his book, which was released by Kaplan Publishing. Q: The book arrives amid a series of challenges for your industry. What did you hope to accomplish by writing it? A: I've spent most of my life studying or working in education, with students of all ages and preparation levels: top students from America's most elite institutions and working adults and low-income students who have few quality choices to change their lives. I've come to see how the American higher education system (as with K-12) is profoundly tilted in favor of those who already have advantages. Our society keeps investing more and more in the relatively small and unchanging number of students who have the privil

"Big Data's Arrival February 1, 2012 - 3:00am By Paul Fain New students are more likely to drop out of online colleges if they take full courseloads than if they enroll part time, according to findings from a research project that is challenging conventional wisdom about student success. But perhaps more important than that potentially game-changing nugget, researchers said, is how the project has chipped away at skepticism in higher education about the power of "big data." Researchers have created a database that measures 33 variables for the online coursework of 640,000 students - a whopping 3 million course-level records. While the work is far from complete, the variables help track student performance and retention across a broad range of demographic factors. The data can show what works at a specific type of institution, and what doesn't. That sort of predictive analytics has long been embraced by corporations, but not so much by the academy. The ongoing data-mining effort, which was kicked off last year with a $1 million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, is being led by WCET, the WICHE Cooperative for Educational Technologies. Project Participants American Public University System Community College System of Colorado Rio Salado College University of Hawaii System University of Illinois-Springfield University of Phoenix A broad range of institutions (see factbox) are participating. Six major for-profits, research universities and community colleges -- the sort of group that doesn't always play nice -- are sharing the vault of information and tips on how to put the data to work. "Having the University of Phoenix and American Public University, it's huge," said Dan Huston, coordinator of strategic systems at Rio Salado College, a participant. According to early findings from the research, at-risk students do better if they ease into online education with a small number of courses, which flies in the face of widely-he

Breaking Bad Habits: Navigating the Financial Crisis by Dennis Jones and Jane Wellman The "Great Recession" of 2009 has brought an unprecedented level of financial chaos to public higher education in America. Programs are being reduced, furloughs and layoffs are widespread, class sizes are increasing, sections are being cut, and students can't get into classes needed for graduation. Enrollment losses upwards of several hundred thousand are being reported-and only time will tell whether the situation is even worse. Reports of budget cuts in public institutions in the neighborhood of 15 to 20 percent (Pennsylvania, Virginia, New York, Florida, and California) are becoming common. Halfway through the 2009-2010 fiscal year, 48 states were projecting deficits for 2011 and 2012 (NASBO, 2009). Although states are reluctant to raise taxes, they evidently have less of a problem letting tuitions go up. And up they are going-California, Oregon, Washington, New York, Wisconsin, and Florida announced increases ranging from 10 to 33 percent. The normally tuition-resistant Florida legislature has authorized annual increases in undergraduate tuitions of 15 percent per year until they reach national averages for public four-year institutions. Around the country, the increases are setting off student protests reminiscent of the 1960's, variously directed at campuses, system boards, legislatures, and governors-complete with reports of violence and arrests. The New Normal Higher education has been through tough times before. The pattern of the last two decades has been a zigzag of reductions in state funds for higher education during times of recession, followed by a return to revenue growth about two years after the state coffers refill. But resources have not returned to pre-recession levels. So the overall pattern has been a modest but continuous decline in state revenues. Caption: Percent Change in Appropriations for Higher Education, 1960-2006

"Congress's 'Secret Shopper' August 3, 2010 WASHINGTON -- A government report detailing the findings of an undercover investigation of for-profit colleges' recruiting tactics reveals admissions and financial aid officers engaged in unethical and sometimes illegal practices, all in the interest of persuading students to enroll and obtain federal financial aid. The report, along with an accompanying video of undercover footage, is the culmination of a three-month effort by the Government Accountability Office, Congress's investigative wing, to determine whether and to what degree for-profit colleges are engaging in "fraudulent, deceptive or otherwise questionable marketing practices." A copy of the report is available here."

This article appeared in Planning for Higher Education v.38 no.3 April-June 2010. It discusses planning for organizational change in the context of the use of the 2010 federal financial stimulus funds. It defines best practice as a balance in policy, procedure, and the relationship of key players.

"Advancing by Degrees" is designed to help college officials monitor and improve graduation rates by providing a framework of on-track indicators that reveal patterns among groups of students-including those who are struggling and need help to graduate. These data, in turn, can help drive changes in policies and practices that can boost the number of college graduates. Great report...wonderful questions, practical, focused! Terrific.

"MITx: 3 Cheers and 3 Questions December 19, 2011 - 8:00pm By Joshua Kim MITx is very big news. For a great overview of MIT's plans, check out Audrey Watters' excellent writeup MITx: The Next Chapter for University Credentialing? The MIT student paper The Tech also has a great article. The MIT press release and accompanying FAQ also go into detail about MITx. 3 Cheers and 3 Questions for MITx: Cheer 1 - Leadership: All of us in higher ed should take a moment to recognize and commend MIT for the institutions continued bold leadership in higher education and the open education movement. The wonderful thing about higher ed is that when one institution innovates it grows the pie for all of us - we all benefit. Cheer 2 - Risk Taking: What I love most about MITx is MIT leaders' willingness to learn as they go. Rather than endlessly talk about the next innovation that will make it possible to offer high quality postsecondary education to large numbers of people at affordable prices, MIT is actually doing something. I have no doubt that the MITx model will change and morph over time, but the only way to figure this out is to run lots of experiments and be willing to fail, learn, and evolve. Cheer 3 - Recruiting: A program like MITx raises my opinion of MIT as a parent (my kids launch in 2015 and 2017), potential donor and even a potential employee. The market for higher ed talent is worldwide, and the best people are motivated by mission and culture. MITx is a clear stake in the ground about MIT's values. Question 1 - Platform?: From what I understand from the articles, MITx will run on a new platform that MIT is developing on its own, and that will be made open source. Is this a totally new platform? Are existing open source LMS platforms like Sakai or Moodle utilized at all? What platforms will be utilized for course videos? Again, a new platform, or an existing open source lecture capture and video management platform like OpenCast? Question 2 - Partnersh

"The Year Ahead in IT, 2012 January 6, 2012 - 3:00am By Lev Gonick This series of annual Year Ahead articles on technology and education began on the eve of what we now know is one of the profound downturns in modern capitalism. When history is written, the impact of the deep economic recession of 2008-2012 will have been pivotal in the shifting balance of economic and political power around the world. Clear, too, is the reality that innovation and technology as it is applied to education is moving rapidly from its Anglo-American-centered roots to a now globally distributed dynamic generating disruptive activities that affect learners and institutions the world over. Seventy years ago, the Austrian-born Harvard lecturer and conservative political economist Joseph Schumpeter popularized the now famous description of the logic of capitalism, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy. The opening of new markets, foreign or domestic … illustrate(s) the same process of industrial mutation - if I may use that biological term - that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one. This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism. Our colleges and universities, especially those in the United States, are among the most conservative institutions in the world. The rollback of public investment in, pressure for access to, and indeterminate impact of globalization on postsecondary education all contribute to significant disorientation in our thinking about the future of the university. And then there are the disruptive impacts of information technology that only exacerbate the general set of contradictions that we associate with higher education. The faculty are autonomous and constrained, powerful and vulnerable, innovative at the margins yet conservative at the core, dedicated to education while demeaning teaching devoted to liberal arts and yet powerfully vocatio

"January 22, 2012 States Push Even Further to Cut Spending on Colleges By Eric Kelderman For nearly four years, governors and state legislators have focused on little else in higher education but cutting budgets to deal with historic gaps in revenue. Now, with higher-education support at a 25-year low, lawmakers are considering some policy changes that have been off-limits in the past, such as consolidating campuses and eliminating governing boards. Such proposals reflect the reality that, in most states, money for higher education will be constrained for the foreseeable future. Systems in Georgia and New York have already taken the unusual step of combining campuses under a single president. Other states, such as Ohio, are talking about giving institutions more freedom from state regulations, although for college administrators there's a trade-off: They would get more flexibility but even less state money. On the agenda in many statehouses this year will be bills that would tie higher-education appropriations to the completion rates of students at public colleges. Such performance-based models, which have had a mixed record in recent decades, are again popular with lawmakers trying to squeeze the most out of every tax dollar and to reward colleges that are more efficient at producing graduates. Related Content State Support For Higher Education Falls 7.6% in 2012 Fiscal Year Calif. Governor Goes After For-Profits With Limits on Cal Grants Legislators aren't demanding that colleges be more cost-efficient just to reduce spending on higher education, says Travis J. Reindl, a higher-education researcher for the bipartisan National Governors Association. They also want to keep colleges affordable for students. "We'll still be talking about money, money, money," Mr. Reindl says of the legislative sessions ahead. "Governors are increasingly interested in how the money is being spent by higher education ... and how much of that money is going to come out of

"Tenured Professor Departs Stanford U., Hoping to Teach 500,000 Students at Online Start-Up January 23, 2012, 4:53 pm By Nick DeSantis The Stanford University professor who taught an online artificial intelligence course to more than 160,000 students has abandoned his tenured position to aim for an even bigger audience. Sebastian Thrun, a professor of computer science at Stanford, revealed today that he has departed the institution to found Udacity, a start-up offering low-cost online classes. He made the surprising announcement during a presentation at the Digital - Life - Design conference in Munich, Germany. The development was first reported earlier today by Reuters. During his talk, Mr. Thrun explored the origins of his popular online course at Stanford, which initially featured videos produced with nothing more than "a camera, a pen and a napkin." Despite the low production quality, many of the 200 Stanford students taking the course in the classroom flocked to the videos because they could absorb the lectures at their own pace. Eventually, the 200 students taking the course in person dwindled to a group of 30. Meanwhile, the course's popularity exploded online, drawing students from around the world. The experience taught the professor that he could craft a course with the interactive tools of the Web that recreated the intimacy of one-on-one tutoring, he said. Mr. Thrun told the crowd his move was motivated in part by teaching practices that evolved too slowly to be effective. During the era when universities were born, "the lecture was the most effective way to convey information. We had the industrialization, we had the invention of celluloid, of digitial media, and, miraculously, professors today teach exactly the same way they taught a thousand years ago," he said. He concluded by telling the crowd that he couldn't continue teaching in a traditional setting. "Having done this, I can't teach at Stanford again," he said. One o

"Cracking Open the Scientific Process Timothy Fadek for The New York Times A GLOBAL FORUM Ijad Madisch, 31, a virologist and computer scientist, founded ResearchGate, a Berlin-based social networking platform for scientists that has more than 1.3 million members. By THOMAS LIN Published: January 16, 2012 Recommend Twitter Linkedin comments (145) E-Mail Print Single Page Reprints Share The New England Journal of Medicine marks its 200th anniversary this year with a timeline celebrating the scientific advances first described in its pages: the stethoscope (1816), the use of ether for anesthesia (1846), and disinfecting hands and instruments before surgery (1867), among others. Science Times Podcast Subscribe This week: Opening science and doing it yourself, plus the malaria medicine of Chairman Mao. Podcast: Science Times Related Wordplay Blog: Open Science, Numberplay style! (January 16, 2012) When Breakthroughs Begin at Home (January 17, 2012) RSS Feed RSS Get Science News From The New York Times » Enlarge This Image Timothy Fadek for The New York Times LIKE, FOLLOW, COLLABORATE A staff meeting at ResearchGate. The networking site, modeled after Silicon Valley startups, houses 350,000 papers. Readers' Comments Readers shared their thoughts on this article. Read All Comments (145) » For centuries, this is how science has operated - through research done in private, then submitted to science and medical journals to be reviewed by peers and published for the benefit of other researchers and the public at large. But to many scientists, the longevity of that process is nothing to celebrate. The system is hidebound, expensive and elitist, they say. Peer review can take months, journal subscriptions can be prohibitively costly, and a handful of gatekeepers limit the flow of information. It is an ideal system for sharing knowledge, said the quantum physicist Michael Nielsen, only "if you're stuck with

"A Disrupted Higher-Ed System January 26, 2012, 2:40 pm By Jeff Selingo The "disruption" of the higher-ed market is a popular refrain these days. Rising tuition prices and student debt have left many wondering if the current model is indeed broken and whether those like Harvard's Clay Christensen are right when they say that innovations in course delivery will eventually displace established players. What exactly those innovations will look like remains a matter of debate. One view from Sheryl Sandberg, chief operating officer of Facebook, envisions a future in which every industry will be disrupted and "rebuilt with people at the center." In this recent interview with The Wall Street Journal, Sandberg talked specifically about the gaming industry, which has been upended by the popularity of social-gaming venues, such as Words With Friends and Farmville. But what if we applied her people-centered vision to higher ed? While amenities and services on campuses have been redesigned in the last decade with students clearly at the center, the core of the academic experience for students today is almost exactly the same as it was for their parents decades ago. While other industries have been able to find productivity gains without sacrificing quality, on most college campuses we still have professors at the front of a room or at a table with an average of 16 students in front of them. We all know that's one of the key drivers of rising college costs. Higher ed is people intensive, and for many prospective students and their parents, the professor-centered academic experience is well worth the high price and will be for a long time. It's one reason why high-quality institutions really have little to worry about. But we also know that the traditional academic experience isn't for everyone these days. The students we used to call "nontraditional" are now a majority, yet we have way too many colleges chasing after high-achieving 18-to-24-year-olds

"Venture Fund for Traditional Colleges January 17, 2012 - 3:00am By Doug Lederman The space between nonprofit and for-profit higher education gets a little more crowded today. University Ventures Fund, a $100 million investment partnership founded by a quartet of veterans of the for-profit and nonprofit education sectors, is the latest entrant in a market that aims to use private capital to expand the reach and impact of traditional colleges and universities. The fund, whose two biggest investors are the German media conglomerate Bertelsmann AG and the University of Texas Investment Management Company, is focused on stimulating "innovation from within the academy," rather than competing with it from the outside, David Figuli, a lawyer and partner in University Ventures, said in an interview Monday. The projects will include helping institutions expand the scale of their academic programs, re-engineer how they deliver instruction, and better measure student outcomes; the first two investments, also announced today, will be creating a curriculum through Brandman University aimed at improving the educational outcomes of Hispanic students, and a company that helps universities in Britain and elsewhere in Europe deliver their courses online. "Most of the attempts to bring about innovation in higher education have come from people trying to buy their way in," Figuli said, citing the many takeovers of traditional institutions by for-profit colleges over the last decade (quite a few of which he helped engineer). "Our way is to find good ideas within the existing institutions and fund those." Figuli, a former general counsel for the South Dakota and Montana university systems, said he and his partners don't buy the critiques of traditional postsecondary institutions as unimaginative or fearful of change. "I've been in higher education for 30-some years, and most of the nonprofit institutions I've worked with have been frustrated by the fact that they're capital-constra

"MyEdu & KnowU - Two Approaches to Social Media in Higher Ed Keith Hampson Higher education is trying hard to find the best ways to integrate social media into its practices. They've approached it from a number of angles: marketing, community building, student support, and instruction. Instigators behind the efforts include software vendors looking to build the next edu social platform, colleges, individual educators, and on less formal basis, the students themselves. As of late 2011, there are very few scalable, institution-wide initiatives - but a great deal of isolated experimentation by innovators. The opportunities seem endless, but higher education management professionals are on the lookout for the right approach to make social media work for them today. Not all areas of higher ed will be equally well-suited to the opportunities that social media presents. Of all of the possibilities, integrating social media and instruction may be the most difficult, for example - due to the conflicting properties of social media and higher ed. While social media is particularly well-suited to facilitating open-ended exchanges between people - with no clear or prescribed beginning and end - higher education has clear boundaries (e.g. course duration) and largely predetermined objectives (e.g. syllabi). Social media is user-generated and leaderless. Higher education is top-down and instructor-directed. Social media thrives when there are thousands, if not millions, of users. High volume provides online communities with enough activity and content to ensure that each user finds what and who they want with sufficient frequency. (Although Twitter and Linked In have over 100 million users, only a fraction of the users are of significance to any one user.) On the other hand, higher education instruction typically restricts participation to a single class (e.g. 100 students). This is not to say that higher education won't find ways to use social media for instructi