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At the summer AASCU meeting, Twitter was used (along with Lady Gaga) as iconic representations of the kinds of "new" thinking and doing that may be useful for supporting the Red Balloon initiative. Issued in September 2010, "Twitter in Higher Education 2010: Usage Habits and Trends of Today's College Faculty" reports data and findings from the second annual survey on Twitter usage and trends among college faculty. (from the Executive Summary): This year's survey, like that conducted in 2009, sought answers to some of the fundamental questions regarding faculty members' familiarity, perception, and experience with the micro-blogging technology, as well as whether they expect their Twitter use to increase or decrease in the future. We also examined year-to-year comparisons to see how the Twitter landscape has changed during the past 12 months.

"Peer Review by Twitter As social media tools are increasingly used to respond to scientific papers published in peer-reviewed journals, many researchers are frustrated, according to an article in Nature. "Papers are increasingly being taken apart in blogs, on Twitter and on other social media within hours rather than years, and in public, rather than at small conferences or in private conversation," the article says. It goes on to quote many others who say that speedy response (even if of varying reliability) is actually a huge improvement over a system of waiting a long time for criticism of published articles."

"Annals of Higher Education Get Rich U. There are no walls between Stanford and Silicon Valley. Should there be? by Ken Auletta April 30, 2012 Students at the Institute of Design at Stanford, or d.school, work this spring on an irrigation project for farmers in Burma. The work is part of the university Students at the Institute of Design at Stanford, or d.school, work this spring on an irrigation project for farmers in Burma. The work is part of the university's focus on interdisciplinary education. Photograph by Aaron Huey. inShare214 Print E-Mail Single Page Related Links Audio: Ken Auletta on Silicon Valley and Stanford University. Keywords Stanford University; Silicon Valley; John Hennessy; Education; Entrepreneurs; Distance Learning; Technology Stanford University is so startlingly paradisial, so fragrant and sunny, it's as if you could eat from the trees and live happily forever. Students ride their bikes through manicured quads, past blooming flowers and statues by Rodin, to buildings named for benefactors like Gates, Hewlett, and Packard. Everyone seems happy, though there is a well-known phenomenon called the "Stanford duck syndrome": students seem cheerful, but all the while they are furiously paddling their legs to stay afloat. What they are generally paddling toward are careers of the sort that could get their names on those buildings. The campus has its jocks, stoners, and poets, but what it is famous for are budding entrepreneurs, engineers, and computer aces hoping to make their fortune in one crevasse or another of Silicon Valley. Innovation comes from myriad sources, including the bastions of East Coast learning, but Stanford has established itself as the intellectual nexus of the information economy. In early April, Facebook acquired the photo-sharing service Instagram, for a billion dollars; naturally, the co-founders of the two-year-old company are Stanford graduates in their late twe

"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

"Tue, Jan. 31, 2012, 3:01 AM Global contest will lead to help during heart attacks By Marie McCullough Inquirer Staff Writer SEPTA station manager Garry Deans saved a man´s life this month because he knew the location of an AED. MICHAEL S. WIRTZ / Staff Photographer SEPTA station manager Garry Deans saved a man's life this month because he knew the location of an AED. Do you know where the nearest defibrillator is located? Yes No View results Post a comment RELATED STORIES Join the MyHeartMap challenge PHILLY.COM's TOP FIVE PICKS Mayor Nutter outraged at suspect's bail Media misled about whereabouts of Santorum daughter Parents: Disabled daughter's transplant could happen Where's the school choice, Chaput? Contest's 1st clue: Find the pig Around the world, the hunt is on for thousands of lifesaving portable medical devices that are hanging in public places - in Philadelphia. Why would someone in, say, Abu Dhabi care about finding devices in Philadelphia? Because a University of Pennsylvania project to map the locations of automated external defibrillators (AEDs) throughout the city has mushroomed into a global "crowdsourcing" competition fueled by the Internet, Facebook, Twitter, smartphones - and the chance to win cash prizes up to $10,000. The ultimate prize, of course, will be saving the lives of cardiac-arrest victims. Penn plans to create an interactive online AED registry that will, for the first time, enable the city's 911 system, emergency responders - and any bystander with a phone - to quickly locate an AED. Beginning Tuesday, participants in Philadelphia will use a free app downloaded to their phones to transmit photos and locations of the city's estimated 5,000 AEDs. These backpack-size machines can assess a cardiac-arrest victim and, if appropriate, deliver an electric shock to restart the heart. Studies show even sixth graders can follow an AED's step-by-step audio directions. But in this age of cyber collaboration, the contest, called "

"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

"July 19, 2012 Inside the Coursera Contract: How an Upstart Company Might Profit From Free Courses How an Upstart Company Might Profit From Free Courses 1 Jim Wilson, The New York Times, Redux Andrew Ng, a co-founder of the company and a professor of computer science at Stanford U.: "We have a lot of white boards up around the office where these ideas are being written down and erased and written down and erased." Enlarge Image By Jeffrey R. Young Coursera has been operating for only a few months, but the company has already persuaded some of the world's best-known universities to offer free courses through its online platform. Colleges that usually move at a glacial pace are rushing into deals with the upstart company. But what exactly have they signed up for? And if the courses are free, how will the company-and the universities involved-make money to sustain them? Some clues can be found in the contract the institutions signed. The Chronicle obtained the agreement between Coursera and the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, the first public university to make such a deal, under a Freedom of Information Act request, and Coursera officials say that the arrangement is similar to those with the other partners. The contract reveals that even Coursera isn't yet sure how it will bring in revenue. A section at the end of the agreement, titled "Possible Company Monetization Strategies," lists eight potential business models, including having companies sponsor courses. That means students taking a free course from Stanford University may eventually be barraged by banner ads or promotional messages. But the universities have the opportunity to veto any revenue-generating idea on a course-by-course basis, so very little is set in stone. Andrew Ng, a co-founder of the company and a professor of computer science at Stanford, describes the list as an act of "brainstorming" rather than a set plan. "We have a lot of white boards up around the office where these ideas

"July 22, 2010 How Social Networking Helps Teaching (and Worries Some Professors) By Jeffrey R. Young San Jose, Calif. Professors crowded into conference rooms here this week to learn how to use Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube in their classrooms, though some attendees raised privacy issues related to the hypersocial technologies. About 750 professors and administrators attended the conference on "Emerging Technologies for Online Learning," run jointly by the Sloan Consortium, a nonprofit group to support teaching with technology, and two other educational software and resource providers."

"MBS expands into online marketplace By Victoria Guida Oct 1, 2010 Dennis Flanagan, CEO of MBS Direct, recently launched Xplana, an online student learning platform that helps students manage their academic lives through social networking, study groups and e-textbooks. Google, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and other online resources have transformed the way students receive information. MBS Textbook Exchange, eying the exodus from print to digital, is evolving to keep up with the technological transformation. This summer, MBS launched an online social learning platform called Xplana that strives to connect Internet resources in a way that makes learning easier and more interactive for students. The company has since made the case that the new website is the way of the future on college campuses. "We began looking at the fact that learning was evolving in a lot of different ways," said Dennis Flanagan, CEO of MBS Direct and Xplana (pronounced ex plah' nah). "The traditional print book has always been one of the primary sources of learning, with the teacher standing up in front of the classroom. The Internet kind of changed that whole process. You don't necessarily look in a book to find information." MBS, which leads the textbook industry in wholesale production, acquired Xplana last October as a strategic move to keep up with the times, said Rob Reynolds, founder of Xplana."

"January 2, 2011 6 Top Smartphone Apps to Improve Teaching, Research, and Your Life Academics describe going mobile to plan lectures, keep up with scholarship, and run classes "I used to use a piece of paper" for taking attendance in class, says David M. Reed, a computer-science professor at Capital U., but he kept losing the sheet. The smartphone app that he wrote to do the job has gained him about $20,000 on the iTunes store. By Jeffrey R. Young Not long ago, it seemed absurd for aca­demics to carry around a computer, camera, and GPS device every­where they went. Actually, it still seems absurd. But many professors (and administrators) now do just that in the form of all-in-one devices. Smartphones or tablet computers combine many functions in a hand-held gadget, and some users are discovering clever ways to teach and do research with the ubiquitous machines. For many on campus, checking e-mail on the go is the first killer app of the hand-held world. The downside: Having that ability can mean working more than ever-answering student e-mails while in line at the grocery store, responding to a journal editor during lunch. There can be benefits, though. Some professors say they find that carrying the Inter­net in their pocket helps them collaborate, teach, and collect data in new ways that include e-mail but go far beyond it. A handful of colleges are running expensive pilot projects in which they give out iPhones or iPads to students and professors to see what happens when everyone goes mobile. Some of the most innovative applications for hand-held devices, however, have come from professors working on their own. They find ways to adapt popular smartphone software to the classroom setting, or even write their own code. That's what I discovered when I put out a call on Twitter, as well as to a major e-mail list of college public-relations officers, asking about the areas in which professors and college officials are making the most of their mobile device

"College Students Lead in Internet Use and Tech Gadgets, Study Finds July 19, 2011, 12:39 pm By Jie Jenny Zou A study by the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project confirms the idea that young adults-particularly undergraduate and graduate students-are more likely to use the Internet and own tech devices than is the rest of the general population. But nonstudents ages 18 to 24 were more active on social networks than were college students, sending more updates to Facebook and Twitter. The study was compiled using data collected from the Pew Internet Project surveys throughout 2010, and it featured a sample size of nearly 10,000 respondents. Regardless of educational background, young adults ages 18 to 24 were generally much more likely to be Internet users, to engage in social media, and to own Web-enabled devices like laptops and smartphones. Undergraduate and graduate students were the most likely to have speedy Internet connections, with 93 percent to 95 percent citing home access to broadband. Community-college students showed a slight edge in mobile Internet use over undergraduates and graduate students, which Aaron W. Smith, a Pew senior research specialist who compiled the study, attributed to a trend among lower socioeconomic groups to use mobile phones as their primary mode of Internet access, a finding of a previous Pew report. The researchers were surprised by how ubiquitous the Internet has become for young people, said Mr. Smith. Nearly 100 percent of college students and 92 percent of nonstudents in the 18-24 age range were Internet users. By comparison, only 75 percent of adults nationally report using the Internet."

Every other Monday, right before class ends, Muhammad Zaman, a Boston University biomedical engineering professor, hands out a one-page form asking students to anonymously rate him and the course on a scale of one to five. Enlarge This Image Gretchen Ertl for The New York Times Muhammad Zaman, who teaches biomedical engineering at Boston University, graphs the results of his evaluations and e-mails to explain how he will make changes. News, data and conversation about education in New York. Join us on Facebook » Follow us on Twitter » .It asks more, too: "How can the professor improve your learning of the material?" "Has he improved his teaching since the last evaluation? In particular, has he incorporated your suggestions?" "How can the material be altered to improve your understanding of the material?" "Anything else you would like to convey to the professor?" College learning assessments and professorial ratings come in many forms, with new ones popping up all the time. Ratemyprofessors.com has been going strong for years, and almost everywhere, colleges ask students to fill out end-of-term evaluations - and increasingly, midterm evaluations as well. Many professors with large lecture classes swear by clickers that help them keep tabs on how well their students are following the material. Some online courses include dashboards that let professors see which students are stuck, and where. And thousands of professors use some variation of K. Patricia Cross's "One-Minute Paper" approach, in which, at the end of each class, students write down the most important thing they learned that day - and the biggest question left unanswered. But even in an era when teacher evaluations and learning assessments are a hot topic in education, Dr. Zaman stands out in his constant re-engineering of his teaching: He graphs the results the day he collects them (an upward trend is visible), sends out an e-mail telling the class abo

How do we facilitate--both structurally and culturally--opportunities for creativity in developing opportunities for profound transformation of the work of colleges and universities?