"Probably the most serious problem we have identified is the general lack of imagination about the possibilities of technology for meeting the needs of today's students. We need to move away from the dominant paradigm of the fixed time and place classroom (Andrea del Sarto's "silver-grey, placid and perfect art" in the chapter's opening quotation) as the default model for university and college teaching, and think of all the many other ways we could organize and manage teaching."
Tomorrow's Professor Msg.#1115 The Need for Multiple Visions for Teaching and Learning in the Future http://bit.ly/ozudt3

As I talk at colleges and universities across the country about the blogging initiatives I've led at the University of Mary Washington, Baylor University, and now at Virginia Tech, my audiences consistently ask about several issues. FERPA is one. Grading is another. But the fundamental questions have to do with the nature and value of the activity itself.

Jasig is launching a new open source project called uMobile and is calling on colleges and universities to contribute to the effort. Jasig is a consortium of higher education institutions and commercial organizations from around the world dedicated to the development and promotion of open source software to benefit colleges and universities. It also holds an annual conference spotlighting open source in education. This year's spring conference will be held May 23 to 25 in Westminster, CO. Among Jasig's projects is uPortal, an open source enterprise portal that's built on Java, XML, JSP, and Java 2 Platform Enterprise Edition (J2EE) technologies, providing a framework for building portals with standards-based integration (including authentication and security applications), single login, and customization. The new uMobile project will be built on the uPortal framework and will provide portal-like functionality on mobile devices, initially with features like campus maps, directories, RSS feeds, calendars, course schedules, campus news, and other tools common to mobile portal apps. Early development will focus on providing native apps and browser-based portal functionality on iOS and Android devices.

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

Private Gains, Public Stagnation March 7, 2011 The median base salary increase for faculty members in 2010-11 was 1.1 percent, with increases of 0.0 percent at four-year public institutions and 2.0 percent at private institutions, according to a report being released today by the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources. For public institutions, this is the second year in a row where the median increase is no increase at all. The median increase for faculty members at private institutions last year was 0.1 percent, so that sector is seeing a real rebound this year. In 2008-9, private institutions also outpaced publics in the size of the median increase in faculty salaries -- 4.0 percent to 3.5 percent.

Several recent reports have highlighted a rising rate of adoption for mobile devices: * Gartner, this week, released a projection that tablet devices such as Apple's iPad will see more than 19 million units sold worldwide this year, most of them in the US; Gartner also anticipates that this figure will grow to more than 200 million units in 2014 * In September, International Data Corp. (IDC) upgraded its forecast for sales of smartphones, suggesting that the end of 2010 would see a 55.4% increase since 2009 In short, though most universities in the US are only in the earliest stages of implementing mobile marketing initiatives, and though few universities are actively piloting mobile learning, there is growing urgency in the need to do so.

Yesterday's meeting, sponsored by NEBHE, echoes many of the same concepts expressed in the Red Balloon initiative.

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.

The Race Between Education and Technology, by Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz, $19.95, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, March 2010, ISBN-10: 0674035305, ISBN-13: 978-0674035300, pp. 496. Mass education is what set the United States apart from all other nations starting in the 19th Century and extending through much of the 20th century, as the authors explain in this award-winning book. Rather than educating only the elite who could pay for it, America educated more people for more years at no charge. As the U.S. turned out even more educated people than needed to meet the demands of technology, its wages, productivity and income equality increased, according to Drs. Goldin and Katz, both Harvard University economics professors. Gains from this expanding economic growth became more or less equally distributed across society. In the last couple of decades of the 20th Century, the country began losing what it cast as the race between education and technology. In the meantime, other countries had begun educating more of their own people. Students of some nations began exceeding U.S. high school and college graduation rates, as well as outscoring American students on standardized exams. "Rising inequality, lagging productivity for a prolonged period, and a rather non-stellar educational report card have led many to question the qualities that once made America the envy of all and a beacon for the world's people," the authors write. As they note, "the supply of educated Americans slowed considerably" after 1980. Technology raced ahead of educational gains in the United States. The authors expand on the reasons for these gaps, analyze trends in education and economics that are at the root of the problem and examine some solutions. As the bottom line, to fix the problems and regain our competitive edge in the world, the authors suggest that the U.S. re-examine assumptions about education and turn out more people with analytical, direct-service an

From Higher Ed Impact: Weekly Analysis from Academic Impressions, August 19, 2010

Daniel Fusch, Academic Impressions

Recent news has highlighted how the economy is making aging faculty more reluctant to retire and slowing colleges' ability to hire new faculty. And this week saw a New York Times feature interviewing diverse faculty about the issue. (Times piece is located at: http://nyti.ms/90Rt26

Mary Coussons-Read, a professor of psychology at the University of Colorado Denver, summarizes some forward-thinking approaches institutions have tried to offering faculty retirement incentives. For complete article, go to:
http://bit.ly/9d8zpL

Can You Hear Me Now? August 19, 2010 That is the logic Georgia Gwinnett College employed when it decided to offer its more than 300 full- and part-time faculty members cell phones and encouraged them to respond to any calls or texts from students within 24 hours. Under the program, professors are offered a state-of-the-art smartphone and a Sprint data plan that includes the most sophisticated wireless Internet coverage. It is part of a several-tier effort by Georgia Gwinnett - a public, four-year, noncompetitive-admissions college founded in 2005 - to defy the historically low retention rates typical of colleges that set such a modest bar for admission (Georgia Gwinnett admits any Georgia high school graduate). And so far, they say, it is working. The retention rate for returning sophomores at Georgia Gwinnett stands at 75 percent. That is about double the average rate for noncompetitive-admissions colleges in Georgia, according to Tom Mundie, dean of the school of science and technology at Georgia Gwinnett, and on par with many public institutions that have competitive admissions. In engagement surveys, Mundie says, students have reported "feeling that faculty care about and are accessible to them." These plaudits and retention numbers are not driven solely by invitations to call or text professors and expect a reasonably swift response, Mundie says. Other aspects of the college's retention effort probably contribute as well, including small class sizes and a mentoring program that arranges for professors to advise students on academic, career, and personal matters. But professors and administrators at the college seem to believe there is a substantial correlation between the cell phone program and the young institution's impressive retention numbers -- enough that the college, which has grown its student body and faculty by leaps and bounds since its founding five years ago, is preparing to spend $350,000 on faculty cell phones and data