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"The best way to understand learning tech people is to do a little thought experiment.   Pretend that through some Freaky Friday magic, (think Lindsay Lohan circa 2003), you wake up as a member of your campus IT organization.  (I'm assuming that you are a faculty member or future faculty member of some sort).  Everyone around you is talking about deliverables, assumptions, critical paths, constraints, dependencies and milestones.  There is a hierarchy. Demands are coming at you from all directions.  Budgets are tight and getting tighter. Those around you in IT are talented, dedicated, and often brilliant.  They are also constrained by the need to provide a 24/7/365 rock-solid infrastructure, and to so with budgets that have not grown to meet all the new demands."

"Coffee courses are an easy way to learn new ideas for using technology in your teaching. Each coffee course will cover a new topic in education technology, teaching online, digital tools, pedagogy, or trends in technology. It is equivalent to a one- or two-hour face-to-face training session, but is done at your own pace from your own desk. Courses are offered regularly through the blog, and take place over one week. Each day while the course runs, a short activity or video will be posted to the blog for you to do. It should take about 15 - 20 minutes, just enough time to enjoy a cup of coffee (or tea, or whatever you prefer). For more information, please see this post about coffee courses. You can do any course at any time and all are welcome to participate. If you would like recognition on your employment record for completing the course, you can register for the session on HORUS prior to the course starting (available for ANU staff only)." From Wendy: I love the blog idea! Participants from their University can review each course and post a substantive comment to the blog in order to get the certificate. We could do this with workshop. It would help ensure faculty are really learning, since their posts would be public. Thoughts? Also note that all of their content is posted with a CC-BY license in case there's something we can use. It's also a model we can follow?

Study of DeVry students only and the courses sound like they are very poorly designed.

A easy way to determine if you are running any apps that will stop working with Lion. I have several that are incompatible, one is the Microsoft Office Update utility. Another is the Media 100 Transcoder.

"As the nonprofit tech company operating Bookshare, the largest library of accessible books in the world, Benetech believes the time is right for the publishing world to seize this era of opportunity. We believe that all content born digital can-and should-be born accessible. We understand how to navigate this new world of opportunity-both by identifying the possibilities and working to resolve the challenges. Tremendous progress has been made when it comes to retro-fitting books, especially those that are primarily text, but as digital content becomes richer and more complex, the challenge of making it born accessible will require broader partnerships and technological innovation. The resources we've provided below are meant to help publishers and the myriad of other new, digital content creators understand the basics of how to make content born accessible. These resources highlight the challenges that images, interactivity, math equations and other complex features pose, but also demonstrate how they can be addressed. Working together, we know that accessibility can become a critical component in the creation of all content"

Harvard Universityand Duke University have revamped their general education models to make courses more interesting and meaningful to students and faculty, Colleen Flaherty reports for Inside Higher Ed. At both universities, leaders are concerned that students do not understand the point of general education, a problem also seen at other institutions nationwide.

Great video demonstrating capabilities of AR to make learning more experiential.

he "largest and oldest" collection of natural sounds in the world is now digital and available online, Cornell University announced. The Macaulay Library at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology houses a scientific archive of biodiversity audio and video recordings. Previously in analog format, the recordings - which go back to 1929 - are now completely digitized, and can be heard at MacaulayLibrary.org. "In terms of speed and the breadth of material now accessible to anyone in the world, this is really revolutionary," Greg Budney, Macaulay's audio curator, said in a statement. It took archivists 12 years to finish digitizing the collection, which has nearly 150,000 audio recordings that run a total of 7,513 hours, according to Cornell. The library features 9,000 species, including mostly birds, as well as whales, elephants, frogs and primates.

Using data collected from 2,124 student participants from across 15 public and private colleges and universities, the results are carefully analyzed and broken down by different student subgroups.

"The Affordable Learning Exchange was created to help instructors take ownership of their courses and content. We are here to help navigate the waters of affordable resources and find creative solutions that promote students savings. This includes re-imagining the textbook, encouraging faculty innovation, and empowering our faculty through grants and training opportunities to adopt, adapt, create and share open educational resources"

An intersting tool for creating interactive simulations. Scroll down and look at a few of the sample. They are all animated so that you can press play and then use one of the up/down arrows on any node to kick off a simulation.

Information on what computers are compatible with AirPlay (the technology that allows you to wirelessly share your computer screen with an AppleTV).