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"It gives me great pleasure to announce that OER Research Hub is now ready to release the first of its dissemination reports. The 'OER Evidence Report 2013-2014′ brings together a range of evidence around the research hypotheses of the product and provides an overview of the impact OER is having on a range of teaching and learning practices."

"Several weeks ago the University of Florida Online program opened for the Spring 2014 semester, accepting 600 transfer students, and the new program will accept Freshmen starting August 2014. This announcement comes just 2 years after the Florida legislature commissioned a study from the Parthenon Group on how to best leverage online programs in the state, and this program is probably one of the highest profile new online programs in the US within the past few years (along with California's online initiative, Open SUNY, SJSU / Udacity and GaTech / Udacity)."

"There is strong, if not overwhelming evidence that behaviour patterns of students, educators, employees and professionals are moving towards the use of social tools for learning, working and teaching. Collaborating seamlessly face-to-face and at a distance, bringing the human element to virtual interactions, and personalized learning will prevail in 2014; each facilitated by technology. But it's not going to be about the technology, it will be about making connections by voice and/or visual, contributing to new knowledge, and learning with and from others-all mediated through social media. It will be the behaviours of students, lifelong learners and educators-their use of technology, specifically social media applications that will influence education in the upcoming year."

"With the 2014 JIF ranking finally expected this week, the anti-JIF coalition of scientists, journal editors, and scholarly publishers who issued the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) are greeting the delayed JIFs with examples of JIF-less "good practices" for scientific assessment. DORA is calling for the scientific community to contribute fresh JIF-less examples to a new DORA web page. "

"Most Google+ fans I know don't mourn its closure as much as they mourn the loss of Google+ circa 2014. Imagine a social network where geeks have higher follower counts than celebrities. Where there's no advertising. Where trolls get crushed and ordinary people have a voice. Where smart people gather for long, detailed and interesting conversations. Where most streams aren't algorithmically filtered. Where photographs appear at full quality. Where social networking engagement leads to actual, real-life friendships. Imagine a social network that strikes fear into Facebook, and forces them to improve the site for their users. It's all hard to imagine. But for about three years, this was Google+. Google+ is dead. But the best version of the site died in 2014. We should all mourn its loss."

"There's a lot at stake and that means plenty of outlets resort to illicit practices (read: faux users and spambots) to improve their reputation. In a Gartner study, analysts found that by 2014, between 10 and 15 percent of social media reviews will be faked."

Amid continued debate over whether or not Sochi is prepared to host the 2014 Olympics, which begins Thursday, reporters from around the world are starting to check into local hotels - to their apparent grief. Some journalists arriving in Sochi are describing appalling conditions in the housing there, where only six of nine media hotels are ready for guests. Hotels are still under construction. Water, if it's running, isn't drinkable. One German photographer told the AP over the weekend that his hotel still had stray dogs and construction workers wandering in and out of rooms.

"1/5 of all Sakai institutions appear to be actively running, piloting, or planning to switch to a different LMS. The most popular LMSs being run in parallel are Blackboard Learn and Canvas."

"Of the various professional development opportunities available, social media reigned supreme as the most popular way for educators to keep themselves up to speed on current issues in the education world. And while the report does note, "Most survey participants were pooled from social media websites, resulting in a sampling bias," other sources of information educators use to stay afloat extend beyond social media--Internet search, blogs, academic/education conferences, and news articles all topped 70% (see graph to the right)."

"After about two decades of steady growth in the number of graduates, the country likely peaked at about 3.4 million graduates in 2011 and will see a modest decline over the next few years, according to a report released Thursday by the Western Interstate Commission on Higher Education. According to the report, the number of graduates will fall in the immediate term, settle at about 3.3 million graduates a year by 2014 and begin to grow gradually starting in 2020, but at nowhere near the rate seen from 1990 to 2011."

""Going forward, IDC expects that tablet shipments will surpass desktop PCs in 2013 and portable PCs in 2014, according to IDC. "In 2013, worldwide desktop PC shipments are expected to drop by 4.3 percent and portable PCs to maintain a flat growth of 0.9 percent. The tablet market, on the other hand, is expected to reach a new high of 190 million shipment units with year-on-year growth of 48.7 percent while the smartphone market is expected to grow 27.2 percent to 918.5 million units.""

"The question is not whether or not you should go to school, the question for the class of 2014 is what is your college plan and what is the likelihood that the college or university you attend will still be in business by the time you want to graduate."

"Results from the 2016 Mobile/eTextbook survey report are shared and compared against the 2012 and 2014 surveys."

"The following graph for average textbook prices is based on data obtained in the annual financial survey of college stores. The most recent data for "average price" was based on the sale of 5.5 million new books and 3.0 million used books sold in 142 U.S. college stores, obtained in the Independent College Stores Financial Survey 2014-15. "

"In 2014 the UCISA Digital Capabilities Group (then the User Skills Group) launched the inaugural Digital Capabilities survey of the UK higher education sector. The survey focussed on what has been variously referred to as digital capabilities, digital literacies or digital competencies. The need to improve the country's digital capabilities has been highlighted in a House of Lords committee report published in February 2015. Make or break: the UK's digital future notes that the higher education sector "has not responded to the urgent need for reskilling" and calls for institutions to develop courses to give students the skills they need."

""Why not shame and embarrass others, especially the vulnerable, if there are no negative consequences? If people had a stronger sense that online abuse would be followed by legal or social sanctions, then we surely would have less of it," according to Danielle Keats Citron, law professor at the University of Maryland and author of 2014's Hate Crimes in Cyberspace."

Bucknell University, with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, will host its first annual international digital scholarship conference. The theme of the conference is "Collaborating Digitally: Engaging Students in Faculty Research" with the goal of gathering a broad community of scholar-practitioners engaged in collaborative digital scholarship in research and teaching.

"We continue to struggle with all this testing madness in the US - and we're doing our best (along with that education behemoth Pearson - thanks Britain!) to export this madness worldwide. Education and empire - some things never change do they."

"I was inspired to launch Comics in Education after the 2014 Reading for the Love of It conference at the Sheraton Centre in Toronto. I received so many wonderful inquiries from teachers that I wanted to create a forum where K-12 educators could find what they needed and be inspired to share the great things they were doing with their students to further explore visual narrative in the classroom. "

school productivity has not become part of the reform conversation, and with this project, our hope is to shine a light on how productivity differs across districts, as well as to identify key areas of reform. Moreover, for the first time, we conducted a special analysis of educational fiscal practices, diving deep into state budgeting approaches. We believe that if our education system had a more robust way of tracking expenditures, it could do more to increase productivity. Together with this report, we have also released analysis by CAP Senior Policy Analyst Robert Hanna on twin districts. Hanna's analysis looks more closely at the programs and practices of more effective districts.