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"The primary purpose of this wiki is to provide a place for students to fact-check, annotate, and provide context to the different news stories that show up in their Twitter and Facebook feeds. It's like a student-driven Snopes, but with a broader focus: we don't aim to just investigate myths, but to provide context and sanity to all the news - from the article about voter fraud to the health piece on a new cancer treatment."

""Relate" videos get the student to feel connected to the instructor. They seek to establish instructor presence. They also prompt students to reflect on their own prior experiences with the topic and reasons for taking the course. "Narrate" videos share stories, anecdotes, or case studies that illustrate a concept or put the learning in context. They tap into the power of narrative to make learning sticky. "Demonstrate" videos illustrate how to do something in a step-by-step way. They pull back the curtain on invisible phenomena or procedures. They visually demonstrate how students will complete assignments and apply learning in the real world. "Debate" videos are perhaps the most important if you want students to actually change the way they think. These videos explicitly surface and address the misconceptions that students have about a domain and showcase competing points of view."

"One of the most fun and useful things I've been doing lately is automating small processes I do all the time. It took me a while to work up the courage to dive into automation, as it always seemed like a really difficult, technical thing to do, which should be left to programmers."

In addition to the benefits of using "clickers" (AKA student response systems) in a classroom to foster a more engaged environment (click here for a quick intro), clickers also offer the opportunity to measure how students are understanding and processing information in real time. "Keeping the poll open" and asking students questions while they are listening/watching is a very useful way to find out how they are able to apply theoretical ideas. Although the examples in this essay focus on music, keeping the poll open could be applied to other time-based arts, or even in other disciplines when a teacher wants to observe how students are processing information as it changes.

"When Google killed its RSS app Google Reader, it appeared to have taken a dislike to the whole concept of RSS feeds, removing them from its Google Alerts service - saved searches whose results are automatically sent to you. With the RSS option gone, the only option remaining was to have alerts emailed instead. Now, with no announcement, the RSS feed option has returned. Google's explanation at the time didn't make much sense to me. It seemed to effectively be arguing that RSS was an out-dated delivery system, but its replacement was … email? No matter, it's back now. Simply sign into Google Alerts and select Feed from the delivery pull-down."

Twenty-first-century learners have expectations that are not met within the current model of higher education. With the introduction of online learning, the anytime/anywhere mantra taken up by many postsecondary institutions was a first step to meeting learner needs for flexibility; however, the choice and determination of delivery mode still resides with the institution and course instructors. Recently, the massive open online course (MOOC) movement has been introduced as an undeniable force in higher education, and the authors argue that it is distracting leadership from focusing on alternative options for supporting the needs of learners who demand both personalization and real access to learning opportunities. The key element to the MOOC movement is its openness that enables student access to education. In this article, the authors present the multi-access learning framework that envelops the MOOC phenomenon and merges course access modes enabling student choice and agency. The authors report results from a pilot study on one type of multi-access course, where students were able to choose their mode of access. In this case, remote students accessed the course via webcam and joined their on-campus classmates and instructor who were together face-to-face. Implications for multi-access learning in relation to the MOOC movement are discussed.

"There's little reason for typesetting to be such an expensive bottleneck in both time and money when we have better solutions in place. Academia will have to adopt new methods of producing text-based content. This was true when scholars moved from typewriters to word processors like Microsoft Word. Word enabled new capabilities like saving documents and editing them over time, rich text formatting, and the like. Unfortunately, Word arrived in a world before the internet and has never been adapted to work with the internet. As a result, it takes months to get an article into a format that can communicate with the web. Keep in mind that once we have the text in a web-communicable form the innovative things we can do with it are endless in terms of presentation, analytics, and more. We can't reverse that scholarship is moving to the web so we might as well learn how to speak with the web, today."

"To succeed in today's connected world, you need to build a community around your company, brand, and products. Over the last decade, social media monitoring has become a primary form of business intelligence, used to identify, predict, and respond to consumer behavior. Listening to what your customers, competitors, critics, and supporters are saying about you is key to getting great results from your social media campaigns. There are countless tools out there, offering many ways to analyze, measure, display, and create reports about your engagement efforts."

"You have the power to shape the way others see you online, so it's wise to be a bit proactive. As a first step, Google yourself to see what others might find. Next, ask a couple of colleagues to describe the person they uncover when search for your name. Based on what you learn from Steps 1 and 2, begin to create, edit, or revamp your online content to craft the image you want to project."

"When we started using Google Apps in our elementary district a few years ago, we figured it was time to test out electronic ways to present a year's worth of work, instead of the traditional binder. Our fourth, fifth and sixth grade students love using Google Sites to create their own portfolio as a web site. They can be creative, show their personality, and present an easy to navigate body of work to their parents . We continue using those portfolios each year and when it's time to update their portfolios, students get excited to see where they started. "

"At the end of the semester, however, students would be required to return the print version to the publisher, preventing them from selling their used casebooks back to a bookstore or to their peers. "My immediate reaction was: 'My goodness, they are trying to to kill first sale!'" said Mr. Grimmelmann, a professor of law at Maryland."

"In August my brother-in-law died suddenly. All my in-laws live in New York, and I teach in Kansas, so I was gone for a week from all my classes. When I got back, I had a grieving husband and four classes to manage. In October my grandmother died in New Hampshire. Same deal. Four classes, grief. You know what I didn't expect? My colleagues to ask me to attend all my committee meetings, my dean to reprimand me for being absent to attend a funeral, or my students to be unforgiving when I had to miss a week of classes they were paying for."

"We received a couple of requests from teachers asking for Google Drive add-ons to use with Google Docs to create and integrate diagrams and flowcharts. The first tool that came to mind is Gliffy for we have reviewed it here a couple of times but then we did a further search in Google Drive app store and picked two more to add to this list. For those of you looking for apps to create concept and mind maps in Google Drive, this selection is a good place to start with."

"Tool designers who want to intervene in the new world of letters should look first to the social history, and to the social future, of reading. The web has made newly visible the diversity of interest groups among the general population of readers; it has also made the members of those groups more visible to each other, enabling them to define themselves and their needs in ways that perhaps change their behavior. The new and changed audiences that have emerged in the digital domain include data miners, professional readers who read scientific papers for industry, scientists on the semantic web, wiki contributors who treat their activity as leisure, and high school and college/university teachers who want to use digital tools to engage students or experiment with flipped-classroom pedagogy. "

"To help education improve itself for all teachers and learners we have to try to connect with those teachers who aren't comfortable with radical shifts in pedagogy or technology. We believe that the best way to encourage positive change in educational practices across the broad landscape of content areas, learning objectives, and teaching philosophies is by providing tools that are easy-to-use, flexible, and comfortable to the majority of teachers and learners. The door to change must be open and the doorkeeper must be deposed"

"Students who use OER find them to be accessible, relevant, and engaging. Over 60 percent of students reported that the overall quality of their learning experience in an OER course was higher in comparison to a typical, non- OER course. Though creating OER courses and degrees is time consuming, instructors in several colleges said they had made changes in instruction as a result of working with OER materials. Though few instructors made changes to their pedagogical practices specific to OER, use of these materials allowed them to align materials better with their learning goals. Instructors already using student-centered and hands-on learning strategies said that the OER materials helped what they were already doing. Several instructors also reported that students were more engaged with OER materials compared to textbooks, because they are better tailored to good pedagogy, reading materials are more relevant and interesting, and students can be more involved in the construction of the learning experience."

"One strategy for these colleges to avoid extinction is to diversify-to avoid a precarious reliance on residential students. And one way to do that is by adding online programs to the mix. The challenge for many small colleges is that they see online courses as at odds with their very identity. After all, these institutions embrace intimacy as central to their mission, with close, mentoring relationships between faculty and students, and deep, comradely connections among students-essential ingredients of highly engaged learning. For many, online fails to meet these crucial education ambitions. Instead, they reject virtual instruction as alienated learning, with isolated faculty and students coldly facing inert computer screens-not one another."

"still think education struggles culturally, not just technologically, with some of these very "warning message" issues. In many ways, the Internet portal of the Nineties remains a comforting model to those who don't believe that educational content like syllabi and handouts should be freely and openly available on the Web. The Internet portal of the Nineties remains a comforting model to those who believe that the Web is dangerous and there are predators and trolls just waiting to steal your intellectual property or hijack your forums. The Internet portal of the Nineties remains a comforting model to those who believe that students' work should be private, shared only with the instructor-of-record. The Internet portal of the Nineties remains a comforting model to those who believe that they are in charge of a learner's online experience - that they can dictate where learners go, what they see, what they read, and at the end of the semester, they control when access to all that goes away."

This was such a great link - I have been reading through Audrey Watters blogs and finding information and links that are very important to my efforts with ePortfolios right now. Thank you!

"As Google Plus continues to grow its active user base and integrate its "social layer" across its other products and services, the number of ways to utilize this powerful social media marketing channel only continues to grow. For any user or brand that wants to take a deep dive into their circles, sharing, engagement and posting activity, this post is for you. By using these four Google Plus analysis tools, you'll be able to get valuable insights into meaningful Google Plus data which will allow you to be more strategic with how you circle, engage, share and make your time on the network more effective and efficient."

" You can throw all kinds of software and data at a problem, but if faculty aren't brought in early to the process in a collaborative way, effective change is unlikely to happen. Unfortunately, demands from outside actors like legislators and federal bureaucrats can often lead to friction between groups on campuses and thwart their ability to collaborate. I found that external mandates and the need to focus on compliance issues related to accreditation have stymied innovation."