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"The deadline for the demise of iGoogle, Google's start page, is getting closer (read how to export your igoogle feeds). While nothing will completely replace iGoogle, there are some alternatives out there. Before we get to the alternative sites we need to define what a Start Page is. For this article a start page is a website that enables you to have various websites, news feeds, and widgets in one place. Most start pages have links to news, popular email services, weather, videos, calendars, To Do lists, maps, sticky notes, TV listings and access to all your social media such as Facebook. "

Find open source software alternatives to well-known commercial software Our mission is to provide easy access to high quality open source alternatives to well-known commercial products. And remember that open source software is also a freeware alternative.

In order to fulfill the task of analyzing and presenting their Twitter activity, students would need to use an alternative to Storify. Unfortunately, I did not have a backup plan (i.e. a selection of other curation tools for them to use.) So we took this list of 40 curation tools, divided it up among the students in the class (each student tackled 2 of the items on the list), and quickly evaluated each one to see if it would fit our needs. If you'd like to take a look at the results of this evaluation, you can view the GoogleDocs spreadsheet that resulted from my students' work.

"ACE announced today that 25 colleges and universities are joining an alternative credit consortium as part of an innovative initiative to create a more flexible pathway toward a college degree for millions of nontraditional learners. The 25 institutions serving in this pilot project have agreed to accept all or most of the transfer credit sought by students who successfully complete courses that are part of a selected pool of about 100 low-cost or no-cost lower division general education online courses. These institutions also will help identify the sources, criteria and quality of the courses."

"Google announced today that it'll be closing Google Reader's doors on July 1st of this year, meaning you'll need to find a new way to get your news fix. Here's how to export all your feeds and put them into a new reader."

The course management system (CMS) reinforces the status quo and hinders substantial teaching and learning innovation in higher education. It does so by imposing artificial time limits on learner access to course content and other learners, privileging the role of the instructor at the expense of the learner, and limiting the power of the network effect in the learning process. The open learning network (OLN)-a hybrid of the CMS and the personal learning environment (PLE)-is proposed as an alternative learning technology environment with the potential to leverage the affordances of the Web to dramatically improve learning.

" The reason of interest was his focus on the actual usability of a broad range of alternative social media tools that people with disabilities need to use in order to actually access social media."

Colleges following what the company calls the Textbook Zero model would offer a section using open-education alternatives for every required course and elective needed to earn the degree. Lumen is now testing the model with an unnamed community college on the East Coast, and is also looking for colleges interested in applying the model to general-studies and computer-science degrees.

The prices of traditional textbooks continue to increase, further driving up the cost of Higher Education. CTE's goal is to help save OU students money while delivering highly engaging and pedagogically sound course materials. There are a number of options to supplement or replace high cost textbooks such as free online resources, lower-cost digital books and course packets and downloadable open-access textbooks.

University professors need to accept the fact that like most fields, education is constantly evolving due to technological advancements. The traditional classroom is changing, but the refusal of many tenured professors to change with it hinders the efficiency of education to improve. The university not only needs to provide incentives for professors to utilize these online resources, but also mandate that they at least be offered. In the next few years, it is unavoidable that some people will prefer and continue to use traditional methods of education. Yet, at the bare minimum, cheaper alternatives to over-priced textbooks and online resources need to be offered and available to university students.

And the iPad's future dominance is far from certain. "The iPad is a powerful pedagogical tool, but we are seeing the market take its course. Other companies are now providing competitive alternatives at lower price points," says Brian Lewis, CEO of the International Society for Technology in Education.

WCC will offer two classes next semester with readings available online for free instead of textbooks with high price tags. The courses - one reading course and one math course - typically have high enrollment and high textbook costs. The offerings are part of the Kaleidoscope Project, a grant-based initiative funded by Next Generation Learning Challenges.

"The relatively low completion rates of learners have been a central critique as MOOCs grow in popularity. This focus on completion rates, however, implies a monolithic view of disengagement that fails to acknowledge alternative forms of participation in MOOCs. Identifying subpopulations of learners based on their longitudinal engagement with the course allows MOOC designers to target interventions and develop adaptive course features. We develop a simple, scalable, and informative classification method that identifies four prototypical engagement trajectories: Completing learners, who complete the majority of the assessments offered in the class; Auditing learners, who do assessments infrequently (if at all) and engage instead by watching video lectures; Disengaging learners, who do assessments at the beginning of the course but then have a marked decrease in engagement, generally in the first third of the class; and Sampling learners, who enter and exit the course quickly, watching a minimal number of videos at some point during the course."

This alternate version of the Marketing in the Round presentation was given on September 30 on Sunday morning to Podcamp East attendees. Marketing in the Round was co-authored by Gini Dietrich (spinsucks.com) and Geoff Livingston (geofflivingston.com). You can learn more about the book on integrated marketing communications at marketingintheround.com.

"You could browse events and find interesting events that connections in your network were organizing or attending. You could also post upcoming events and promote them through your network and the LinkedIn Events page. It worked great and lots of people used it. Unfortunately, LinkedIn didn't talk much about it and hid it in their navigation bar so there were a lot of people who didn't even know it existed."

"We met with the most obvious first: the textbook managers at the campus bookstore, where only 1% of book sales were in digital form. We received a demonstration of the digital platform and are now doing informal testing. This led to the creation of a Digital Course Materials page, to share the university's materials ordering policy, information about the digital platform, and textbook alternatives."

"Being consumed in constant judging leaves us with the feeling of being mediocre or, alternately, with narcissistic pride. Both antithetical perceptions absorb us in the vicious cycle of comparison with friends, family and unknown others. What's most important -- which I wish I had realised in my teens -- is to learn to be comfortable in our own skin."

Overwhelmingly, students are open to adopting digital alternatives to traditional resources because they provide value on price, content, and portability. These are all areas where traditional textbook publishers have stopped innovating and fallen flat. Our findings suggest that students have already adapted to cost and access barriers with behaviors not supported by the traditional textbook market. We are at a new precipice in education, one where digital innovation will define the way our students work, learn, and interact - all in a post-textbook world.

""Feminism and Technology" is trying to take a few MOOC elements, but then to change them in ways consistent with feminist pedagogy to create a distributed open collaborative course or DOCC (pronounced "dock"). The DOCC aims to challenge MOOC thinking about the role of the instructor, about the role of money, about hierarchy, about the value of "massive," and many other things. The first DOCC will be offered for credit at 17 colleges this coming semester, as well in a more MOOC-style approach in which videos and materials are available online for anyone."