Group items tagged

"Do you merely link your article to Google Plus every time you write a blog post?  If so, you are missing a BIG opportunity to showcase your article. "

"There is an interesting study out in the journal PNAS: "Evaluating big deal journal bundles". The study details the disparity in negotiation skills between different US institutions when haggling with publishers about subscription pricing. For Science Magazine, John Bohannon of "journal sting" fame, wrote a news article about the study, which did not really help him gain any respect back from all that he lost with his ill-fated sting-piece. While the study itself focused on journal pricing among US-based institutions, Bohannon's news article, where one would expect a little broader perspective than in the commonly more myopic original papers, fails to mention that even the 'best' big deals are grossly overcharging the taxpayer. Here is the figure of the article, apparently provided by the PNAS authors:"

"I am ecstatic that one of my articles has been made officially free-to-access. I am excited that a publisher is willing to promote my article that challenges much of mainstream academic publishing. And I respect that a publisher already has systems in place to allow some form of openness (in the form of author manuscripts made open) beside the model that brings them money, and that moreover, they choose some articles to make them open access from their own site, at no cost to the author."

"Unpaywall is a service that indexes open access repositories, university, government and scholarly society archives, and other sources that make articles available with authorization from the rightsholders and journals -- about 47% of the articles that its users seek."

#udsnf12 article from Chronicle on MOOCS - available through the library if you can't view the whole article.

"The Open Access Button is a browser-based tool that lets users track when they are denied access to research, then search for alternative access to the article.  Each time a user encounters a paywall, he simply clicks the button in his bookmark bar, fills out an optional dialogue box, and his experience is added to a map alongside other users.  Then, the user receives a link to search for free access to the article using resources such as Google Scholar. The Open Access Button initiative hopes to create a worldwide map showing the impact of denied access to research."

"I recently published an article describing a a creative online assignment that I've been using successfully in my university courses to teach visual digital literacy. It's a very brief and practical article about the amazing student engagement achieved and some pedagogical complications encountered."

scholarly articles on weak ties and their benefits. (many of these are available through the UD library!) :-)

Great background article on big data. Provides lots of consumer examples. Sort of sobering when you see all of the ways our usage is tracked and commodified.

"As any botanist knows, a monoculture is highly susceptible to a single pathogen. A great shakeout is under way, and MOOCs are the logical outgrowth of this push for interchangeable educational delivery. Curricula, faculty, and students are overwhelmingly indistinct, and MOOCs are simply the cheapest way to combine those elements in our economically constrained times."

An article providing an important perspective to consider when promoting or arguing for the MOOC concept.

"Many people ask me how I manage my social media accounts (and others make stuff up rather than figure out what I do). Here are the gory, inside-story details. Perhaps you may find some of my methods useful to help you get the most out of social media, too. I wrote this article for my friends at Hubspot in May, this is the June 2013 update."

"Publishers should encourage adoption of gold open access by reducing individual universities' subscription charges as they pay more in article fees."

It is hard to imagine holding a university-level class today in which students do not engage with the web or social media in one form or another, whether by using Google search, bookmarking or sharing an article, taking an online survey, posting or commenting on a blog, or using e-mail or text messaging. So, what rules should we, as instructors, follow to ensure no legal or Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) issues arise?

Although faculty and students are the primary learning management system users, administrators and IT experts often select the system. This article stresses the importance of involving all stakeholders in the selection process, offers a step-by-step guide to LMS selection, and enables readers to develop a customized list of LMS features that align with their institution's instructional and learning priorities.

""we present specific approaches for adapting effective tutoring strategies and applying them to large biology lecture classes." (p. 3) Using a set of effective tutor characteristics identified by Lepper and Wolverton (a reference to their research is in the article), Wood and Tanner explore how these seven characteristics can be adapted and used in large lecture courses (and what they propose isn't applicable just in biology courses). Here are some of the suggestions offered for each tutor characteristic."

"Instead of being an unstoppable force disrupting the faculty profession, MOOCs can be an opportunity to empower faculty to explore, create, and express themselves in new ways through open and digital education. To do this requires establishing the proper institutional context, one that allows for experimentation and grassroots, faculty-led initiatives to flourish. We have argued in this article that a focus on soft infrastructure - the resources, values, and affirmations that support faculty agency in experimenting with digital learning - has helped us create this context at Stanford. Our research suggests that this approach has given faculty the opportunity and autonomy to manifest their desires to share intellectual work more broadly, experiment and take pedagogical risks, express their unique teaching philosophies in new ways, and thoughtfully engage in the MOOC phenomenon on their own terms. As a result, a great number and variety of open and digital learning approaches have flourished at our institution."

"Machine translation is leaps and bounds faster and more effective than my old dictionary method, but it still falls short in accuracy, functionality and delivery. That won't be the case for long. A decade from now, I would predict, everyone reading this article will be able to converse in dozens of foreign languages, eliminating the very concept of a language barrier."

"This article presents a framework for guiding modifications to Peer Instruction based on theory and findings from the science of learning. We analyze the Peer Instruction method with the goal of helping teachers understand why it is effective. We also consider six common modifications made by educators through the lens of retrieval-based learning and offer specific guidelines to aid in evidence-based implementation."

"More and more I am reading articles like this one Colleges worry about always-plugged-in students. In it they talk about college professors and administrators who have or are considering unplugging student's access to the internet or banning technology altogether so students will focus. These learning institutions are moving in the wrong direction! When we blame or ban the technology,  we solve our issue temporarily, but we are ignoring the root of the problem.  "

"I've posted a few times about the importance of, to borrow from Carol Dweck, "celebrating" our mistakes. You can find those posts at The Best Posts, Articles & Videos About Learning From Mistakes & Failures."