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The open educational resources model, including textbooks, has emerged as a response to rising text prices, a need for greater access to high-quality learning materials, the proliferation of e-reader devices, and a trend in publishing toward electronic media. Many contend that educational resources should be open and that instructional models increasingly depend on open content. Open textbooks can be offered by commercial publishers or found in open repositories. Open resources can promote active learning through student interaction with the text, particularly when they contribute to authorship. Although open textbooks face questions about the accuracy and reliability of their content, they allow higher education instructors to design content for their courses on an as-needed basis, choosing from an array of books, articles, videos, audio recordings, and readings.

"This article examines a relatively recent and increasingly problematic trend in fair use jurisprudence: courts' tendency to decide whether a copyright defendant has made a fair use of the plaintiff's work based in part on whether the defendant has acted in "bad faith." Courts use the term "bad faith" to encompass a wide range of conduct weighing against a finding of fair use."

Educause's list of MOOC articles and resour

The rationale for seeking open terms of both access and use is as follows. Free access provides the literature to at least five overlapping audiences: researchers who happen upon open-access research articles while browsing the Web rather than a password-protected database; researchers at institutions that cannot afford the subscription prices for the growing literature; researchers in disciplines other than that of a journal's intended audience, who would not otherwise subscribe; patients, their families, students, and other members of the public with an interest in the information but without the means to subscribe; and researchers' computers running text-mining software to analyze the literature. In addition, granting readers full reuse rights unleashes the full range of human creativity for translating, combining, analyzing, adapting, and preserving the scientific record, whereas traditional copyright arrangements in scientific publishing increasingly inhibit scholarly communication.

This is a facilitated course that will run for 6 weeks, initially from 19 March - 23 April 2013. Webinars are held Tuesday morning (Americas)/ late afternoon (Europe, Africa). There is an optional weekly lab session on Fridays at the same time of day. To sign up, click 'Start Course' at bottom left.

In this article, I highlight current theories of learning and critically analyze connectivism within the context of its predecessors, to establish if it has anything new to offer as a learning theory or as an approach to teaching for the 21st Century

"Although not specifically designed to optimise learning, claims have been made that MOOCs are based on sound pedagogical foundations that are at the very least comparable with courses offered by universities in face-to-face mode. To validate this, we examined the literature for empirical evidence substantiating such claims. Although empirical evidence directly related to MOOCs was difficult to find, the evidence suggests that there is no reason to believe that MOOCs are any less effective a learning experience than their face-to-face counterparts. Indeed, in some aspects, they may actually improve learning outcomes."

"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. "

IN LITTLE MORE THAN A YEAR, discussion of the role of online learning in higher education has undergone a qualitative shift. With the launch of for-profit educational start-ups such as Coursera, Udacity, and the MIT and Harvard-founded nonprofit platform edX, Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have moved from obscure experiment to major initiative. MOOCs are online classes, generally composed of short lectures, that allow for open, often free enrollments (thousands can easily enroll in a single course), assessing students through periodic quizzes and discussion forums.

"Ditching Facebook has become a new, elitist form of "conspicuous non-consumption," on par with refusing television, argues New York University assistant professor Laura Portwood-Stacer in a recent article published in the Journal of New Media and Society. Once upon a time, being on Facebook meant you were hip. Now, not having a Facebook account is the status symbol -- at least to some."

I reference first the article in the Chronicle of Higher Education on the bill being proposed in the California legislature to create a "faculty-free" New University of California online (read it and scream). And yet, this should surprise no one. We are living in a plutocracy. MOOCs are becoming popular as potential money savers for universities and money makers for "education" companies. One might think these two phenomena are unrelated. They're not.

"I love being a scholar, but one thing that really depresses me about research is that so much of what scholars produce is rendered inaccessible to so many people who might find it valuable, inspiring, or thought-provoking. This is at the root of what drives my commitment to open-access. When Zizi Papacharissi asked Nancy Baym and I if we'd be willing to guest edit the Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media (JOBEM), we agreed under one condition: the issue had to be open-access (OA). Much to our surprise and delight, Taylor and Francis agreed to "test" that strange and peculiar OA phenomenon by allowing us to make this issue OA. Nancy and I decided to organize the special issue around "socially mediated publicness," both because we find that topic to be of great interest and because we felt like there was something fun about talking about publicness in truly public form. We weren't sure what the response to our call would be, but were overwhelmed with phenomenal submissions and had to reject many interesting articles. "

"I also love using Pocket and Evernote. Pocket saves all the interesting articles and blog posts that I want to read later. I could not survive without it. Evernote helps me remember notes and acts as my on-the-go text editor (plus it saves all the good restaurants I have tried, too). I also use Evernote+my Moleskine as my day organizer. Every day I create a grid and categorize my to-do's as either quick or long, and either high or low priority. Then I take a picture with my Evernote, have the picture always up on my screen, and use reminders to nudge me at the end of the day to reflect on my productivity. "

Many companies now search candidates' social-media accounts to get a better feel for their personalities, to see if they have creative flair, and to find out how well they communicate. Done right, your profile can work in your favor. Of 2,184 hiring managers recently surveyed by CareerBuilder, one-fifth said a candidate's online profile helped them land a position. More often, though, it backfires: 43 percent said they found information that led them not to hire a candidate, up 9 percentage points from last year. That trend means either that more job applicants are behaving badly online or that human resources is getting stricter in sniffing out problems.

I think this article raises a point that we should absolutely acknowledge. Although I don't believe I am "behaving badly" online, what if some of my viewpoints do not entirely mesh with a future employer. Are they less likely to hire me because I have critical opinions about certain policies, etc.? I think it is this issue in particular that makes people reticent to fully participate. However, this is our new reality. How to balance it?

"Some, including Groom, have gone on record as very unhappy with my appropriation of the term "edupunk" for the ebook, which surprised me because they didn't object to the Fast Company article or to the book. Maybe that's the difference between a title and a subtitle, or maybe it's because Gates is too closely aligned in people's minds with Microsoft and all that is creepy and corporate on the Internet. They're entitled to their opinion."

"Social networking entails "following" people and exchanging personal information about one's family, work, life, travel and so on. And pictures of your cat. When Google launched Google+ in 2011, social networking was on the rise. Social media, on the other hand, is when you share memes, articles, photos and videos taken by someone else-pictures of someone else's cat-and other content that is not about your own life."

"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."

"Jeannette M. Wing actually phrases it, "computational thinking" in her article on the subject, and writes that "Computational thinking is a fundamental skill for everyone, not just for computer scientists. To reading, writing, and arithmetic, we should add computational thinking to every child's analytical ability.""

"Order and assign textbooks, articles, or your PDFs in Perusall. Students annotate the readings and asynchronously respond to each other's comments and questions about the readings in context. With novel data analytics, Perusall automatically generates optimal student groupings and social interactions, grades students' engagement to ensure they are prepared for class, and nudges those who need help to keep everyone on track. "

"In a fascinating article in Scientific American, teachers Jody Passanisi and Shara Peters make the case that, while kids today have a seemingly innate facility with technology, they are quick to become impatient and discouraged when faced with complex tasks involving digital tools"

Great quote: "Just because a child jumps at the opportunity to program a TV to record his or her favorite shows does not mean that he or she will approach a classroom learning tool with the same zeal."