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"Many institutions have invested substantial resources in diverse initiatives to deliver distance learning and/or enhance campus-based learning with online resources. To these institutional efforts, faculty and students are now adding online tools and resources from beyond the campus. Higher education institutions are confronting the need to connect these various efforts to create more powerful and integrated learning experiences for all of their students. In this interview, Brian Hughes, Director of Social Media at the Teacher's College at Columbia University, discusses the issues surrounding social media integration."

"NROC's Connected PD project launched in March 2011 in response to a collective Aha! among many of us at the time: educators need to embody connected learning in order to support students today. The NROC Network's uniquely diverse group of K20+ educators share a commitment to integrate high-quality, digital open educational resources into their curricula."

"We should be justifiably proud of the remarkable and enviable triumphs of American higher education. Instead, we find most recent conversations about higher education echoing around this one tiny (and so far trivial) aspect of the complex and diverse ecosystem of higher education. This focus on technological platforms at the expense of actual threats, challenges, and successes robs us of the ability to have sober, informed debates about the proper level and style of investment in higher education. So I suggest we let MOOCs grow and do their best work, learn from successes and mistakes, and stop assuming that they are the simple answer to anything meaningful and profound in the production and distribution of knowledge. The world is just not that simple."

"Held April 11-12, 2013, The Saylor Foundation's invitation-only Digital Education Conference (#DigEdCon) 2013 brought together a range of stakeholders in funding, philanthropy, technology, academia, and open education. These diverse friends of digital education convened over one of education's largest looming issues: how innovators must collaborate-and cooperate-to provide the highest quality education to all."

"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."

A person's PLN is an organizational system that absorbs multitudinous sources to aggregate content to aid facility and expedience. Yet, considering the PLN as a container for diverse information modules makes me think of the compartmentalization requisite for the human brain to process new learning. Might this be why PLNs have proven themselves to be so useful and seemingly congruent with our learning styles?

"Responding to calls for additional resources to support postsecondary instructors, many vendors and organizations now offer online educational development resources. The ultimate goal is to improve instruction and student learning, but to get there, higher education institutions must examine and evaluate these tools, as well as consider the specific needs of diverse campus stakeholders. After research and discussion, the Professional and Organizational Development Network developed eight principles to guide institutions as they explore and select online educational development resources for their campus communities."

"This paper captures the evolution of the Mozilla Web Literacy Map to reach and meet the growing number of diverse audiences using the web. The paper represents the thinking, research findings, and next iteration of the Web Literacy Map that embraces 21st Century Skills (21C Skills) as key to leadership development."

"The Global Education Conference is a collaborative, inclusive, world-wide community initiative involving students, educators, and organizations at all levels. It is designed to significantly increase opportunities for connecting classrooms while supporting cultural awareness and recognition of diversity and educational access for all. Last year's conference featured 300 general sessions and 20 keynote addresses from all over the world with over 13,000 participant logins. "

"It freely admits the beautiful complexity of the human experience, and thus, by proximity, the sheer craziness of the learning process. This idea, not so much a learning theory as it is a clever and accurate metaphor, describes learning as having no beginning nor an end. It posits that learners have needs so diverse that the "teacher" is essentially off the hook in meeting every need for every student, no matter how noble that sounds."

"Where's Sakai headed?   Toward interoperability without sacrificing customizations, flexibility, diverse feature set, peer-based innovation and lower costs. Sakai 10 is about to be released. This release celebrates ten years of Sakai providing flexibility, control and cost savings.  Sakai 10 is the first of a series of releases that will respond to the needs of higher ed stakeholders everywhere."

"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 enable learning environments of greater quality, scale, and power, with continuous and instantaneous digital connections to information, services, and communities, the learning management system of today must be reimagined. New systems are needed that capitalize on the transformative possibilities of technology to personalize instruction and integrate the diverse resources that support learners."

"Today we are launching a challenge, seeking the best ideas worldwide for how to align our postsecondary educational ecosystem to the future of work and life. We are looking for bold ideas that reimagine how we learn across our lifetimes, ideas that expand opportunity for all members of our society and foster equity. We hope to uncover ideas and seed the development of tools that will ensure that all learners, especially low-income students, can draw on a diverse array of educational opportunities that provide them the skills they need to find the opportunities to work and live meaningful and economically stable lives."

"The following are great resources for educators interested in learning more about what privilege is and how to begin working to overcome it."

What if learning to code weren't actually the most important thing? It turns out that rather than increasing the number of kids who can crank out thousands of lines of JavaScript, we first need to boost the number who understand what code can do. As the cities that have hosted Code for America teams will tell you, the greatest contribution the young programmers bring isn't the software they write. It's the way they think. It's a principle called "computational thinking," and knowing all of the Java syntax in the world won't help if you can't think of good ways to apply it.

"For all these reasons, I've concluded that it would be sound pedagogy for me to give my students notice about some of the challenging material we'll be covering in class - material relating to racial and sexual oppression, for instance, and to ethnic and religious conflict - as well as some information about their rights and responsibilities in responding to it. Starting with the summer semester, as a result, I'll be discussing these issues during the first class meeting and including a notice about them in the syllabus."