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"By now, even the most laggard of organizations understands that digital fluency is a pillar of any strategy seeking to engage audiences, cultivate constituent relations, and secure donors.  More than a "next practice," digital engagement is essential to the relevance and solvency of the contemporary nonprofit organization - simply keeping the doors open requires investments of time, talent, and treasure on digital platforms. But social media is playing an important role in how people relate to and understand nonprofit organizations beyond simply their ability to converse on Twitter or post pretty pictures on Facebook.  In our progressively crowd-sourced, collectively intelligent, peer reviewed world that values trusted endorsements foremost among reputation-enhancing communication channels, social media is emerging as one of the most important tools in the fundraising toolbox."

The promises of Open Educational Resources (OER) include increased access to education, reduced costs for education, enhanced collaboration, and efficient course design. Whilst these are all certainly possible, there are strong practical considerations to Open Educational Practice (OEP). This session will consider the role of OEP in teaching and learning at USQ, explore the challenges of engaging with openness, and offer some practical starting points.

"Within the overall framework of the organization's strategy on OA, the recent launch of OA curricula for Researchers and Library Schools by UNESCO highlights its efforts for enhancing capacities to deal with Open Access issues. The carefully designed and developed sets of OA curricula for researchers and library and information professionals are based on two needs assessment surveys, and several rounds of face-to-face and online consultations with relevant stakeholders."

"Although there have been many claims that technology might enhance university teaching, there are wide variations in how technology is actually used by lecturers. This paper presents a survey of 795 university lecturers' perceptions of the use of technology in their teaching, showing how their responses were patterned by institutional and subject differences. There were positive attitudes towards technology across institutions and subjects but also large variations between different technologies. Two groups of technology were identified-"core" technologies, such as Powerpoint, that were used frequently, even when lecturers felt that they were not having a positive impact on learning, and "marginal" technologies, such as blogs, that were used much less frequently and only where they fitted the pedagogic approach or context. Rather than there being "leading" universities that were the highest users of all technologies, institutions tended to be heavier users of some technologies than others. Similarly, subjects could be associated with particular technologies rather than being consistent users of technology in general. The study suggests that university technology policy should reflect different disciplines and contexts rather than "one size fits all" directives."

"one study found that regular online testing enhanced student learning (Angus & Watson, 2009). Another study found no differences in student performance between online and face-to-face testing (Karkee, Kim, & Fatica, 2010). There's really no right answer to be found in the research literature. All of us need to make our own plans about how and when to measure student learning. Hopefully, these plans are based in sound educational principles and result in effective assessment practices. Read on to learn more about some of the issues related to online testing."

"FlexCourse, a teaching and learning platform offering self-paced online degree programs, comes from a combination of acclaimed technological assets and programs of UniversityNow, which were acquired by NUS, and enhancements and customization by NUS developers; NUS affiliate John F. Kennedy University is the first to integrate FlexCourse, with classes starting in September"

"The Google Glove is filled choke full with electronics. These include cameras on the fingertips, compass, gyroscopes, accelerometers and other motion detectors on the fingers, CPU, a bunch of RAM and storage in the palm of your hand, and (wireless) communication chips on the back. Maybe even a small battery band around your wrist."

"A group of students at the Royal College of Art in London have created two masks that can give you superhuman sight and hearing. The first prototype covers the wearer's ears, mouth and nose and uses a directional microphone to give him the ability to hear an isolated sound in a noisy environment. For example, you could target a person in a crowd and clearly hear his words without the surrounding noise."

"ProQuest SIPX, provider of the most complete digital course materials solutions in higher education, has signed a three-year deal with Arizona State University (ASU), the largest public university in the U.S. with over 90,000 students. ASU will integrate the SIPX Central service-a scalable, self-service configuration that enables anyone at the school to set up course readings-into the campus' Blackboard learning management system. The technology is unique, sophisticated, yet user-friendly and helps get more library resources and open access content into the hands of instructors. The service will reduce the cost of course materials for students and simplify sharing of the course readings between instructors and students."