"Ivory Tower takes a look at universities and their transformation from providers of education to business ventures that strive to be the biggest and the best providers of the "college experience". The competition among these institutions of higher learning has had an adverse effect on those they are suppose to serve. From less rigorous curriculums to higher tuition prices, the universities have changed the way Americans think of educations. Students are now consumers and university presidents are CEOs overseeing multiplexes of the college experience. In order to pay for that experience, students are taking out an average of about $30,000 in student loans. The overall student debt in the US has now surpassed $1tn."

"Do you want to reach more people on Google+? Are you using Google+ hashtags? Google+ hashtags make it easier for people to discover your content, even if they're outside your circles. That added visibility gives you greater overall reach. In this article you'll discover how to find hashtags to reach the right people on Google+."

Fully half of the 2012 graduates from high-income families borrowed money for college, double the share that borrowed in 1992-93.

"I went out there and asked some experts: What is the WORST blogging advice you have ever heard or read? And more importantly WHY? Because there is a lot of common wisdom out there that is:  just not true. or does not work how you would expect or not for everyone. So without further ado, here are the experts telling you how it really is!"

"With ownCloud you can sync & share your files, calendar, contacts and more. Access your data from all your devices, on an open platform you can extend and modify."

"Smart machines are an emerging "super class" of technologies that perform a wide variety of work, both the physical and the intellectual kind, said Sondergaard. Machines, for instance, have been grading multiple choice for years, but now they are grading essays and unstructured text. This cognitive capability in software will extend to other areas, including financial analysis, medical diagnostics and data analytic jobs of all sorts, says Gartner."

"The chart below shows the number of deleted posts every day since April among a sample of between 50,000 and 60,000 users in mainland China. On September 28th, the most tumultuous day of the protests, deletions hit a record: 15 of every 1,000 posts, more than five times normal levels. Mentions of "Hong Kong police" and any posts with a #HongKong hashtag fell afoul of the censors. The data were compiled by Weiboscope, a censorship-monitoring programme at the University of Hong Kong. FreeWeibo, a website developed by GreatFire.org, another Chinese censorship watchdog, captured many of the deleted posts. Most were written by ordinary users: people with a few thousand followers whose non-censored messages revealed otherwise unexceptional lives, of dinners with family and frustrations with traffic jams."

"We define digital literacies as the capabilities which fit someone for living, learning and working in a digital society. To help with thinking about this, we have outlined seven elements of digital literacy for consideration, which can be seen in the following diagram."

"Publish or perish" is an old saw that, like so many things in higher education, has been updated to reflect modern wisdom. The revised version of the phrase offers advice not to professors but to colleges: "Partner or perish."

But Facebook is the network Ello wants to kill. Its manifesto is straightforward: "You are not a product." Ello is ad-free and doesn't believe in tracking your activity to sell to advertisers. But that isn't why Ello is popular. The network is invite-only, which is driving demand. People who have signed up are inviting their friends en masse to make the site worth using.

"A service of the USF Tampa Library, the Textbook Affordability Project (TAP) helps counter the rising cost of an education by connecting students and faculty with alternatives to full-price textbooks."

"LeBlanc and College for America are calling it a "learning relationship management system," a composite term to describe a learning management system build on top of Salesforce, the popular customer relationship management software. LeBlanc said the system aims to strike a balance between "lots of things that CIOs love" -- such as software as a service and cloud hosting -- with "what educators love.""

The rising costs of postsecondary education present challenges to maintaining college affordability. Textbooks are an important factor students need to consider when calculating the overall cost of attending college. In an effort to ensure that faculty and students have sufficient information about textbooks, Congress included requirements in HEOA concerning publisher and school disclosures, as well as publisher provision of individual course materials. HEOA directed GAO to examine the implementation of the new textbook provisions.

""You may not be aware, but this can actually have a massive effect on the performance of the [student] cohort," he said. "If the wrong students set up [the most popular] group, and that's the one everyone goes on, the amount of control they have…is massive." He continued: "If the group is set up by students so that only they can post and nobody else, they can censor discussions."

"Tell your story any way you'd like. Known is a simple platform for publishing words, pictures, podcasts and more to a site that you control. Choose to share it on networks like Twitter and Facebook, or the software you already use."

"With the report, Educause has launched the Next Generation Digital Learning Environments Initiative, a Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation-supported effort to examine why colleges and universities are using "antiquated" technology -- and how to replace it. The average institution's learning management system, according to Educause's data, is eight years old."

"Video games are playing an increasing role in school curricula as teachers seek to deliver core lessons such as math and reading-not to mention new skills such as computer programming-in a format that holds their students' interests. Some herald this gamification of education as the way of the future and a tool that allows students to take a more active role in learning as they develop the technology skills they need to succeed throughout their academic and professional careers."

"What do you want for your graduates (whether they leave you in 5th, 8th or 12th grade)?"

"Moving beyond improving career prospects, the conversation then turned repeatedly to the idea that literacy means more than using digital technology as a means of consuming things other people make. Digital literacy, Smith said, also is about "how to make it do what you want." Or as Geshner put it: "Are you an iPad or are you a laptop? An iPad is designed for consumption." Literacy, as he described it, means moving beyond a passive relationship with technology. "When you get down to coding, you're creating your own tools.""