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The Oculus Rift is a next-generation virtual reality headset designed for immersive gaming.

"Peak higher ed means we've reached the maximum size that colleges and universities can support.  What we see now, or saw in 2012, is as big as it gets.  After two generations of growth, American higher education has reached its upper bound."

"We want graduates who can generate content, of course, but they also need some technical skills. And most of the time we can only hire one person. Do you have anyone like that?" "We want liberal-arts graduates who are not digitally challenged," one museum director said."

""The emergence of 'advocacy philanthropy' has resulted in the unabashed use of foundation strategies to influence government action, policy, and legislation," the Claremont researchers concluded. That's a departure, they wrote, "from the established norms in higher education philanthropy, norms that generally created a distance between foundation activity and politics.""

"Virtual worlds promise to deliver the best aspects of both real-world classrooms and online distance learning into a single platform. With tools that provide avatars that represent the educators and the students, voice and video capabilities, powerpoint and other collaborative whiteboard technologies and group and private messaging chat, educators are finding that the newest generation of virtual worlds can simplify the lecture and presentation process, allow students to ask/answers questions to their teacher or each other (without interrupting the lecture), socialize and learn in a very streamlined manner. All of this is done with the convenience and cost efficiency of distance learning."

"The lack of teacher training in education schools has also been borne out recently by a new report by the National Council on Teacher Quality, entitled "Training Our Future Teachers." The question the group asked was a simple one: Do education schools teach classroom management? The answer was: not very much. The group examined 122 teacher-preparation programs and found that while most programs could say they had classroom management as part of their curriculum, classroom management strategies rarely received "the connected and concentrated focus they deserve." What's more, "instruction is generally divorced from practice (and vice versa) in most programs, with little evidence that what gets taught gets practiced." Education schools, says Kate Walsh, who leads the group, "don't see their job as training teachers. They see their job as creating professional identity.""

"An artist and comedian has been told by the publisher Penguin that her new satirical art book breaches its copyright, and if she continues to sell copies it could use the courts to seize the books and have them pulped. Miriam Elia, who has her own comedy series, A Series Of Psychotic Episodes, on BBC Radio 4 and has had a number of short segments on Channel 4, had produced a spoof version of the Ladybird books from the 60s. Generations of British children fondly remember these works, which famously portrayed the daily lives of Mummy, Peter and Jane as an introduction to reading and writing for young children."

"The age of knowing is slowing giving way to an age of data navigation, and what students need help with should be adjusted accordingly-even if in ways other than the ideas below."

"With the Illum, Lytro is targeting a more specialized market. In addition to the 8X (30 - 250mm) zoom lens, it has a constant f/2.0 aperture, 1/4000 shutter, and a four-inch backside touchscreen display. According to the company, the new sensor can capture 40 million light rays (Lytro doesn't list megapixels) to the original's 11 million. Its desktop processing software works with traditional products, like Adobe's Photoshop and Lightroom. Photographers can use the camera's software to refocus pictures after the fact, generate 3-D images, adjust the depth of field, and create tilt shifts. It will be available in July for $1,500."

"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."

""The biggest elephant in the room is that a lot of the systems that are used in higher ed are very course-centric in nature," Kroner said. "What we see is that probably is the biggest limiting factor of not just current-gen ed-tech products, but also the administrative systems that support them.""

"Early on, the most common campus apps were maps and bus routes, says Kyle Bowen, director of informatics at Purdue U. "Now the apps have gone beyond general information. They can actually engage students as part of the teaching-and-learning process.""

"We contend that the real issue - and the one that largely goes unaddressed - is that the majority of people who teach online are given virtually no assistance in learning how to teach online. Professional development for these instructors is limited to lunch 'n' learns, basic learning platform support, and other technology-related resources, but generally fails to expose instructors to the best techniques for online instruction."

"We have released over a million images onto Flickr Commons for anyone to use, remix and repurpose. These images were taken from the pages of 17th, 18th and 19th century books digitised by Microsoft who then generously gifted the scanned images to us, allowing us to release them back into the Public Domain."

"The Federal Government currently invests billions of taxpayer dollars each year in programs that include the creation of educational, training, and instructional materials through grants, contracts, and other cooperative agreements. This investment produces educational resources ranging from innovative curricular resources to workforce training materials to English language learning tools. While these materials are created for the public good, they are generally not open to the members of the public who paid for them. At a time when educational opportunity, workforce development and access to knowledge are critical to America's future, these valuable publicly-funded resources should be openly available to students, teachers, businesses, workers and the public to use in new and innovative ways."

"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. "

"As Victor begins to lose he gets sarcastic and angry but otherwise he just makes conversation - commenting on words he puts down and generally chattering away while you play. Like the fitness robot, Autom, the designers made Victor so that he would be easily to engage with. By simulating human interaction, you get a unique experience that can make people feel a little better. Plus it's a trash-talking Scrabble-bot. Are we living in the future or what?"

"How can critical pedagogy help to examine, dismantle, or rebuild the structures, hierarchies, institutions, and technologies of education? And how can we gather together generously to bring critical digital pedagogy more fully into the conversation about the changing landscape of education?"

"So here are seven real signs of surrender in higher ed generally "

"ACE announced today that 25 colleges and universities are joining an alternative credit consortium as part of an innovative initiative to create a more flexible pathway toward a college degree for millions of nontraditional learners. The 25 institutions serving in this pilot project have agreed to accept all or most of the transfer credit sought by students who successfully complete courses that are part of a selected pool of about 100 low-cost or no-cost lower division general education online courses. These institutions also will help identify the sources, criteria and quality of the courses."