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Recordings of the sessions presented during the Learning Futures Festival, held 13-15 April 2011, are now available to view online. Among them are presentations by delegates from ICDE member institutions, Athabasca University, The Open University, Unisa, University of Leicester and the University of Southern Queensland.

This week the OCW Consortium is holding its annual meeting, celebrating 10 years of opencourseware. Are universities about credentials or research? Are they a repository of knowledge? It's important, O'Reilly argued, if you want to be innovative "to think about what job you do for your customers (for your students) and not just think about how you do that job today but why you do it."

Michael Wesch's latest "...'video collage' about student life created by students themselves and presented using the wonders of HTML5, allowing us to 'cite' books and videos that are being presented in the remix as they are being shown."

Using blogs as eportfolios. This is increasingly being argued as being a more authentic space than software specific eportfolios such as Mahara, Pebblepad, etc..

"Connexions is a dynamic digital educational ecosystem consisting of an educational content repository and a content management system optimized for the delivery of educational content. Connexions is one of the most popular open education sites in the world. Its more than 17,000 learning objects or modules in its repository and over 1000 collections (textbooks, journal articles, etc.) are used by over 2 million people per month. Its content services the educational needs of learners of all ages, in nearly every discipline, from math and science to history and English to psychology and sociology. Connexions delivers content for free over the Internet for schools, educators, students, and parents to access 24/7/365. Materials are easily downloadable to almost any mobile device for use anywhere, anytime. Schools can also order low cost hard copy sets of the materials (textbooks)."

Education, and in particular higher education, has seen rapid change as learning institutions have had to adapt to the opportunities provided by the Internet to move more of their teaching online1 and to become more flexible in how they operate. It might be tempting to think that such a period of change would lead to a time of consolidation and agreement about approaches and models of operation that suit the 21st century. New technologies continue to appear,2 however, and the changes in attitude indicated by the integration of online activities and social approaches within our lives are accelerating rather than slowing down. How should institutions react to these changes? One part of the answer seems to be to embrace some of the philosophy of the Internet3 and reevaluate how to approach the relationship between those providing education and those seeking to learn. Routes to self-improvement that have no financial links between those providing resources and those using them are becoming more common,4 and the motivation for engaging with formal education as a way to gain recognition of learning is starting to seem less clear.5 What is becoming clear across all business sectors is that maintaining a closed approach leads to missing out on ways to connect with people and locks organizations into less innovative approaches.6 Higher education needs to prepare itself to exist in a more open future, either by accepting that current modes of operation will increasingly provide only one version of education or by embracing openness and the implications for change entailed. In this article we look at what happens when a more open approach to learning is adopted at an institutional level. There has been a gradual increase in universities opening up the content that they provide to their learners. Drawing on the model of open-source software, where explicit permission to freely use and modify code has developed a software industry that rivals commercial approaches, a proposed

Keynote presentation delivered to Instituto Cervantes, Providence, Rhode Island.Social network technologies are reforming the way we communicate with each other inside and outside our learning environments. In this presentation, Stephen Downes offers an inside look at these technologies, how they work, what they can do, and where they will likely lead the future of learning online. Downes will first outline some well-known technologies such as YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, describing how they are used and outlining how they manage online communication in general. [Slides] [Audio]

An image bank where the images are dedicated to the public domain with a CC0 license. All are high quality and well worth a look.

"As part of my open textbook on Teaching in a Digital Age, I am working my way through theories of learning and methods of teaching. I will post shortly my initial draft on theories of learning and their relevance for a digital age. In this post I want to discuss the lecture and its relevance for a digital age. Comments as always are more than welcome."

Abstract Managerialism creates burdens for academics with no evidence for its benefit. Business imperatives override educational. There is needless competition between universities. Research imperatives override education. Global inequalities in educational need are ignored, universities have not kept up with the way young people gain information and initiatives to reduce the environmental impact of higher education are 'tinkering' rather than the required total re-thinking of higher education.

" the ACE Framework to guide our decision-making and professional development planning. ACE stands for Adaptability, Connection, and Equity. ACE elevates three characteristics that are clear, context-sensitive, values-driven, and mission-aligned; we can use them to plan assignment-, course-, and institution-level responses to crisis (such as COVID-19) in the areas of our university that are connected to teaching and learning."

"Funded by The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, College Open Textbooks is a collection of colleges, governmental agencies, education non-profits, and other education-related organizations that are focused on the mission of driving the awareness and advocacy for open textbooks. This includes providing training for instructors adopting open resources, peer reviews of open textbooks, and mentoring online professional networks that provide support to authors who open their resources. Through our community outreach, we have found that open textbooks should be: easy to use, get and pass around, editable so instructors can customize content, cross-platform compatible, printable, and accessible so they work with adaptive technology."

We envision communications infrastructure that is owned and operated cooperatively, by the whole of humanity, rather than by corporations and states.We are using the power of peer-to-peer technologies to create a global network which is immune to censorship and resistant to breakdown.We promote freedoms, support innovations and advocate technologies that enhance and enable digital self-determination.

The underlying principle of the University benchmark is that all modules can adopt technology to effectively benefit some aspect of the learning, teaching and assessment experience. The University benchmark for the use of technology in modules, which you can find here, is therefore designed to help academic staff to consider new or further developed uses of technology that are appropriate for the contexts within which they teach

Are universities going to end up being managed by non-academic bureaucrats?

Discussing how universities want to control knowledge rather than letting it flow freely.

How teachers are working around overprotective content filters to use Web 2.0 tools in the classroom.

"Are you smarter than a third-grader? Because the online education system used by the Fairfax County public schools apparently is not."

Tom Prebble comments that Ako Aotearoa are sponsoring a series of Taking the Lead workshops.

Bates' comments are something to take on board for us. Perhaps we need to create some briefing papers.

Professors, particularly those in the senior ranks, might have a reputation for being leery of social media. But they are no Luddites when it comes to Web 2.0 tools such as Facebook and YouTube, according to a new survey scheduled to be released today.

Professors, particularly those in the senior ranks, might have a reputation for being leery of social media. But they are no Luddites when it comes to Web 2.0 tools such as Facebook and YouTube, according to a new survey scheduled to be released today.