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

World's largest university opens almost ALL its materials!

"As little as we know about the future for which we are preparing our students, it is clear that it will be a place that is governed by information. Accessing, processing, building with, and communicating that information is how we will all make our livings."

"This web site synthesises outputs from the JISC Learner Experiences of e-Learning programme. The programme spanned two phases over four years from 2005-2009. It comprised nine research projects in total (two in phase 1 and seven in phase two), employed mixed method approaches, and had the sustained involvement of over 200 learners and more than 3000 survey respondents. Five national workshops were run disseminating the methods and findings. The programme focussed on the learner voice. Learners allowed us into their worlds and showed us what it is like to study in a technology-rich age. The projects produced a huge collection of rich, detailed data that sheds light on what learners expect from the use of technology in post-compulsory education and the choices they make about using technology to support their study."

"The Higher Education Academy published the book Transforming Higher Education Through Technology Enhanced Learning in December 2009. Although the book has its genesis in the e-learning Benchmarking & Pathfinder Programme led by the Higher Education Academy from 2005-2008 readers will find that the book contains a thought-provoking edited collection which offers far more than a straightforward account of outcomes of one national programme; you will find that it is both broad in scope and reflective in tone"

"This report is based on evidence from a small-scale survey carried out between April and July 2009 in 35 maintained schools in England. It evaluates the extent to which the schools taught pupils to adopt safe and responsible practices in using new technologies, and how they achieved this. It also assesses the extent and quality of the training the schools provided for their staff."

Great little app that lets you grap the license and other details from a flickr image.  Intended to be used when you link to an image and ensure you attribute it correctly. "With ImageCodr.org, there is no need to do all this manually, you simply enter in the URL of the picture page (as seen in your browser) you are interested in and ImageCodr.org will generate the ready to use HTML code. It will also display a brief and easy license summary, so you don't get in legal trouble because you missed something."

"It was great to see New Zealand start-up Swiftpoint honoured at the CES show here in Vegas for the novel design of its pint-sized finger-controlled computer mouse."

graph.tk is an online and open-source graphing utillity. It runs in any modern browser that supports the canvas element. It plots functions, and displays them with style.

More stuff for the Analytics box. If this can grab authenticated data then return it through a dashboard display, it could give students a wide view of what they are doing - Moodle, library, facebook contacts with classmates etc.

"...what is now an opportunity is also becoming an urgency: if students don't need to come to class to get informational content delivery, if they can get it easily on their own, we need to transform how we use our classroom time such that it continues to be relevant and valuable."

"The price of college is going to fall, and the Internet is going to cause that fall. The rest of it is really difficult to figure out."

A new MOOC from Scott Lo in Japan. Details to come but from the title - Sock Puppetry - it seems we could be looking at the illusion that art creates with a bit of digital literacy on the side. Then again, it could just be an elaborate ruse!

Blogging can be quite a process. First you may have to do some research, then put your thoughts together, and of course add any necessary screenshots and images. Let's not forget the optimization part (SEO, keywords, etc) and sharing your content on the Web so that others will read it and hopefully share it. With all of these steps involved, blogging can be quite time-consuming and many bloggers get burnt out rather quickly doing these things on a daily basis.

"'Qualification inflation' is how governments avoid having to do anything about underemployment, and it generates a massive bureaucracy that has its own interests in perpetuating the system."

Is that site up or down? Or is it just me that can'y access it? Quick checker.

"LectureTools is not lecture capture. It is a tool designed to help student engagement during your lecture. It offers a variety of ways for profs to build in interactive elements into the lecture..."

Dave Winer wrote a timely piece this morning about how Facebook is scaring him since the new API allows applications to post status items to your Facebook timeline without a users intervention. It is an extension of Facebook Instant and they call it frictionless sharing.

University refits student halls with Wifi and iPads for all. The aim "...to teach students 'IT IQ'-the ability to understand when a piece of technology is useful and when it isn't."

What are the fees like?

"Our Space is a set of curricular materials designed to encourage high school students to reflect on the ethical dimensions of their participation in new media environments. Through role-playing activities and reflective exercises, students are asked to consider the ethical responsibilities of other people, and whether and how they behave ethically themselves online. These issues are raised in relation to five core themes that are highly relevant online: identity, privacy, authorship and ownership, credibility, and participation. For more information, download the Introduction to Our Space [pdf], FAQ [pdf], and Road Map [pdf]. All curricular units and lessons are free and available for download below. The full casebook [pdf - 133MB] can be downloaded using the link at the bottom of the page." Critiqued by @downes for not addressing the issue properly "This is "a set of curricular materials designed to encourage high school students to reflect on the ethical dimensions of their participation in new media environments." The content divides into five major subject areas: participation, identity, privacy, credibility, and authorship and ownership. I'm not sure these are the top five things I would list when thinking of ethical dimensions of new media environments. While it's useful that there is a section on flamers, lurkers and mentors I think there should be something about hate, racism and bulling. And while a section on credibility is a good idea, it should be based on the principles of reason and inference, not outrageously bad definitions like this: "Networking-the ability to search for, synthesize, and disseminate information." And this: "Collective intelligence-evidence that participants in knowledge communities pool knowledge and compare notes with others toward a common goal." Wow, those are just wrong. Maybe I need to review this and criticize it more closely."