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"Back in March I served on a panel along with Liz Gross, Ed Cabellon, and Greg Heiberger at the #sxswEDU conference. Here are some of the highlights: Greg and I talk about our latest research on using Twitter to support students throughout their first year of college. I summarize my recent research on using Facebook in education. Greg explores the future of higher education and how new technologies can be used to effectively improve student success. Liz discusses how to use Facebook to market your institution and programs. Ed explains how to frame productive social media use to administrators. I get snarky about EdTech startups and how they don't communicate with educators."

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. 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 large interactive display surfaces (LIDS) concept started with the creation of the "Whiteboard Paradigm". There were many available technologies that could be used as LIDS, however, most were prohibitively expensive, and many still did not support appropriate interaction styles. The goal of the LIDS research project has been to develop inexpensive technologies to use as displays, and investigate the interaction issues generated by their use. Furthermore work has gone into investigating potential uses for such technologies, and creating the software to support these uses.

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

This resource aims to help those making decisions about their use of freely available 'Web 2.0' interactive and collaborate e-learning tools. Each product, site or service described in these pages can be searched or browsed by a specific Activity or the usability/accessibility checks that it passed. The applications have short descriptions and comments regarding their ease of use and functionality. If you are involved in teaching and learning and are wanting to make more use of Web 2.0 services in your e-learning activities, or if you are interested in how Web 2.0 can supplement your existing methods, this section may be useful to you.

"In the context of a growing emphasis on eLearning, most commonly facilitated by enterprise-scale Learning Management System and a range of institutionally managed and supported communication and collaboration software tools, and in an environment of increasing emphasis on intellectual property rights management and quality assurance, how do universities (and other educational institutions) respond to the use of free, open-access tools in common use by their students? What are the potential educational uses of such tools? What are the current practices of use of these tools within educational institutions? What are the issues, risks and hidden costs? What are the advantages and benefits?"

"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."

"As learning technologies are now integral to most higher education student learning experiences, universities need to make strategic choices about what technologies to adopt and how to best support and develop the use of these technologies, particularly in a climate of limited resources. Information from students is therefore a valuable contribution when determining institutional goals, building infrastructure and improving the quality of student learning. This paper draws on a survey of student experiences and expectations of technology across three Australian universities. Analysis of text responses from 7,000 students provides insight into ways that institutional learning technologies and academic-led technologies are influencing the student experience. This paper also discusses how the three universities have used this information to develop strategic initiatives, and identifies a need for new strategies to support academic-led use of the available tools."

Following #mootau15 & @vmarchant's session on #retention using @Jeanette_242's #completion #research http://t.co/qWBEUM3WsA looks useful.

Following #mootau15 & @vmarchant's session on #retention using @Jeanette_242's #completion #research http://t.co/qWBEUM3WsA looks useful.

"AbstractWe present a case study to evaluate the use of a Wimba Voice Board to support asynchronous audio discussion. We discuss the learning strategy and pedagogic rationale when a Voice Board was implemented within an MA module for language learners, enabling students to create learning objects and facilitating peer-to-peer learning. Previously students studying the module had communicated using text-based synchronous and asynchronous discussion only. A common criticism of text-based media is the lack of non-verbal communication. Audio communication is a richer medium where use of pitch, tone, emphasis and inflection can increase personalisation and prevent misinterpretation."

copyright-friendly photos for students and teachers to use. Not creative commons licenced - at least the ones I viewed - ordered into categories and topics. Easy to use and the citation to be used is included with each picture

College students love their smartphones. They use them in a myriad of ways and there's the data to prove it. A new infographic visualizes the current state of smartphone usage by college students and it's a sight to see. The infographic below from Online Degrees shows the 12 most popular ways students are using smartphones as well as the types of news they're reading, and more.

"This page features innovative uses of online collaboration tools (OCTs) for teaching and course management. You can browse the full list or use the search criteria to find the examples most relevant to you. Click on any title for a full description or use the Links to watch short videos of faculty describing their teaching strategies and see examples. For a summary of practical recommendations for effectively implementing OCTs in one's teaching, see CRLT's Occasional Paper No. 31: Teaching in the Cloud: Leveraging Online Collaboration Tools to Enhance Student Engagement."

Interesting tool I came across after following a discussion about people changing their CC licence and then end users struggling to prove that they had fairly used under an earlier license. "mageStamper is a free tool for keeping dated, independently verified copies of license conditions associated with creative commons images. You can use it to safeguard your use of free images from license changes, or to prove you are the original image creator."

RT @josiefraser: Summary of technologies in use in the #JISC Developing Digital Literacies Programme http://t.co/90ntlTEp #digitalliteracy

An Open Source vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to Illustrator, CorelDraw, or Xara X, using the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format. Inkscape supports many advanced SVG features (markers, clones, alpha blending, etc.) and great care is taken in designing a streamlined interface. It is very easy to edit nodes, perform complex path operations, trace bitmaps and much more. We also aim to maintain a thriving user and developer community by using open, community-oriented development

"A total of 125 students taking a first year seminar course for pre-health professional majors participated in this study (70 in the experimental group and 55 in the control group). With the experimental group, Twitter was used for various types of academic and co-curricular discussions. Engagement was quantified by using a 19-item scale based on the National Survey of Student Engagement. To assess differences in engagement and grades, we used mixed effects analysis of variance (ANOVA) models, with class sections nested within treatment groups. We also conducted content analyses of samples of Twitter exchanges. The ANOVA results showed that the experimental group had a significantly greater increase in engagement than the control group, as well as higher semester grade point averages. Analyses of Twitter communications showed that students and faculty were both highly engaged in the learning process in ways that transcended traditional classroom activities."

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

This study is an exploratory case study aimed at analysing one academic's teaching in terms of conceptions of teaching and its effect on student involvement or engagement. The research has been done by drawing on Gonzalez' dimensions of online teaching and data generated by the LMS and data analytics in general. There is growing interest in the use of academic analytics. However, most of the reported work is being done at the level of institutions/groupings of courses. Improving teaching can only be done through changing the conceptions of teaching/learning held by the academics. Can individual teaching staff, reflecting on their courses, learn anything important from examining their courses through analytics? How can this be done effectively? What do they find? This study uses an academic's approach to teaching + use as an indicator of involvement, therefore, an improvement of teaching.

Enterprise immersive software is a collection of collaboration, communication, and productivity tools unified via a 3D or pseudo-3D visual environment. In this computer-generated environment, one or more people engage in work activities like meetings, conferences, and learning and training. The software provides a shared, interactive, multichannel experience through presence awareness, voice chat, active speaker indication, text chat, and many other features, often including avatars. The Enterprise Immersive Software Decision-Making Guide is a use case-based guide designed to aid business decision makers in the enterprise immersive software selection process. In this report, we present "if/then" scenarios and highlight good-fit vendors for common situations, with a focus on the most prevalent use cases: meetings, conferences, and learning and training. The report offers guidance on how to: 1) ask core business questions to frame the discussion, 2) choose a research-and-demo, do-it-yourself, or combination approach, 3) identify requirements based on your use case, and 4) filter your options based on important limiters.