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The key attributes that a computer grad needs today. "What all of the employers want is the right attitude and aptitude. With these, any gaps in the knowledge and experience of a student fresh from studies can easily be overcome.  Heck, the industry moves so fast that they need to be updating those on the first day."

Article proposing that a revolution is coming to academia because of social media and web technologies. Possibly a rather optimistic view given the attitudes of some academics and institutions...

"'We found no evidence for any discontinuity in technology use around the age of 30 as would be predicted by the Net Generation and Digital Natives hypothesis,' says the report. What the reseachers do find interesting and worthy of further study is the correlation--which is independent of age--between attitudes to technology and approaches to studying. In short, students who more readily use technology for their studies are more likely than others to be deeply engaged with their work."

That last point is pretty powerful. Need to get the data replicated elsewhere as next stage. But as always, different people are different!

Excellent post by Mark Smithers capturing the difficulty I have with a corporate control attitude in HE.

Atlantic article on SM in HE. Some good stuff about attitudes and the failure of the academy to maintain pedagogical control. Examples tho' seem to come from courses teaching 'about' SM, not 'through' SM.

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

Google and the AND or the OR or the Plus + Search changes but also instructive on the attitude and way that Google makes decisions about change.  It might be really important to you but being part of 10% of a user base that likes versus 90% who don't like or are indifferent means you've lost.

Gardner Campbell