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"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."

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.

"OpenStax College offers students free textbooks that meet scope and sequence requirements for most courses. These are peer-reviewed texts written by professional content developers. Adopt a book today for a turnkey classroom solution or modify it to suit your teaching approach. Free online and low-cost in print, OpenStax College books are built for today's student budgets."

Imperial College threaten to stop subscribing to Elsevier and Wiley-Blackwell journals unless subscription fees are reduced.

"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."

"Social media and online games have the potential to convey 21st century skills that aren't necessarily part of school curricula - things like time management, leadership, teamwork and creative problem solving that will prepare teens for success in college and beyond. Making the transition between a highly structured environment in high school to a self-driven, unstructured environment in college can prove a huge challenge for many kids. Educators spend a lot of time thinking about how to fix this problem. The solution doesn't lie solely with games, but a lot of the psychology that motivates teens to play games holds potential. We need to figure out how to tap in."

Increases in social media use in US unis & colleges. Data from 2007 to now.

"The public and college presidents differ over the educational value of online courses. Only 29% of the public says online courses offer an equal value compared with courses taken in a classroom. Half (51%) of the college presidents surveyed say online courses provide the same value."

RT @VC_UEL: 22% of students influenced by social network of target univ http://j.mp/oWHfoQ (via @JossWinn) #SoMe #highered #yam

"...exploring how universities and colleges can help teaching staff, researchers, support and administrative staff to develop their digital literacies"

links to three interesting articles on rethinking lecturing as a teaching method including a new experimental college in the USA - the University of Minnesota Rochester

"At the end of the twentieth century, intellectual property rights collided with everyday life. Expansive copyright laws and digital rights management technologies sought to shut down new forms of copying and remixing made possible by the Internet. International laws expanding patent rights threatened the lives of millions of people around the world living with HIV/AIDS by limiting their access to cheap generic medicines. For decades, governments have tightened the grip of intellectual property law at the bidding of information industries; but recently, groups have emerged around the world to challenge this wave of enclosure with a new counter-politics of "access to knowledge" or "A2K." They include software programmers who took to the streets to defeat software patents in Europe, AIDS activists who forced multinational pharmaceutical companies to permit copies of their medicines to be sold in poor countries, subsistence farmers defending their rights to food security or access to agricultural biotechnology, and college students who created a new "free culture" movement to defend the digital commons. Access to Knowledge in the Age of Intellectual Property maps this emerging field of activism as a series of historical moments, strategies, and concepts. It gathers some of the most important thinkers and advocates in the field to make the stakes and strategies at play in this new domain visible and the terms of intellectual property law intelligible in their political implications around the world. A Creative Commons edition of this work will be freely available online."

"Barnes & Noble continues to makes inroads into the education, um, space. It just announced that it has teamed up with Blackboard, the Web site/software suite that is used in colleges all over the U.S."

Hey guys. Thought I'd share a link with yaz. You probably forgot I was still in the group. ;-)

News Article about Sherpa - course recommendation software.

"...a pilot program undertaken by the Wikimedia Foundation that, in conjunction with a number of universities, is making verifying and updating Wikipedia pages part of college coursework."

The college reached this decision after first looking into outsourcing their email to the cloud. They considered offering from both Google and Microsoft, but eventually decided against both in lieu of the new forwarding option.

Cornwall College LSIS funded Research based project exploring the Issues for the uses of Facebookwith 16-19 year old Learners. Bex Ferriday.All the documents written as a result of the LSIS Facebook project are freely available from a range of internet locations. Documents are as follows:* Briefing paper (with case studies)* Suggested acceptable use policy* Plenary dissemination slides:paper and case studies available on Slideshare:

"College education is the largest scam in U.S. history!" or is it?

Site helping teens with disability become their own advocates for learning and what they might need to deal with in the transition to HE.

The cost of higher education and why cheap shots in facebook sendalongs should get you angry. A compelling post.