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Great looking site built by 1st years. "AllAboutLinguistics.com was created by first-year linguistics students at the University of Sheffield, supported by staff in the School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics. The website formed part of the students assessment, after they completed a course called Introduction to Linguistics, and it aims to share the knowledge they gained from this module with anyone outside the University who is interested in language and its study - especially A-Level students thinking of going on to study linguistics at University. We asked students to build the site because as beginners in linguistics themselves, they were in a good position to help explain the discipline to you."

"Welcome to the website for the OER IPR Support Project. Our aim is to provide IPR and licensing support for JISC/HEA funded OER Phase 1, 2 and 3 projects in order to help them identify and manage IPR issues with particular emphasis on the use of Creative Commons Licences.  The objectives of OER IPR Support Project are: To create a range of advice and information resources which will enable JISC/HEA OER Projects to manage the IPR in their OER resources appropriately To  create IPR advice and information resources which have longevity and broad applicability beyond the duration of the JISC/HEA OER Projects To disseminate the advice and information resources to JISC/HEA OER Projects through JISC Legal Helpdesk, published resources, workshops, and via the JISC Legal website at www.jisclegal.ac.uk To ensure that all resources created in this project build on the experience gained in JISC/HEA Phase 1 OER Projects and are responsive to the needs of the JISC/HEA OER Project. To monitor and assess the impact of the project support and resources on the JISC/HEA OER Projects"

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.

"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"

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.

One-click access to Moodle files from within MS Office apps. Is this necessarily a good thing? Is it encouraging us to use Moodle as a filing cabinet?

Office add-in for Moodle allows individuals to upload (and download and edit) files directly to moodle from office. "You no longer need to use your web browser when working with Office documents stored in Moodle" is their statement, which is interesting in thaqt everyone else is moving to the web as the platform!

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."

"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."

"An innovative resource designed to cultivate 21st century fluencies,while fostering engagement and adventure in the learning experience. This resource is the collaborative effort of a group of experienced educators and entrepreneurs who have united to share their experience and ideas, and create a project geared toward making learning relevant to life in our new digital age. Our purpose is to develop exceptional resources to assist in transforming learning to be relevant to life in the 21st Century. At the core of this project are our Curriculum Integration Kits - engaging, challenge based learning modules designed to cultivate the essential 21st Century Fluencies within the context of the required curriculum."

"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."

During the past decade, rapid developments in information and communications technology have transformed key social, commercial, and political realities. Within that same time period, working at something less than Internet speed, much of the academic and policy debate arising from these new and emerging technologies has been fragmented. There have been few examples of interdisciplinary dialogue about the importance and impact of anonymity and privacy in a networked society. Lessons from the Identity Trail: Anonymity, Privacy and Identity in a Networked Society fills that gap, and examines key questions about anonymity, privacy, and identity in an environment that increasingly automates the collection of personal information and relies upon surveillance to promote private and public sector goals.

"This paper describes the implementation of a quantitative cost effectiveness analyzer for Web-supported academic instruction that was developed in Tel Aviv University during a long term study. The paper presents the cost effectiveness analysis of Tel Aviv University campus. Cost and benefit of 3,453 courses were analyzed, exemplifying campus-wide analysis. These courses represent large-scale Web-supported academic instruction processes throughout the campus. The findings were described, referring to students, instructors and university from both the economical and educational perspectives. The cost effectiveness values resulting from the calculations were summarized in four "coins" (efficiency coins=$; quality coins; affective coins; and knowledge management coins) for each of the three actors (students, instructors and university). In order to examine the distribution of those values throughout the campus assessment scales were created on the basis of descriptive statistics. The described analyzer can be implemented in other institutions very easily and almost automatically. This enables us to quantify the costs and benefits of Web-supported instruction on both the single-course and the campus-wide levels. "

"This new learning environment - an augmented reality/virtuality - consists of distributed virtual spaces generated by social software tools, and of the real spaces and objects, in which locative content has been added with mobile devices. Augmented reality, the reality overlaid with virtual reality, and virtual reality, in which representations of the real world have been embedded and contextualised, is enabling interactions both in real and virtual spaces."

In a move that could shake the e-learning industry, Pearson today unveiled a new learning management system that colleges will be able to use for free, without having to pay any of the licensing or maintenance costs normally associated with the technology. Pearson's new platform, called OpenClass, is only in beta phase.  By providing complimentary customer support and cloud-based hosting, OpenClass purports to underprice even the nominally free open-source platforms that recently have been gaining ground in the LMS market. "I think that the announcement really marks another, and important, nail in the coffin of the proprietary last-generation learning management system," says Lev Gonick, CIO of Case Western Reserve University.

"On 1st March 2012 John Seely Brown gave a keynote presentation at the DML (Digital Media and Learning) 2012 Conference in San Francisco, called Cultivating the Entrepreneurial Learner in the 21st Century.  You can watch the recording here, and you can read the transcript here. What does it mean to be a entrepreneurial learner? JSB tells us "This does not mean how to become an entrepreneur. This really means, how do you constantly look around you all the time  for new ways, new resources to learn new things? That's the sense of entrepreneur I'm talking about that now in the networked age almost gives us unlimited possibility.""

There's a lot of talk about social media in learning but where's the action? Well, something's happening in social media and learning, and Facebook is looking like a front runner. 

"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."

"NPR reports that Harvard physicist and professor Eric Mazur has largely gotten rid of the lecture in his classes, after finding that in lecture-based classes, students tend to commit to memory formulae and heuristics, but fail to develop deep understanding of concepts. Mazur has tried - and seemingly succeeded - to cultivate deeper learning with a combination of small group peer-instruction and a tight feedback loop based on in-class polling about particular problems."

Hey guys. Happy new year, hope yaz had a nice break. The idea posted in this thread at /. no doubt isnt new to you all, neither the whole learning-styles thing, but the thread itself is actually not a bad read, lots of differing opinions, not all geeks.

"Given an expectation of digital literacy among students, why should we worry about student perceptions of CMS tools? For the same reason exemplary instructors stay aware of their students' general learning style preferences-to evolve their teaching styles to meet diverse preferences and maximize learning while also attempting to develop and enhance students' abilities to learn in different ways. Likewise, knowing the CMS tools that students find most effective establishes an important baseline for understanding student needs that can be addressed not only in a CMS but also through other online systems and services. The University of Florida (UF) conducted a survey investigating that question in spring 2009, during the university's most recent CMS evaluation and adoption decision to replace the existing CMS. This research bulletin presents the survey results to help inform other institutions with their own evaluation and adoption processes. The information will also benefit instructors looking to maximize their own use of a local CMS and/or to choose tools that enable personal learning environments, as well as specific tools for learning."

"The aim of this small project is to create a map of virtual world based scientific research and educational initiatives at UK universities. The map is being created by Birmingham-based virtual world specialists Daden Limited as part of this year's British Science Festival hosted at Aston University in Birmingham.Virtual Worlds such as Second Life, where users can socialise and connect on-line are already being extensively used by UK Universities and other educational and research organisations - but it can be hard to find out what is going on, and where. It can hopefully become a lasting resource for UK Science which can live on beyond the 2010 British Science Festival.The map is, appropriately, presented as virtual map inside of Second Life where visitors will be able to click on map markers to gain further information on each project, and to be directly transported to the science project location.Users without access to Second Life, or running projects in other virtual worlds, are not excluded from the project. All information will be available through this micro-site, which includes a browser based version of the Second Life map, and lists of projects in other worlds."