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University of Southern Queensland: all teaching staff at the University of Southern Queensland (USQ) will have access to use virtual classrooms, online study groups and other innovative educational tools from semester two this year. The tools are part of the Wimba suite of educational technologies that USQ

Innovative Assessment. Article by Graham Mohl.

"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."

2nd of 2 posts on plagiarism vs iterative innovation in the gaming industry. 1st is at http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/EvanJones/20110815/8195/Radical_Plagiarism_The_Ethical_Lessons_of_the_Gamenauts_Controversy.php

At school or college? Have an idea to change the world? ITU Telecom World 2011 brings together thousands of influential delegates from the telecommunications and technology industries to discuss what steps need to be taken to get more of the world connected. And they need your help! We are inviting 10,000 global school children (8-18)  to design the innovations that could make a real difference to their world.(((( Sign up your school or class now, and your students can start influencing thousands of decision-makers in information and technology communications.

"Blended learning is a disruptive innovation in education that can take many forms. Here, we look at what blended learning is, why it's spreading, and how it works in real and virtual classrooms."

Heterogeneous teams achieve more and have a higher potential for innovation.

"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."

Sugata Mitra (TED talks and hole-in-the-wall computer innovator) critiques traditonal 'pencil and paper' exams and learning and gives an alternative which is (I think) a problem-based learning approach which he calls SOLE (Self-organised learning environment). 

"The internet lets us share perfect copies of our work with a worldwide audience at virtually no cost. We take advantage of this revolutionary opportunity when we make our work "open access": digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. In this talk, Peter Suber - Director of the Harvard Open Access Project - shares insights from his new concise introduction to open access - what open access is and isn't, how it benefits authors and readers of research, how we pay for it, how it avoids copyright problems, how it has moved from the periphery to the mainstream, and what its future may hold. This event includes questions and responses from Stuart Shieber (School of Engineering and Applied Sciences), Robert Darnton (Harvard University Library), June Casey (Harvard Law School Library), David Weinberger (Berkman Center / Harvard Library Innovation Lab) and more."

"Learning Space as Creation Space The next generation of learning spaces will take all the characteristics of an active learning environment-flexibility, collaboration, team-based, project-based-and add the capability of creating and making. Project teams will be both interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary and will likely need access to a broad array of technologies. High-speed networks, video-based collaboration, high-resolution visualization, and 3-D printing are but a few of the digital tools that will find their way into the learning space. The ability to rearrange furniture and technology quickly and easily will be highly desirable. Some project activities will need nothing more than comfortable furniture, food, and caffeine. Others will require sophisticated computational analysis and the ability to do rapid prototyping. Acoustics will be a concern and will need to accommodate a wide range of activities. It seems likely that such space will support more than one team or activity simultaneously. That will be a highly desirable trait, fostering serendipitous discovery and innovation. The ability to quickly and easily capture the group's activities and progress will also be desirable. An emerging class of powerful and effective collaboration tools enables project teams to save and store project elements, resources, concepts, plans, designs, models, and renderings-in short, all the "stuff" that a team might find or make."

"Digital literacy is not word processing or watching movies on an iPhone, but instead using technology to create, code and collaborate. In today's world, that necessarily includes the Web. Building a generation of young 'webmakers' is key to job creation, international competitiveness and engagement in civil society. In this webinar, Mozilla will talk about their work in this area to define key Web literacy skills, create pathways for innovative learning experiences around them and build a network of instructors and facilitators with a shared mission."

Using technology to do more with less (sounds familiar). Like SWEET - Synchronous Web-enabled Employee Training :-)

"We believe that a free and open Internet can bring about a better world. To keep the Internet free and open, we call on communities, industries and countries to recognize these principles. We believe that they will help to bring about more creativity, more innovation and more open societies."

Excellent article on a different approach to getting teachers engaged with elearning (and any pedagogical innovation). I think we've already bed this overall idea i.e. that we need teachers to participate in the design of their courses but this provides structure around it and also theoretical underpinning.

Google wins the case to scan the worlds books.

Report from the OU on new forms of teaching, learning & assessment.