"Higher education institutions face a number of opportunities and challenges as the result of the digital revolution. The institutions perform a number of scholarship functions which can be affected by new technologies, and the desire is to retain these functions where appropriate, whilst the form they take may change. Much of the reaction to technological change comes from those with a vested interest in either wholesale change or maintaining the status quo. Taking the resilience metaphor from ecology, the authors propose a framework for analysing an institution's ability to adapt to digital challenges. This framework is examined at two institutions (the UK Open University and Canada's Athabasca University) using two current digital challenges, namely Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and Open Access publishing."
In growing numbers, scholars are integrating social media tools like blogs, Twitter, and Mendeley into their professional communications. The online, public nature of these tools exposes and reifies scholarly processes once hidden and ephemeral. Metrics based on this activities could inform broader, faster measures of impact, complementing traditional citation metrics. This study explores the properties of these social media-based metrics or "altmetrics," sampling 24,331 articles published by the Public Library of Science.
"(Iceland) wants to take a number of government departments open source.
According to project leader Tryggvi Björgvinsson, the migration project will involve the three biggest public institutions in Iceland: all of the ministries, the city of Reykjavik and the National Hospital. "These are setting a good migration example", he says."
"If we think of OERs as we think of physical artifacts, we might focus on their design, production, storage and distribution. We could quantify their number, calculate their popularity, and track their use. However, in open, distributed, networked learning environments, the emphasis is not be on the resources but on the engagement between participants who create, use, modify, and share experiences."
"The concept behind My Resource Cloud is that each educator tailors interactive content to suit the needs of their own learners.
My Resource Cloud consists of a number of resource sections: My Language Cloud, My Math(s) Cloud, My Science Cloud and My ICT Cloud.
My Resource Cloud allows users to integrate web, printed, mobile and social media based technologies to help motivate learners."
"Today, Coursera co-founder Daphne Koller is in Sydney, Australia, where she has just signed agreements with the University of New South Wales (UNSW) and the University of Western Australia (UWA). These top institutions join the University of Melbourne as our second and third Australian university partners, bringing our total number of university and educational institution partners to 86.
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Put together a coursepack from OERs or your documents. Not a lot of supporting info. Has just been released by CC Canada.
"Simply upload your journal articles or other documents. We'll take care of the table of contents, attributions, page numbering, formatting and distribution. For free!"
"The current buzz in the internet world is about "mashups" and "remix". This article explores the question as to the legality of engaging in the practices of mashing and remix of copyright material as a part of cultural existence and expression - without the permission of the copyright owner. In the context of mashups, the article will look at the increasing number of video and website mashups and what this means for copyright law; while in the context of remix the article will consider the recent Dean Gray remix and what copyright law is willing to permit in this regard."
This article proposes a model to integrate the traditionally conflicting objectivism and constructivist approaches to curriculum design.It is argued that these two are not opposing paradigms, but complementing approaches.A number of analyses of learning programs are discussed to show that learning events contain both objectivist and constructivist elements. Plotting the two approaches at right angles to one another produces four quadrants of conditions of learning. These four quadrants are discussed together with the rationales for each.
eStudy, a German open source LMS, features student-created activities and courses. Courses can be ordered by the number of activities using clouds. Via Prof Zinke.