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The Department of Education's (ED) Office of Educational Technology today released a draft issue brief - Enhancing Teaching and Learning Through Educational Data Mining and Learning Analytics - representing the results of a months-long discourse among 8 academic and 15 industrial data mining and learning analytics experts conducted by SRI International. The brief, inspired by ED's 2010 National Educational Technology Plan (NETP), articulates the challenges and opportunities of Big Data in improving student outcomes and overall productivity of K-2 education systems. It focuses on three key research areas - educational data mining, learning analytics, and visual data analytics - and offers a set of corresponding recommendations, categorized by various stakeholders. ED is now seeking public comment on the draft.

Jon Evans releases two novels as free ebooks. Both had previously been paid print releases. As a side note, both are thrillers - Invisible Armies is about hackers, anti-corporate protestors, globalization, and the surveillance society; Swarm is about fleets of UAVs in The Wrong Hands

First stable release in 2003 - the following description sounds uncannily familiar! "iPeer is an open source web application application that allows instructors to develop and deliver  rubric-based peer evaluations, to review and release student comments, to build progress report forms online, and to analyze evaluation results. iPeer features a built-in user management system, data import/export, and an easy-to-use installer."

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

Professors, particularly those in the senior ranks, might have a reputation for being leery of social media. But they are no Luddites when it comes to Web 2.0 tools such as Facebook and YouTube, according to a new survey scheduled to be released today.

Professors, particularly those in the senior ranks, might have a reputation for being leery of social media. But they are no Luddites when it comes to Web 2.0 tools such as Facebook and YouTube, according to a new survey scheduled to be released today.

How accurate are iThenticate (Turnitin etc) press releases? 

Class2Go is an open source platform(LMS?) is to be integrated with the edX platform and released on Github from June 1 2013. Will be interesting to see what its like...

Dave Kernohan on Moocs and the Universities UK report - a quick and dirty response when it was released.

"If you want to find out why people might become engaged in OER and Open educational practices (OEP) then you might like to look at the Motivations section. If you are interested in looking at the range of models and approaches adopted for OER Release then the Models page may be useful for you. If you want to know about the impact of the HEFCE funding then we have an Impact section. We have drawn together some critical factors to support OEP for those that want some tips on how to go about this themselves. We have a section that highlights tensions and challenges around OEP and the OER journeys section provides an interesting look at the wider context and how the HEFCE-funded initiatives fit into that. We also offer recommendations. If you contributed to our surveys, polls and interviews then we have a series of supplementary appendices and you can look at out methodology and evidence pages - all available from the main report page http://bit.ly/HEFCEoerReview. We have also produced a summary briefing paper."

"The University of Queensland has committed to the development of a major online open learning environment.  UQ Vice-Chancellor Professor Deborah Terry said heads of school, deans and other senior academic leaders had embraced a University vision to move toward the development of a major online open learning environment.  "The initiative is an integral component of the new UQ blueprint for technology-enhanced learning, recently released to staff," Professor Terry said. "

Associate Education Minister Nikki Kaye today tabled the Government's undertaking to deliver on its commitment to digital literacy in education.

Rebuttal to the "Google owns my data" hitting the ether after the release of G Drive

"Individual [OER] projects have been getting institutional buy-in to OER release, particularly where it can be shown to support other, existing, priorities and strategies, such as sustainability, lowering environmental impact, or marketing."<--true of all projects?

alpha release of an LMS (myeverCLASS) that runs on Facebook

Review of the research report into halted Udacity / SJSU moocs.

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 long awaited (and much previewed through individual chapter release) book by Tony Bates on teaching in the digital (read modern) age.

Google releases codeless development environment for Android apps. Anyone can easily (so it claims!) develop apps for android phones.