Group items tagged

"Australia went from lagging to leading the worldwide smartphone revolution in just one year, a major study by Google has revealed. Mobile internet usage by Australians now rivals that of PCs for activities like social networking and, soon, shopping, Google found."

Article proposing that a revolution is coming to academia because of social media and web technologies. Possibly a rather optimistic view given the attitudes of some academics and institutions...

"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."

Self paced, online, lab based maths.

Michael Peters reviews MOOCs from an economic, post-modern university type standpoint. Quite long. Most of the comments are garbage!

"Universities that are forced to get by on dwindling budgets will drive a revolution in information technology, the next president of Universities UK has predicted."

"In January 2009, Jay Mathews of the Washington Post disparagingly labeled the call for new media literacy and 21st Century skills "the latest doomed pedagogical fad,"..."

"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."

The Future of Education - evolution or revolution, and why both have big problems

"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."

"The greatest revolution in how humans create and share knowledge, how they read and write, how they communicate and interact in all human history‐‐and there's no space there for the human and social sciences?"--Cathy Davidson, Founder, HASTAC. <--useful for PG FASS?

"About 100 years ago, higher education restructured to meet the needs of the industrial age. It has changed little since, even as the internet has transformed life. Another revolution is needed, says Cathy Davidson, to modernise universities and prepare graduates for a 21st-century working environment"

Exploration of narrative, openness, digital storytelling

"This review essay examines literature from a variety of disciplines on the technological, social, behavioural, and neuroscientific impacts that the Internet is having on the practice of reading."

SM can alter collective action dynamics. Post euphoria post on SM & the Arab Spring