Group items tagged

"As we near the halfway point in 2012, perhaps it's time to look back at some of the major stories, trends and developments in social media since the start of the year. Check out this neat infographic that highlights some of the biggest stories in social media, broken down month-by-month starting in January and ending in May. The infographic was created by NowSourcing, a social media firm based in Louisville, Ky."

Interesting start page in a different style from NetVibes and PageFlakes.

"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."

So even the people who hate something (the web? Social media? networking? computers?) are now starting to join FaceBook. We need a timescale on this as well for a start.

"To link to any specific slide in a Google Docs presentation, click the "Start Presentation" button and copy the URL of the presentation view. Now replace the value of "start" parameter with the slide number (minus one)..."<--handy Google docs tip!

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

"That the acronym MOOCs rhymes with "nukes" seems apt. Massive open online courses, or MOOCs - led by two profit-making start-ups, Coursera and Udacity, founded by entrepreneurial Stanford professors - are a new disruptive force in education. "

"Zeega is revolutionizing web publishing and interactive storytelling for a future beyond blogs. Join the community and start experimenting now."

A starting (and end?) point for our OER workshop later this month?

Publishers realise oer is a threat and try lawsuits to prevent. Seems like there might be some trolling in the comments from 'Disgusted of Academia' or possibly publishers employee!

Moodle doesn't encourage good course design. Interesting post by James Clay and it gives me 2 thoughts.  Should we change the way we start people off on Moodle so course design comes first and then some mechanics.  The other thought is could we write a wizard (or some such thing) that leads people through the big picture design of their course and then helps them populate it with appropriate elements?

"With this feature, educators can use, tweak, or completely redo any video lesson featured on TED-Ed, or create lessons from scratch based on a TEDTalk or any video from YouTube. How? Just plug the video in and start writing questions, comments, even quizzes - then save the lesson as a private link and share with your students. The site allows you to see who's completed the lessons and track individual progress. It's still in beta, but we're so excited about this feature we had to share."

"Click the button above and start sharing your screen in under 5 seconds! (Java required to share)"

"Just click the button above to start recording. We will give you an mp3 you can save, and a link you can share with anyone. "

"Built just for Google Apps administrators, this site is your "one place to go" for the latest news on upcoming products, features, and learning resources. Follow our four easy steps to get started today!"

"How about this infographic from Turnitin to start the week? From a survey of nearly 900 educators (Plagiarism Today) Turnitin are trying to "understand what kinds of plagiarism were the most common in academia and, equally importantly, which were viewed as being the most problematic"."

"Late Friday, the federal district court in Nevada issued a declaratory judgment that makes is harder for copyright holders to file lawsuits over excerpts of material and burden online forums and their users with nuisance lawsuits." The judgment - part of the nuisance lawsuit avalanche started by copyright troll Righthaven - found that Democratic Underground did not infringe the copyright in a Las Vegas Review-Journal newspaper article when a user of the online political forum posted a five-sentence excerpt, with a link back to the newspaper's website. 

Start of a project at Bolton Uni to data warehouse with Linked Data components.