Participation in developing guidelines for schools and government on filtering internet content and the tension between being safe and having opportunities to learn.
"Social media is about conversation. This increasing emphasis on two way communication and conversation has transformed organisational communications and is crucial to effective online knowledge sharing. Communicators using online media use the term 'engagement' to describe the process of moving to a situation where users and producers interact online, discussing and sharing content."
"'Massive open online courses: Higher Education's digital moment?' tracks the development of MOOCs from a small selection of specialist courses to major online platforms, offering hundreds of courses with millions of users. The report explores MOOCs' surge in popularity and discusses whether this signals the beginning of a significant transformation in higher education, similar to those seen in other sectors, such as the newspaper industry. It pulls together the recent trends in online education delivery and looks at how universities can respond to the changing online environment."
Interesting tool I came across after following a discussion about people changing their CC licence and then end users struggling to prove that they had fairly used under an earlier license.
"mageStamper is a free tool for keeping dated, independently verified copies of license conditions associated with creative commons images. You can use it to safeguard your use of free images from license changes, or to prove you are the original image creator."
"The ins and outs of online video
There is a lot of discussion at present about video content at present including from the Minister, regulator, broadcasters, new competitors, ISPs, and commentators (not to mention TUANZ itself: ed).
This post tries to make sense of all that. It looks at the state of broadcasting in New Zealand and reviews the prospects for greater competition. Part 1 sets out how things look at present, and explains some of the basic issues. Part 2 looks at where the market might be headed, and whether the government needs to get more directly involved."
"Back in March I served on a panel along with Liz Gross, Ed Cabellon, and Greg Heiberger at the #sxswEDU conference. Here are some of the highlights:
Greg and I talk about our latest research on using Twitter to support students throughout their first year of college.
I summarize my recent research on using Facebook in education.
Greg explores the future of higher education and how new technologies can be used to effectively improve student success.
Liz discusses how to use Facebook to market your institution and programs.
Ed explains how to frame productive social media use to administrators.
I get snarky about EdTech startups and how they don't communicate with educators."
"Within a week of the emergence of Occupy Wall Street, a library surfaced in the midst of the protest. Staffed by volunteers and comprised entirely of donated materials, the People's Library offers books and media to the public, provides basic reference assistance and has built an online catalog of their holdings. In this paper, I analyze the People's Library in terms of larger discussions of libraries, technology and activism. Drawing on personal experiences volunteering at the Library as well as text from the Library's blog, I argue that the People's Library offers two counter arguments to conventional claims about the public library: first, that libraries are being existentially threatened by the emergence of digital technologies and second, that a library's institutional ethics are located solely or predominantly in the content of its collection. Using the People's Library as a kind of conceptual case study, I explore the connections between public libraries, digital technologies and activist ideologies."
"The manifesto for teaching online was a key output from the Student Writing project at the University of Edinburgh. It is a series of brief statements that attempt to capture what is generative and productive about online teaching, course design, writing, assessment and community. It is, and may remain, a living document that is reviewed and reworked periodically with colleagues, students and amongst the programme team of the MSc in E-learning programme. Its primary purpose is to spark discussion, and to articulate a position about e-learning that informs the work of the project team, and the MSc in E-learning programme more broadly. This position is best summarised by the first of the manifesto statements:
Distance is a positive principle, not a deficit. Online can be the privileged mode."
Free, online LMS which seems to be used at some of the Ivy league American universities if the home page is to be believed... Includes discussions, calendar, library (for your resources) and a gradebook.
Free book on future of the internet download under read now) Bunch of essays about impact of internet on society, how internet should be managed, privacy, intellectual property etc . Various perspectives but published by a libertarian think tank. Critical of Lessig for proposing controls on internet development. Some good reads (Dean, beware - lawyers). Also check out the video presentations - panel discussions - some fascinating stuff.
This book is both a beginning and an end. Its publication marks the beginning of TechFreedom, a new non-profit think tank that will launch alongside this book in January 2011. Our mission is simple: to unleash the progress of technology that improves the human condition and expands individual capacity to choose.
"Much has been written about wikis' reliability and use in the classroom. This research bulletin addresses the negative impacts on institutional welfare that can arise from participating in and supporting wikis. The open nature of the platform, which is fundamental to wiki operation and success, enables these negative consequences. A finite user base that can be determined a priori (e.g., a course roster) minimizes the security implications, hence our discussion in this bulletin primarily concerns open or public wikis that accept contributions from a broad and unknown set of Internet users."