Archive for the ‘Change & Innovation’ Category

Jeff Young at The Chronicle of Higher Ed’s Wired Campus asks: Could Google Wave Replace Course-Management Systems?

“Google argues that its new Google Wave system could replace e-mail by blending instant messaging, wikis, and image and document sharing into one seamless communication interface. But some college professors and administrators are more excited about Wave’s potential to be a course-management-system killer.”

On October 2nd, Educause will offer a free live Web seminar Emerging Technologies in Higher Education: Big School Solutions to Small School Problems. Presenter John O’Keefe, Director of Academic Technologies and Network Services at Lafayette College will discuss “major developments over the past five years (from Shibboleth to Internet2 to MPLS to iTunes U) that can help smaller schools both address and transform their technology needs.”

Derek Law from the Centre for Digital Library Research at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow Scotland has written Academic Digital Libraries of the Future: An Environment Scan for the New Review of Academic Librarianship. It is available for free download for a limited time.

“Libraries are attempting to face a future in which almost every fixed point has disappeared. Users are changing; content is changing; research is taking new forms. Indeed the very need for libraries is being questioned in some quarters. This paper explores the nature of the changes and challenges facing higher education libraries and suggests key areas of strength and core activities which should be exploited to secure their future.”

via Stephen’s Lighthouse

Educause has published a quick guide to 7 things you should know about Federated Identity Management. This helpful guide provides info about enterprise identity management systems which enable users to sign into multiple resources, ie. email, learning management systems, library databases, etc. with a single digital identity. The brief answers the following questions:

1. What is it?
2. Who’s doing it?
3. How does it work?
4. Why is it significant?
5. What are the downsides?
6. Where is it going?
7. What are the implications for higher education?

A new project from the MIT Media Lab called Personas will create a data portrait of your online identity. You simply enter your name and it searches the Web for information and context and computes a visual representation of how the Internet sees you.

The New York Times Bits Blog discusses a 93-page report on online education, conducted by SRI International for the Department of Education which concludes “On average, students in online learning conditions performed better than those receiving face-to-face instruction.” The report looks at comparative studies of traditional vs. online learning from 1996-2008, mainly in higher education settings.

“The real promise of online education, experts say, is providing learning experiences that are more tailored to individual students than is possible in classrooms. That enables more “learning by doing,” which many students find more engaging and useful.”

Josh Catone at Mashable suggests 3 Reasons Students Aren’t Ready for Digital Textbooks. And from his observations it seems that digital textbooks have some major hurdles to overcome before they’re ready for mass adoption such as:

• Cost Savings Must be Greater
• A Standard Format is Needed
• Questions of Ownership

The UK’s Guardian newspaper covers some of the changes happening in today’s libraries with Louise Tickle’s Academic libraries are undergoing a quiet revolution. The article proposes that “Being a librarian these days is all about technology and customer service; no time to stick your nose in a book”.

“Applying for a job in a university library because you “love reading” isn’t going to get you very far these days. These hallowed repositories of academic knowledge have changed beyond recognition over the last decade, and the people recruited to work in them have to be willing to embrace new technologies and customer service with an alacrity that would likely horrify the shushing custodians of the past.”

Kate Sheehan writes a thoughtful article about The Digital Divide Inside the Library for the ALA TechSource blog. Sheehan discusses the need for a strong technology skill set among reference librarians in addition to public service experience.

“Libraries need change and we need to get better and quicker at adapting–there isn’t room for actual luddites in the library. But when it comes to working with our colleagues, I think we’re headed toward a double standard. We need our front line staff to understand tech, to be sure, and even in the short time that I’ve been a librarian, I’ve seen huge leaps forward in that area. Tech savvy is increasingly like public service experience–it’s something organizations are unwilling to take a chance on. We expect librarians to keep up with tech and be willing to learn more about it, but we’re less skilled at differentiating between problematic resistance to change and thoughtfulness.”

via Jill Hurst-Wahl

Dana Oshiro at ReadWriteWeb posts about Seven e-Learning and Teaching Resources. This useful list includes services such as Edmodo, the private microblogging application for schools, YouTube EDU which aggregates videos and channels from colleges and universities, and LearnHub, a network where schools can create their own virtual classrooms and students can complete assignments.

ReadWriteWeb takes a look at disruptions in the book publishing business in a two-part post which discusses three big waves hitting the industry including; the digitization of back catalogs, e-books, and print on demand. Bits Of Destruction Hit the Book Publishing Business Part One introduces these waves while Part Two takes a look at what this means for the major players including; readers, authors, printers, publishers, retailers, and e-book device vendors.

Meryl Evans at Web Worker Daily comes up with a helpful list of innovative ways to make use of LinkedIn professionally in 33 Ways to Use LinkedIn for Business. Here are the top 10 recommendations:

1. Fill out your profile completely to earn trust.
2. Use widgets to integrate other tools, such as importing your blog entries or Twitter stream into your profile.
3. Do market research and gain knowledge with Polls.
4. Share survey and poll results with your contacts.
5. Answer questions in Questions and Answers: show expertise without a hint of self-promotion.
6. Ask questions in Questions and Answers to get a feel for what customers and prospects want or think.
7. Publish your LinkedIn URL on all your marketing collateral, including business cards, email signature, email newsletters, web sites and brochures, so prospects learn more about you.
8. Grow your network by joining industry and alumni groups related to your business.
9. Update your status examples of recent work.
10. Link your status updates with your other social media accounts.

Last night Google announced that they will be releasing an operating system based on their Chrome Web browser. They will open-source its code later this year.

“Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks. Later this year we will open-source its code, and netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010. Because we’re already talking to partners about the project, and we’ll soon be working with the open source community, we wanted to share our vision now so everyone understands what we are trying to achieve.”

Bryan Alexander, Director of Research at the National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education (NITLE), writes for the May/June issue of Educause Review. In Apprehending the Future: Emerging Technologies, from Science Fiction to Campus Reality, Alexander discusses strategies to identify future trends in technology including the environmental scan, Delphi Method, prediction markets, scenerios, and crowdsourcing.

“This article will introduce and explore methods for apprehending the future as it applies to the world of higher education and information technology.2 These are not hypothetical approaches; they are realized, documented, and applied methods. There is no perfect method; nor has any one approach emerged to overshadow the others. This article will thus explore each for its specific affordances, structures, and practical usage. Together, they represent an aggregate, sector-wide movement that tries to help academics understand the future as it hits the present. Put another way, these future-scanners seek to follow the translation of digital ideas from science fiction to campus reality.”

Mike Laurie, Digital Planner at UK Integrated Agency JPMH, writes for Mashable about 7 Technologies Shaping the Future of Social Media. The article takes a look at some new and emerging technology which will make our social media lives even easier.

1. The Arduino
2. RFID Tags & Transponders
3. Geomagnetic Sensors in Mobile Devices
4. Optical Pattern Recognition & Augmented Reality
5. OpenID, OAuth, and the Identity Graph
6. Mind Reading
7. Natural Language Processing