World-Shaker

American colleges are spending a declining share of their budgets on instruction and more on administration and recreational facilities for students, according to a study of college costs released Friday.

The report, based on government data, documents a growing stratification of wealth across America’s system of higher education.

At the top of the pyramid are private colleges and universities, which educate a small portion of the nation’s students, while public universities and community colleges, where tuitions are rising most rapidly, serve greater numbers and have fewer resources.

NOTE: I know this is a NYT link, but you do not have to be logged in to read this (it’s in the Education section).

For decades, professors who chose not to give a final exam were required to submit a form to opt out. Now, professors will have to file a specific request to give a final.

You know why this is great? Because one massive project (probably one of three grades for the entire 16 week semester) is not an effective assessment of a student’s progress.

Every semester, a few students in Steven White’s business and marketing courses ask to borrow the professor’s copy of the course textbook. They can’t afford one for themselves, White said, and their sub-par exam scores show it.

That’s why White, a University of Massachusetts Dartmouth professor since 1998, supports a federal law that aims to lower skyrocketing college textbook costs by making students privy to a class’s book prices before they register for the course, requires publishers to disclose book prices to professors, and rids textbooks of “bundles” like CDs and access to web sites that raise prices.

Can people hear applause from the Internet?

Simple, awesome new tool. I’m a fan.

Some interesting ideas for teaching literacy in the 21st Century. Here’s the most intriguing:

Establish a Digital Teacher Corps

Teachers cannot teach what they do not know. Most practitioners are unskilled in embedding new media in powerful instructional practices. A Digital Teacher Corps should be established to work in the lowest-performing elementary schools in order to train teachers to help students learn to read by transforming information for discovery and problem-solving.

I cannot begin to explain how often I have this thought. Technology does not replace traditional teaching methods. Teaching online is not and cannot afford to be the same type of teaching that goes on in the classroom. The mediums are different, the environments are different, we have to be different as a result.

Provide Security, a cyber security company, illustrated this danger with the Robin Sage Experiment. The experiment created fake Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn profiles under the alias, “Robin Sage.” A photo of a cute girl (borrowed from an adult website) and the job title “Cyber Threat Analyst” completed the fake profiles.

From there, Thomas Ryan, co-founder & managing partner at Provide Security, posing as Robin, sent requests and established social network connections with more than 300 professionals in the National Security Agency, DoD, and Global 500 corporations.

Robin’s new friends revealed information to Ryan that violated military operational security and personal security restrictions.

A fantastic collection of true stories.

toldorknown:

Brainstorming in a group became popular in 1953 with the publication of a business book, Applied Imagination. But it’s been proven not to work since 1958, when Yale researchers found that the technique actually reduced a team’s creative output: the same number of people generate more and better ideas separately than together.

None of us are as dumb as all of us.

(via @fritinancy)

ideasareawesome:

They call it swirl and it’s still just a labs thing. The standard image search has seen some improvements too. Swirl looks kind of like the old visual thesaurus.

infoneer-pulse:

Earlier this week Facebook acquired its 500 millionth user. This means that more people are on Facebook, which got its start a mere six years ago, than live in the United States, Canada and Mexico combined. Fewer people live on Facebook than in China, but Facebook is banned in China. If it weren’t, then Facebook would have even more users.

How to mark this moment? The social network has taught us, above all else, the value of the brief and tangential — the “ambient intimacy” that social scientists use to describe the site, where users become close simply by absorbing the casual status updates on each other’s lives.

» via The Washington Post

This. Is. Awesome.

With backing from several heavy hitters and an acquisition, Flipboard has kicked off its quest to become the new and vibrant way your browse your social media streams.

Flipboard, which is now available in the iPad app store, is a start-up that calls itself the “world’s first social magazine.” It connects to your social media accounts — primarily Facebook (Facebook) and Twitter (Twitter) — and utilizes that information to create an interface that will feel familiar if you’re a magazine lover. It officially launches today.

What an insanely cool idea.

One of the biggest problems Joshua Kim is experiencing?

Kids: My biggest problem so far is that the kids seem to want to steal the iPad once I get home to watch movies or surf the Web. When I grab it back to do some reading, they get cranky. I’m loathe to drop $500 of my own money for a first generation entertainment device, but the iPad is such a great content consumption device for the entire family that holding out is proving difficult.

This is one of those innocuous stories that may actually be a sign of something huge. I’m curious to see if this turns out to be as substantial as it sounds.

The Amazon.com Kindle e-reader and bookstore have reached a “tipping point,” the company said Monday, with Kindle titles outselling hardcover books on the massive online marketplace for the first time.

What an obscenely phenomenal idea. I keep wondering if maybe Facebook shouldn’t have designated a close-off section of their site (call it “The Playground” or something) where they would run something like this.

I can see some people wondering why children would even need a pseudo Facebook page. I won’t patronize you with the “because their friends will have it and they’ll want one too” argument, but at the very least, this gives the parents the opportunity to raise them up with responsible social networking behavior (something we didn’t have to worry about five years ago when these kids were born).

Genius Idea: The idea to create a Facebook for kids is hardly new. Togetherville takes a parent-friendly approach to social networking that actually helps a parent use her own Facebook network to build out her child’s neighborhood (a.k.a network) on the site.

Togetherville is meant to offer a more colorful and safe Facebook-like experience for kids ages six to ten (though any child under 13 can become a member), and it includes parents in the entire experience.

“Grownups” can sign up using a Facebook account. They then create an account for a child and help connect the child to real-world friends by pulling data and relationships from the adult’s own Facebook (Facebook) social graph. Parents can easily find the children of their adult friends and connect them to their child on Togetherville. Parents also have complete control over who communicates with their children and can share the child’s activities with their friends on Facebook.

The most popular tools cited by professors were e-textbooks and online documents, with faculty members reporting far less enthusiasm for other electronic tools. Under a quarter of faculty members surveyed use wikis or blogs in their teaching, and only 31 percent of professors surveyed considered online collaboration tools “essential” to today’s classroom, compared with 72 percent of over 300 IT employees surveyed.

First, this is a huge gap in perception.

Second, it raises some serious concerns. Faculty may be excited that information sharing has gone digital, but to ignore literally every other tool out there is foolish. I can think of over 100 ways to use blogs, wikis, Skype, social networks, Twitter, YouTube, and other collaborative online tools.

And guess what? Their students use all of these tools. Where’s the focus on shifting them from consumers to producers?

We’re experiencing the largest and most rapid increase in creative potential in our history, and faculty only seem to care the fact that they can import a course cartridge into Blackboard instead of finding their own content.

Discovery Channel has launched a new campaign to promote the upcoming season of “The Colony” which will recreate what it would be like to live during a global pandemic. To promote the show, the company has created a promotion which utilizes Facebook Connect to create a custom news feed which mimics what your Facebook newsfeed would look like during a global pandemic. The campaign appears to be more educational than entertaining, but definitely clever.

Say you are an employer evaluating college students for a job. Perusing one candidate’s Facebook profile, you notice the student belongs to a group called “I Pee My Pants When I’m Drunk.” What is your first thought?

It should not be that this student is unemployable for being an intemperate drinker, said Susan Zvacek, director of instructional development at the University of Kansas — though that it might mean that, too. Mainly, though, it should suggest something else — something that might be more relevant to the student’s qualifications.

“What it tells me,” Zvacek said, “is that the student is technologically illiterate.”

The study highlights the emerging importance of the “edutainer” – a teacher who is able to combine education and ­enter­tainment. “It’s not just about the member of staff having a sense of humor or being funny; it’s about the education experience being enjoyable,” explained Barefoot.

I feel like that may be an unpopular statement with some folks, but with people like Stewart and Colbert sharing info in fun, engaging ways, the bar’s been raised.

Facebook is expected to say this week that it has reached 500 million users, making it the biggest information network on the Internet in a meteoric rise that has connected the world into an online statehood of status updates, fan pages and picture exchanges.

In its six-year history, the site has become ritualized in our daily lives. It has even attracted the unwilling who join for fear of being cut out of the social fabric. It has connected old friends and family. It has helped make and break political campaigns and careers. It has turned many of us into daily communicators of one-line missives on the profound and mundane. And it has tested the limits of what we care to share and keep private.

“The goal is to push this tool as hard and as far as we possibly can to really see what the limitations are,” said Bill Handy, visiting associate professor at the university’s School of Media and Strategic Communications.

With respect, that should be the goal with every new tool out there. We’re missing the boat with potential. It reminds me of Monica Rankin, talking about using social media for teaching: “Yes, it’s going to be messy. But just because it’s messy doesn’t mean it’s going to be bad.”

Foursquare has experienced massive growth in the last twelve months, with nearly 1 million checkins taking place each day. In fact, it was just over two months ago that the company passed 40 million checkins.

This is the key point here. The thing about sharing in any social media network, is even modest gains in the amount of users can dramatically increase the amount of interactions that technology facilitates.

Foursquare users checked in 60 million times in two months. This, from a site that took over 15 months to hit 40 million checkins.

Rapid, accelerating growth.

You are reading a web page, say a news story on the CNN website, and would like to share it with your friend. The article is interesting but a bit long and therefore there’s a possibility that your ‘busy’ friend may skip the stuff that you really want him to read.

In the good old days of paper, you could have used an highlighter pen to mark the important lines but now that the text has gone digital, so have the highlighter pens. Let’s look at some of the best tools that let you add highlights and text annotations to web pages without installing any software.

Amy Cavender over at The Chronicle is going to be dropping her course textbook for a semester.

I’m curious to see how this goes.

Of all the Web 2.0 tools that have become de rigueur on college campuses, wikis fundamentally embody the Internet’s original promise of pooling the world’s knowledge — a promise that resonates loudly in academe.

And yet higher education’s relationship with wikis — Web sites that allow users to collectively create and edit content — has been somewhat hot-and-cold. Wikipedia, the do-it-yourself online encyclopedia, vexed academics early on because of its wild-west content policies and the perception that students were using it as a shortcut to avoid the tedium of combing through more reliable sources. This frustration has been compounded by the fact that attempts to create scholarly equivalents have not been nearly as successful.

Teachers who use technology frequently in their classrooms perceive greater benefits to student learning—particularly learning 21st century skills—than teachers who are less frequent users. That’s one of the major findings from a K-12 technology study released Monday by researchers out of the Richard W. Riley College of Education and Leadership at Minnesota’s Walden University.

Warning: NSFW content.

With links to get your own copy of each one!

What a great resource. I love when educators give these things away to improve things for everyone.

Probably the best collection of information on social media. I’ll definitely be forwarding this on.

Here’s a collection of social media policies for businesses and organizations such as:

• The American Red Cross
• Ball State University
• The Cleveland Clinic
• The Electronic Frontier Foundation
• FedEx
• Harvard Law School
• Kodak
• Nordstrom
• Reuters
• The U.K. Government
• The U.S. Department of Defense
• Wal-Mart

Here’s a great resource for learning more about Google Apps (for free!).

The next generation of question and answer sites promise higher quality, informed answers, and the opportunity to publish and showcase your knowledge and expertise. Whether you’re a consultant looking to increase your exposure, a small business looking to use product advice to gain new business, or just guy in serious need of help, first know that it’s about so much more than just asking or answering. There are ways to ask the best questions, provide great answers and ultimately build your reputation; here are eight guidelines that can help.

Couple this with their own social media, and it might make Google a more attractive alternative to Facebook.

The investment was made by Google itself, not Google Ventures, say our sources, and it’s a highly strategic deal. Zynga will be the cornerstone of a new Google Games to launch later this year, say multiple sources. Not only will Zynga’s games give Google Games a solid base of social games to build on, but it will also give Google the beginning of a true social graph as users log into Google to play the games. And I wouldn’t be surprised to see PayPal being replaced with Google Checkout as the primary payment option. Zynga is supposedly PayPal’s biggest single customer, and Google is always looking for ways to make Google Checkout relevant.

A federal judge on Friday drastically trimmed a $675,000 verdict against a Boston University graduate student who was found liable for illegally downloading and sharing 30 songs online, saying the jury damage award against a person who gained no financial benefit from his copyright infringement is “unconstitutionally excessive.”

Here’s a great walkthrough for getting started with Forms in Google Docs. It’s really surprising just how much potential this simple tool now has.

Since the beginning of the year, there has been a lot of activity in online Q&A sites due to increased funding and launch announcements. The next generation of question and answer sites promise higher quality, informed answers, and the opportunity to publish and showcase your knowledge and expertise. Whether you’re a consultant looking to increase your exposure, a small business looking to use product advice to gain new business, or just guy in serious need of help, first know that it’s about so much more than just asking or answering. There are ways to ask the best questions, provide great answers and ultimately build your reputation; here are eight guidelines that can help.

Analogous to “open source,” open content comprises content or creative work that—unlike copyrighted material—allows copying and modifying by anyone who reads and interacts with it. In the higher education space, open content has so far been largely limited to course syllabi published online and free for all to view and use.