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“Once they were hosts to lively discussions about academic style and substance, but the time of scholarly e-mail lists has passed, meaningful posts slowing to a trickle as professors migrate to blogs, wikis, Twitter, and social networks like Facebook.” Chronicle of Higher Education

“Technology that allows gamers to control game functions with only their eyes is helping to open virtual worlds such as Second Life and World of Warcraft to people with severe motor disabilities.”

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This 6O minutes piece raises some interesting possibilities and concerns about the possibilities of creating learning systems that respond to actual brain processes.

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x9pzcq_the-present-future-of-mindreading-t_news

“Yesterday, Google announced a new mobile location-aware application called Latitude, which lets you track your friends’ whereabouts using your mobile phone. The move will have major ramifications to the current mobile social networking market which was just beginning to get off the ground. The question we must ask now is this: did Google just validate mobile social networking …or did they just kill all the competition?”
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“A large gap exists between the public’s perception of video games and what the research actually shows. The following is an attempt to separate fact from fiction.” By Henry Jenkins

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A company called Cerego just launched a new adaptive learning system for English speakers who want to learn a new language: iKnow!

Link to review of site

SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), the Public Library of Science (PLoS), and Students for FreeCulture have jointly announced the first international Open Access Day. Building on the worldwide momentum toward Open Access to publicly funded research, Open Access Day will create a key opportunity for the higher education community and the general public to understand more clearly the opportunities of wider access and use of content.

Open Access Day will invite researchers, educators, librarians, students, and the public to participate in live, worldwide broadcasts of events. In North America, events will be held at 7:00 PM (Eastern) and 7:00 PM (Pacific).

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“Integral to higher education, academic integrity stands as a cornerstone of academic life. However, compelling evidence of widespread academic dishonesty among Net-Generation students threatens to undermine both the environment of trust that nourishes integrity and the safeguards that help ensure it. Working from their experience with widespread cheating on low-stakes quizzes in a large introductory information systems class, Valerie Milliron and Kent Sandoe describe the Net Generation’s culture of cheating and explore ways to detect and deter cheating. Detailing technological, content-based, and behavioral approaches to detection and deterrence, Milliron and Sandoe provide an overview of the extent and the nature of cheating within the Net Generation.”

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“One way of better understanding Net-Generation learners is to examine the texts they create on online social networking, blogging, and image sites as well as in virtual worlds. Mark Mabrito and Rebecca Medley explore the nature of Net-Generation texts as a reflection of the cognitive differences between this generation’s students and their older instructors, discuss the unique challenges this group of learners may present for instructors who do not share their technological immersion, and suggest the means by which such challenges may be overcome. To accommodate the needs of the Net Generation, Mabrito and Medley suggest that faculty must reconsider traditional pedagogy and integrate more innovative ways of instruction for this significantly different population of students.”

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