Recently, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) and Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) introduced the Research Works Act (RWA) (H.R. 3699) to "ensure the continued publication and integrity of peer-reviewed research works by the private sector.”  The bill is short, but the reverberations have been swift and strong throughout the research and scholarly publishing community.  The basic question, posed by a Chronicle of Higher Education article is this: “When taxpayers help pay for scholarly research, should those taxpayers get to see the results in the form of free access to the resulting journal articles?”

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Three trends in student technology use caught me off guard this semester. [Read more]

Jacqueline Barnes, Litmos LMS

Do you feel like you are being more efficient and productive when learning online? Are you maximizing your capacity to retain information? Or are you feeling the extreme opposite? Are your brain and eyes on overload from viewing everything via online? According to recent studies, our brains love learning online. Columbia neuroscientist, Betsy Sparrow, states, “We are becoming symbiotic with our computer tools”. There is no fact in denying that people today are constantly glued to their computer, Smartphone, tablet, or other electronic gadget. Although some may argue that it is a bit excessive, being one with our computer tools allows our brains to become like online memory banks. Within seconds, we can work through a problem with the help of the Internet; which in turn allows our brains to offload some information, and create more room in our brain to focus on areas of other interest. Studies have shown that the action of “googling”, “may actually engage a greater extent of neural circuitry” than paper-based complex reasoning, states neuroscientist Gary Small.

http://www.litmos.com/industry-news/online-learning-it-does-a-brain-good-2/

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by Carol Heard, BC Communications

Tucked away in a newly renovated building of Bainbridge College’s main campus is a center devoted to supporting instruction at the college -but not the type of instruction from yesteryear. The Center for Teaching Excellence, which is located in a recently renovated building that used to house the Continuing Education Division on the main campus, is developing and supporting teaching excellence in all BC courses, but here in the early days of its existence, is devoting much of its resources to improving online learning. Online courses at Bainbridge College have increased from 20 five years ago to 146 this spring semester. The subjects may range from accounting, biology, English Composition to technical mathematics.

http://bainbridgega.com/news/publish/012412bc.shtml

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By AUSTIN BYRON, Daily Trojan

The university unveiled last-week a new strategic plan to further develop its online programs, which aim to meet the needs of a rapidly changing world. According to the Strategic Vision, USC will offer access to education to more people in order to meet the growing demand for educated workers. “New modes of learning and societal needs require that we reinvent undergraduate, graduate and postdoctoral education,” the Strategic Plan states. “Changing demographics and public demands require we provide greater access to, and accountability in, higher education.”

http://dailytrojan.com/2012/01/18/university-continues-to-expand-online-classes/

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Last week, January 18, 2012, the U.S. Supreme Court decided a copyright case that has broad implications for educators who use or perform musical works.  In Golan, et al., v. Holder the Court upheld Congress’s authority to withdraw works from the public domain and put them back under copyright protection.  If someone wants to resume the use or performance of a work after it regains copyright, they must pay for the privilege, the decision made clear. 

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The 2012 NIST/NSTIC IDtrust Workshop will be held March 13-14, 2012 at NIST in Gaithersburg, Maryland. The workshop, Technologies and Standards Enabling the Identity Ecosystem, will focus on how technologies and standards can help the framework of the identity ecosystem coalesce. Online registration is now available.

The two day workshop will feature plenary presentations and panel discussions by leading identity management and standards experts addressing a broad swath of technology and standards issues that surround identifying and implementing the four NSTIC Guiding Principles in the Identity Ecosystem:

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U.S. Senate Education Committee Hearing regarding Innovations in College Affordability

February 2, 2012, starting at 10 am

430 Dirksen Senate Office Building, Washington, D.C.

http://www.help.senate.gov/hearings/hearing/?id=15eea6a0-5056-9502-5d55-b899d73ef5f9

Yesterday, the Center for American Progress (CAP) (http://www.americanprogress.org/) and EDUCAUSE brought together roughly 50 thought leaders in higher education IT, business process innovation, online and hybrid learning, postsecondary education philanthropy, and higher education in general to explore how more effectively infusing technology throughout higher education might advance national and institutional goals for improved performance across the higher education mission (e.g., college readiness and completion, access and affordability).

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2012 NIST/NSTIC IDtrust Workshophttp://www.nist.gov/itl/csd/ct/nstic_idtrust-2012.cfm Purpose: “Technologies and Standards Enabling the Identity Ecosystem”The 2012 NIST/NSTIC IDtrust Workshop will be held March 13-14, 2012 at NIST in Gaithersburg, Maryland. The workshop will focus on how technologies and standards can help the framework of the identity ecosystem coalesce.

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This week I discovered a hidden pitfall of team-teaching: My colleague and I were talking about the next couple of reading assignments, how we see them as fitting together, and the like. Normal class prep, in other words. At the end of it, I offered a one-sentence summary of my goals, since I’m the one nominally leading class right now.

What happened in class? My colleague trotted out my sentence as her own!

The implications are clear: When team-teaching, be sure to squirrel your best stuff away from your colleague.

(I might be kidding. After all, I’m married to the colleague in question, so the habit of stealing one another’s lines is built-in from the start.)

• Cal Newport has a terrific post decrying the tyranny of the convenience principle when discussing communications technology: Motivating this request from Georgetown HR was convenience. If every employee checked in daily with that department, a lot of the administrative processes required to operate a large university would run more smoothly. This would make peoples’ lives easier, therefore the policy is justified. I argue that this convenience principle is at the core of how knowledge work organizations decide which work habits to keep and which to discard, especially when these habits involve technology.
• Last week Ryan wrote about “Avoiding Tool Takeover”. In a related post, Brian Lam reflects on recent research suggesting that lots of time spent using technology makes us unhappy: I owe my livelihood to technology and I love the raw capability it offers us as a tool, but I fear it a bit more than most people do. It’s a tool, but it’s not quite a hammer, because a hammer doesn’t seduce you into sitting around lonely in your underwear for 6 hours at a stretch clicking on youtube videos and refreshing twitter. (via The Brooks Review)
• AstroBetter’s Jane Rigby explains what she “learned about astro outreach from giving a TEDx talk” (link includes the video of her talk–about space telescopes and dark energy!): So, what can we learn from this? Here goes. Don’t assume that the public knows, remembers, or understands the key discoveries of the past 20 years.
• Michael Kramer considers digital historians as citizens of “Annotation Nation”: It seems to me that annotation and the digital go well together, for the digital is geared toward enabling, representing, and capturing the flow of argument and argumentation. And annotation, at its essence, is just this flow.
• Kate Clancy explains why female bloggers occasionally need a posse, and rethinks her policy for comments on her blog: Supporting a female blogger under attack in a comment thread is a very risky endeavor. If you are a male ally, you may be afraid of making things worse. If you are a woman, you may be afraid of drawing some of the attack on to you.

In this week’s video, Charles Seife discusses Proofiness: The Dark Arts of Mathematical Deception:

Unmissable bonus: C.G.P. Grey’s “10 Misconceptions Rundown”. The top pick will prevent you from ever sleeping again, thus solving your productivity problems.

Have a great weekend!

Photo “THIEF” by Flickr user JohnGoode / Creative Commons licensed

more links for students:

adwords learning center - google's place to learn about adwords

ppc advertising - a type of advertising where an ad is displayed and the advertiser is charged per click.

ppc consultant - generally for more expert analysis and typically more expensive than an agency per hour.

google keyword tool - googles official keyword tool for keyword research

ppc software - software that manages your ppc accounts

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Since their inception, the NET-MAN and Wireless groups have discussed a wide range of topics relevant to network managers including convergence, bandwidth management, management systems, security, wireless technologies, and support. This gathering will allow network managers to share ideas about their current professional challenges and new or emerging technologies with other networking experts from a wide variety of institutional backgrounds. You need not be a group member to attend. Please join us if you're a network manager or simply if you're interested in network technologies.

In class a couple weeks ago, I mentioned a lot of tools and sites that I went through very quickly, and I told you I was going to give you list them out on Edcause for you guys.

Well, here they are:

adwords help - a resource for finding out what adwords is

all-in-one-seo - a tool that does *most* of your SEO needs, and conviently it's free!

keyword-advertising - when doing ppc or display adds, keywords are associated that relate to the content you are landing on.

sitelinks - a aguide where it outlines what adwords sitelink extensions are and how you can use them

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Anyone who’s spent some time working on a typewriter can tell you that one of the great things about a computer is how easy it is to type special characters. By “special characters,” I mean those symbols or accented letters that aren’t part of regular use in English but that come up plenty often in your scholarship. Instead of typing an “e” and then trying to position the paper so you can strike an apostrophe on top of it, you can just use a combination of keys to generate the perfect “é.” Much, much easier. Of course, the ease of creating these special characters is entirely dependent upon your ability to remember what the key combination is.

I recently discovered a handy widget for the Mac OS Dashboard that fixes this problem. CharacterPal, designed by tacowidgets.com, provides a small reference for typing the character you want. Once you download and install the widget, you simply find the character that you’re looking for, hover the mouse over that character, and it displays the keyboard combination that you’ll use to generate it. In addition to keyboard combinations, the widget can also show you the HTML code that corresponds to your choice. All that, and it’s free!

It would be nice if you could click on the character that you’re looking at and that it would automatically be added to your clipboard so you could copy and paste. Instead, it will copy the keyboard combination. Perhaps this is intentional, however, as it helps you learn the combination. It also bears mentioning that when looking for a particular letter you sometimes need to look for just the diacritic. CharacterPal, doesn’t, in other words tell you how to type “é”; rather, it tells you how to type “´”.

The only downside of CharacterPal that I can see is that it’s Mac only. But then again, Windows has the Character Map built into it (Accessories –> System tools –> Character Map) that does exactly the same thing, albeit not as a widget. (Thanks to John Overholt and Michael Cade-Stewart for pointing the Character Map out to me.) So now you’ve got not excuse for forgetting how to properly type Mötley Crüe!

If you know of a better approach for Windows, Linux, or Mac, let us know in the comments!

Lead image: 20090823-Typewriter-10 / Raúl Hernández González / CC BY 2.0

By EUGENIA WILLIAMSON, the Boston Phoenix |

We should take into account the research of Justin Reich, a doctoral candidate at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. In a lunchtime talk at the Berkman Center on Tuesday titled “Will Free Benefit the Rich? How Free and Open Education Might Widen Digital Divides,” Reich made the case that, in the “profoundly inequitable” United States educational system, free technological resources favor those students who are already at a socioeconomic advantage. “There’s clear evidence that those who consume open courseware are predominantly affluent people,” Reich told me after his lecture. That’s not a bad thing— if education technology doesn’t benefit the middle class, he says, it won’t gain traction. “When great universities put their course materials online, it expands the opportunities for students to get access to that kind of education — I think there are very few readily apparent drawbacks,” he said. But it’s worth checking who’s taking advantage of this kind of opportunity.”

http://thephoenix.com/Boston/news/132749-cost-of-open-courseware/

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This free hour-long session, “Leaping the Chasm: Moving from Buzzwords to Implementation of Learning Analytics,” will explore the roots of learning analytics as well as the context in which they are now being considered in higher education. Examples will be provided of learning analytics implementations and leading-edge research, and current trends will be extrapolated to present a vision of what a data-intensive university might look like in the future.

* This presentation is part of the Spotlight on Analytics series. View the first webinar archive.

Those unable to attend may wish to visit the archives after the event or browse related resources:

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