David Wiley taught an online course at Utah State University last fall and let anyone fully participate, even if they weren’t enrolled. In the end, five people the registrar had never heard of joined discussions with the 15 or so regular students and got papers graded by Mr. Wiley, who considered the extra work a public service.
Assessments modelled on a pub quiz or on the television show Dragons' Den are among the unusual practices pioneered in universities as an alternative to traditional exams and essays
The Social Media Classroom is a new project started by Howard Rheingold which offers an open-source Drupal-based web service to teachers and students for the purpose of introducing social media into the classroom. The service includes tools like forums, blogs, wikis, chat, social bookmarking, RSS, microblogging, widgets, video conferencing, and more.
A three-year research project, headed by Mimi Ito, involving 28 researchers and 800 subjects, and sponsored by the MacArthur Foundation, finds that the stereotypical idea of the Internet as a soul-devouring, anti-social wasteland for our kids is just plain wrong.
The turn to online research is narrowing the range of modern scholarship, a new study suggests. Diversity will be lost if networks do not specifically include it (see http://scienceoftheinvisible.blogspot.com/search?q=wisdom+of+crowds).
RAE 2008 can be criticised on several grounds but perhaps the most significant is that it is based on a view of universities that is 20 years out of date.