Those who know me will hopefully back me on this, but I don’t exaggerate about technology all that frequently.  Yes I do have a tendency to hammer the few companies or sites who get on my bad side, but generally speaking I try to be pretty objective and even-handed with my evaluations about tools and services.

With that being said, I have to say that Paper.li is perhaps the most awesome application of the Twitter API I’ve seen in the 3.5 years I’ve been using Twitter.

There are a number of different sites available that will aggregate Tweets, and mash them up in a way that creates some structure amidst the anarchy that makes Twitter such a brilliant medium – and yet none of them have done what Paper.li has done.

In my view it’s taken Twitter and transformed the nature of the content and dialogue that emerges from it; taken one medium and created something entirely different from it – and it does it beautifully.

This is still an Alpha service mind you, which means it’s still very much in development.  However it is such a solid offering already that I’ve integrated it into my usage habits, which is something most applications take weeks to do.

Paper.li takes the Tweets you’ve posted, as well as those of the people in your network, and automatically generates a newspaper view from them – updated every 24 hours – that incorporates images and post teasers from referenced articles, embedded media clips and documents and organised into topical sections based on key words and hashtags.

From the user’s perspective all that is required is providing your username and Paper.li does the rest.  I’m truly astounded at the product of such little effort required from the user.

It has completely affected the manner with which I engage with the content in the Twitter streams of my network.  On Twitter I filter and select; perhaps recognise something interesting every once in a while.  With Paper.li, the nature of the structure and organisation of the content has completely altered the way it’s perceived and read.

To see what I mean, take a look at my Paper.li page.  All I did was provide my username.

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The following is a preliminary draft of a document I’m preparing as a support reference for an upcoming forum on assessment later this month. Its intended audience is academic staff who are highly unfamiliar with wiki technology and what they can be used for in an educational context.

If anyone has comments or suggestions on what can be improved, or what is perhaps unclear please let me know and I’ll incorporate the changes. The aim is to make the document easily understood by someone who may never even heard the term “wiki” before.

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D’Arcy Norman points out that Unlimited magazine has recently devoted an issue to open education. Duncan Kinney writes an Open Education Primer. George Siemens and Max Fawcett debate massively open online courses (MOOC).

“ckelty” has a new post discussing Rice University Press shutting down (covered by OEN). From the post:

As a board member of Rice University Press, a former employee, and a participant observer in the whole experiment, I’ve had a worms-eye view the fiasco as it has unfolded. I won’t detail all the ways in which RUP is innovative, but for those in the business, i’ll just say: you should all be madly copying their ideas, because RUP had and has no real competitors.

Curriki has a new post listing 10 sources for free textbooks.

By MEGAN BOEHNKE, iStock Analyst

Hundreds of students taking one of the University of Tennessee’s most popular courses, remedial algebra, arrived last week to the first day of class — in their dorm rooms. For the first time the university will deliver half of its Math 119 sections, which enroll about 1,000 students each fall, online. “It’s a challenging course for us because in some sense, it’s barely at the college level,” said Chuck Collins, a math professor in charge of the course. “We’ve been putting a lot of resources into it without a lot of success … when it comes to matching students with their ability and doing it in a cost-effective way.”

http://www.istockanalyst.com/article/viewiStockNews/articleid/4431913

by Andrew Pantazi, University of Florida Alligator

The old Online Learning is out at UF, and Sakai is in. Sakai, an open-source course management system, is run by a community of universities, including the University of Michigan, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Cambridge University. It was chosen to replace UF’s previous system, WebCT Vista 8, because Blackboard, which runs WebCT, said it would stop supporting the program by October 2012. Already, there were plenty of problems with WebCT, according to Doug Johnson, the manager for UF’s e-Learning Support Services, such as issues with discussion boards and e-mails.

http://www.alligator.org/news/campus/article_3c99debc-af3a-11df-b0fb-001cc4c002e0.html

by Rob Manning, OPB News

Oregon’s schools have at least two really big problems heading into the new school year: a graduation rate of only 66 percent, and a budget crisis of historic proportions. Some education officials say you can address both problems with one fix: getting more students to take classes online. Rob Manning reports on a new statewide online option.

http://news.opb.org/article/11581-could-online-classes-help-ease-oregons-education-problems/

I’ve heard of SNAPP before – ” software tool that allows users to visualize the network of interactions resulting from discussion forum posts and replies” – but decided to play around with it today. This is a good example of a fairly simple, light-weight tool to analyze social interactions in an LMS like Moodle, Blackboard, or Desire2Learn. The process is simple: install a simple bookmarklet in your browser, go to your LMS, select the discussion forum that you want to analyze, and then activate the SNAPP plugin. SNAPP does its analysis and posts the results on the bottom of your browser window. The analysis isn’t very comprehensive, but does provide frequency of posts and social network structure. Greater analysis of the nature of interaction (i.e quality, not only quantity) through language/concept analysis seems like a logical next step. The best part of the tool is that it’s under the control of the educator (or learner). It’s simple, easy to install, and could provide useful insight into interactions. If you want to try it, download SNAPP and head to the introduction forum (an open forum, no login required) from CCK08 and see how it works.
What are you using for light-weight analysis of student learning or content?

Peter Sefton has a new post on the fundamentals of OpenCourseWare. From the post:

There is an obvious advantage to being the one whose materials are out there being used.

Audrey Watters has a new post on five ways tech startups can disrupt education. Openness is listed among many of the ways listed. From the post:

Our modern education system is, after all, not so modern, with many of its practices strongly rooted in a “factory” model circa the Industrial Revolution. But what does revolutionizing education really look like? And which startups working in education technology are really “disruptive”?

George Siemens responds. Thanks to Veera Uusoksa for the link.

Ashley Michelle Papon has a new post on alternatives to college, including OpenCourseWare. From the post:

“It’s kind of like a self-paced class, except that I don’t need to worry about receiving a grade when it’s all said and done,” King [open education participant] says. “I never learned well with a teacher just talking at me from the front of the room. I can read until I understand it.”

“crve” is reporting that Microsoft’s Security Development Lifecycle is being licensed CC BY-NC-SA. From the post:

This should make it easier for others to use and distribute the principles behind SDL and for programmers to integrate SDL components into their own development processes.

Jane Park has a new post noting CC License functionality has been added to yolink, a browser plug-in that enhances search.

by G. A. Anderson, Helium

“Cloud computing” is a relatively new term for many people who are inexperienced in IT and all the latest technologies and devices that help us in our everyday work and play. What is it? “It is software. It is hardware.” It is technology. It is one of the newest forms of technology and is used in many different ways. One of its main features is its flexibility. For example, a young student in a low to middle-class school district can have access to the same educational tools through this technology as a student in an affluent, well-equipped school district. Online, university students have the same access to learning materials, instructors, labs, and libraries as students in top-ranked campus universities.

http://www.helium.com/items/1928759-why-cloud-computing-provides-flexibility-for-online-learning-in-higher-education

by Pandula Siribaddana, Helium

In online learning, one of the most discussed issues would be the plagiarism issues in submitted online assignments as well as postings in different forums. Being a knowledge base of its own, the internet can provide the learners with enormous amount of information which at times may be abused by some to obtain good results by not necessarily achieving the intended outcomes of the course. Such abuses of submitting someone else’s work as if it is your own is known as plagiarism and is something that most institutions do not tolerate even for a single instance.

http://www.helium.com/items/1929729-distance-learning-how-to-avoid-plagiarism-in-your-postings

by KCRA

As Northern California kids head back to school this month, a growing number are doing so without ever leaving home. The Elk Grove Unified School District has launched online learning for students as young as five years old. Anne Zeman, the administrator in charge of the program, said more than 100 students have signed up so far, and at least another 100 are interested. She said calls come in every day about the Virtual Academy.

http://www.kcra.com/news/24706205/detail.html