Author: Oscar Retterer

Joining the ranks of other famous colleges on iTunes, Harvard has just uploaded a series of lectures, preview clips, podcasts and performances on Apple’s own iTunes U.

[Source: MacWorld]

Blackboard is preparing to release Blackboard Mobile Learn, a new version of the company’s flagship learning management system tailored for smart phones and other mobile devices. It will debut as a native application for Android, iPhone, BlackBerry, and “other Web-enabled devices” in the late spring of 2010.

Mobile Learn, according to Blackboard, will move beyond the company’s current mobile offerings and will mimic the full functionality of the Web-based Learn platform, including two-way communication between students and teachers, access to gradebooks, blog access and commenting, discussion board participation, and student-to-student e-mail communications.

[Source: T.H.E. Journal]

It can be difficult to write software for a gadget without being able to touch it. But that has not stopped developers from rushing to create applications for the Apple iPad.

For small start-ups and big Internet and media companies alike, the iPad, and tablet computers in general, beckon as the next wide open technology frontier.

[Source: New York Times]

Blackboard announced that it would release new applications for iPhones and other mobile devices. The course-management-software provider already offers applications for iPhones and Blackberry phones but does not allow students to check grades, add comments to discussion boards, or use other features of its Learn product from those applications. Company officials say the forthcoming applications will let students and professors access just about all of the services of its course-management system from mobile devices.

[Source: Chronicle of Higher Education]

Researchers from Peru and Belgium have developed an open source learning solution that enables health care workers to connect to the free learning platform Moodle with their iPhone, iPod, and some other last generation mobile devices. This is a first application of its kind for both Moodle and the iPhone.

Project and demo site: http://iphone.moodle.com.au/

[Source: EurekAlert]

Blackboard Mobile Learn to debut on select Sprint smartphones in June. Students can complete class work, check grades, interact with professors and more from virtually anywhere, anytime and at no extra charge on the Now Network(TM). The new partnership aligns with the National Broadband Plan proposal to support and promote online learning.

[Source: Market Watch]

While faculty are often blamed for failing to adequately integrate technology into the classroom, this article suggests that there is often a lack of support for doing so; external barriers to adoption can include long-held expectations by students and their parents, the endurance of classrooms designed as lecture spaces, and even the need to fulfill tenure requirements.

[Source: Campus Technology]

The title says it all…check it out!

Read over 450,000 Kindle books and get the best reading experience available for your Mac – no Kindle required. Kindle for Mac is available for download on Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) and 10.6 (Snow Leopard).

Kindle Reading apps are also available for the PC, iPhone/iPod Touch, and the BlackBerry.

How the Internet and mash-up culture change everything we know about reading.

In his deliberately provocative — and deeply nihilistic — new book, “Reality Hunger,” the onetime novelist David Shields asserts that fiction “has never seemed less central to the culture’s sense of itself.”

Mr. Shields’s pasted-together book and defense of appropriation underscore the contentious issues of copyright, intellectual property and plagiarism that have become prominent in a world in which the Internet makes copying and recycling as simple as pressing a couple of buttons. In fact, the dynamics of the Web, as the artist and computer scientist Jaron Lanier observes in another new book, are encouraging “authors, journalists, musicians and artists” to “treat the fruits of their intellects and imaginations as fragments to be given without pay to the hive mind.”

[Source: New York Times]

The latest social-media craze tags campus landmarks with labels and risqué comments, via cellphone.

[Source: Chronicle of Higher Education]

Climbing the “comic book” charts is the graphic novel Atlas Black, an unsung hero of sorts, whose adventures are capturing the minds of college students at the Texas Tech University Rawls College of Business.

[Source: PR Newswire]

Aviary is a suite of creative tools. There are currently six editors including image and audio editors.

These applications run on web browsers and allow users to store and access their work from any computer. Use Aviary to create, modify and share your work- from graphic designs to audio files- easily and effectively.

Aviary integrates seamlessly with Google Apps to let your users share and edit documents directly from the Google Docs interface.

Gapminder’s web site has gotten a major overhaul. The site has added many new, helpful functions to make it easier to use Gapminder.

Gapminder, a non-profit foundation based in Stockholm, Sweden, promotes sustainable global development and the achievement of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals by unveiling the beauty of statistics for a fact based world view.

[Source: Gapminder]

The draft of a new federal plan focuses on improving digital learning at the elementary- and secondary-school level, but it calls for changes in higher education as well.

“Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology,” released this month by the Department of Education, is a draft of the National Educational Technology Plan 2010. It calls for an increased role for online learning in kindergarten through 12th grade and says colleges of education must include online learning in their curricula as well.

[Source: Chronicle of Higher Education]

More than half frequently or always consult Wikipedia for course-related research, says this report.

[Source: Chronicle of Higher Education]

After a long wait and more than 50,000 signatures on an online petition, cyclists will be happy to know that Google has finally added bicycle routes to Google Maps.

[Source: Los Angeles Times]

On many college campuses, it’s become a widely recognized comic form: Students dress up as the Ghostbusters, the Incredible Hulk, or Pac-Man; parade through a lecture hall as a perplexed professor looks on; and film the whole event for YouTube.

Watch…

[Source: Chronicle of Higher Education]

A review of some institutions that have banned laptops from the classroom and for what reasons. This article does not offer any counterpoint views to the practice.

[Source: Washington Post]