Veterans are finding online learning programs particularity appealing.

The newest numbers are available from Sloan, with online enrollments continuing to climb. The number of students taking at least one course online increased by 12.9% from the previous year.

The comments on the post at IHE are interesting as well. I think Gavin Moodie's comment that the distinction between online and face to face instruction will fade over time is a good one.

President-elect Obama will need to address net neutrality at some point in the next four years. The importance of the issue is spelled out clearly by Paul Cesarini of Bowling Green State University. He argues that network neutrality legislation is needed to prevent the segmentation of the internet, like what we see now with phones. His examples reminded me of the early days of home web-access, when people tried to share channels and chat rooms with friends. AOL users didn't have access to the same channels Prodigy.net users did. The web was segmented.

The power of the web is in the open access, free movement and sharing of idea, products, and files. We need to share in academia. Our research and work is weaker when it isn't shared, reviewed, commented on and built on.

As the first commenter at the blog post on the Chronicle noted, people have been using Skype to collaborate across distances for a while now. But it is still a good reminder that distance is coming to mean less and less in academia. We can work with anyone. We can learn from researchers in India, Antarctica, Brazil, Pequot Lakes even when our research has nothing to do with India, Antarctica, Brazil or Pequot Lakes. Imagine a world where a Public Health researcher can learn how colleagues all over the world are addressing the challenges obesity and use that knowledge to propose local solutions. Or a researcher on educational policy can get feedback on a policy draft from experts in China and India and Canada.

Our research questions, and importantly, our solutions, can pull from the best in the world, not just the best in the country. The changes happening now are remarkable.

The University of Minnesota offers two degree completion programs for students who already have college credits. The two degree programs, BS in Applied Studies and BA or BS in Multidisciplinary Studies, are transfer-friendly for students whose credits are from outside the University of Minnesota.

Learn more about the University of Minnesota's online offerings at the Digital Campus.

This has been going around for a long time. But it's a good video, and I'm going to show it in a training next week, so I dug it up again.

I like that the video points out the flaws in trying to collaborate in email; most of us have been doing our work this way for so long that the inefficiency is not always obvious.

Campus Technology online reports on a Gartner study indicating that Open Source e-learning/course management systems such as Moodle and Sakai are gaining ground on commercial systems. Part of this is attributed to the uncertainty created by the Blackboard lawsuit against Desire2Learn.

John P. Campbell's data mining project at Purdue is featured in the Chronicle this week. I first heard about this project at Educause Midwest in 2007; the project is much further now. Campbell and his colleagues are able to notify students when the data indicates the student is struggling, and students are responding.

Outbreak at WatersEdge also includes a teachers guide and health career exploration options.

Dr. Hargittai’s larger body of research relates to inequality and technology use. She has published on the demographic differences of users and non-users of technology and also on how people of different demographics use the same technologies in different ways.

“You know better than I that for many students class has come to consist of some listening but also plenty of e-mailing, shopping, news browsing, and gossip-site visiting. Many students say that the visual images on classmates’ screens are diverting, and they too eventually go off track and check e-mail, sometimes to return to the class discussion and sometimes barely so. Our faculty (and I, as well as many of your classmates with whom I have spoken) believe strongly that we need to do everything we can to make Chicago’s classroom experiences all they can be.�

I certainly understand the impulse to ban internet access in the classroom; I have observed classes with students surfing all manner of sites. It is distracting to the students nearby. It limits the depth of discussions you can have in class if students are distracted. Even in a large lecture class, I assume it is also frustrating to the professor. Most of us can tell when our audience is not listening.

You can view a movie of Viewfinder to see what it can do.

Viewfinder is reminiscent of Microsoft Live Labs’ Photosynth. But Photosynth relies on personal collections of photos, from what I can tell.

Using Flickr for source photos in Viewfinder adds a lot of power to the Viewfinder application. Flickr, as a collection, represents a huge amount of data and understanding of our (collective) surroundings. Flickr is fascinating now, and will be much more so in another 10 years, another 30 years. Adding Google Earth as a layer behind the Flickr collection extends our capacity to interact with and understand photos in Flickr.