When SCUP members were last surveyed, most used LinkedIn for professional networking and Facebook for personal networking. A new Facebook app might change that. We tried it, Branch Out. It's good enough that we think you should give it a try. As we "went to press" we learned of a second, similar app: In the Door, but haven't investigated it enough to say more than that it does not appear to be as fully fleshed out as Branch Out.

As one review of the app said:

We think building a career networking app on top of Facebook’s social network is actually brilliant because it taps into very real and vibrant connections within a social graph, not just the sometimes stale professional Rolodex stored in a LinkedIn profile.

So, we did it. It's basically another way to filter, sift, and experience Facebook data about your friends, all focused on their career profiles, no playful stuff. After a few, easy steps - very easy, maybe 15 seconds - we got what you see below.

The bells and whistles in this app are great, too. There is an activity feed that tells you when your friends make changes to their career profiles in Facebook, for example. How many companies, which, filterable, do you have friends at. Do those companies have jobs. It appears to be useful.

We think it will go wildly viral and can't imagine why Facebook is not already doing this within its own structure. It's worth the five minutes that it will take to become addicted to it. And I would take anyone's bet that the percentage of SCUPers using Facebook for business will go up a lot in the next year.

more

Did you ever experience the crisis that hits when you near a deadline, working with others on a collaborative document, and you suddenly realize that no one knows which of 5–6 versions are "the latest"? At SCUP–46, you can learn about this free, easy to use, and powerful tool at a Skill Session; one of many. The program, below, will open to the Skill Sessions pages if you click on it.

Perhaps you thought, gee, if only we could all work in the same document at the same time, so it was always the "latest" version. And wouldn't it be cool if we could see the changes each collaborator is making, in real-time? How about, if we collaborating with a spreadsheet, if there was a real-time chat window to communicate through, as well? Oh, and how about being able to quickly make an online form that, when completed, automatically completes an online, collaborative spreadsheet?

All that, and more, is in Google Documents, and it is free. Organizations can pay a fee and have greater control and security over a Google Apps domain. A lot of institutions are licensing it now, and Google Apps has a lot more than just email. Google Docs is one part a planner could well put to use. 

Here's a tour of Google Docs. 

Enjoy this succinct, two-page summary of a concurrent session from SCUP's 2010 annual conference. You'll be reading a 50-page set of such summaries that until very recently were only available to SCUP members and others who attended SCUP-45 in 2010. We've left the page open for you to "How Do Smart Meters Make a University More Intelligent?" Just click on the image below.

With the help of SmartSynch, the University of Mississippi (UM, or Ole Miss) has embarked on an ambitious energy-management pilot. SmartMeters transmit data on individual buildings’ real-time energy consumption, providing analysis capability that is yielding granular understanding of buildings’ efficiency levels and occupants’ utilization habits. Social media is being used to disseminate the data transparently, engaging the campus community. Financial reward programs will drive deeper engagement and more behavior change. Dashboards will facilitate comparisons and analysis, with the insights leveraged to inform policy decisions and intelligent building design. The program’s educational and societal value will be compounded when graduates spread its philosophy and practices far and wide.

Diane Auer Jones is a former Bush administration department of education official who is now employed in for-profit education world. In this aggressive post to The Chronicle's blog, Brainstorm, she takes on some regulatory changes by the Obama administration and posits them as mostly about hindering the uses of information technology. The entire piece includes no mention of her employment or of the fact that the new regulations are intended to cope with quality control issues by some major for-profit competitors.

It will not be long before students in brick-and-mortar classrooms will be required to have clickers in their hands so that they can press the button every 15 minutes to prove they are awake and in the room, and so that a computer can record each time they raise their electronic hand to ask or answer a question. Faculty members will need to preserve thousands of e-mails to show that they interacted with a student, even if he or she missed class on a given day. I guess faculty will be required to keep electronic logs of who visited during office hours, too. ...

You are absolutely correct, Mr. President, that the world has changed. So maybe it is time for your Department of Education to realize that the students of tomorrow will not be educated with chalkboards and overheads, no matter how much those of us who are over 40 wish to relish the glory days of our own college past. I challenge anyone who questions the quality of online education to sign up for an online course to see first hand just what it is like. Go ahead. Do it. Come back and tell us how it was. But for those who have never experienced online learning or teaching first hand, perhaps it is time to stop parroting hearsay and start making some evidence-based observations of their own.

Thank you, Mr. President, for recognizing that technology has changed our world. It is now time to allow technology to change higher education.

Yes, more than half of us (personal prediction) will be using tablet computers in two years. The best known tablet computer is the iPad. University Business magazine's Tim Goral reviews tablets: What they are, where they are, and so forth, in an article that you should read if you want to be sure that you fully understand the phenomenon:

What makes it different? First, it isn’t a computer in the traditional sense. That is, it’s not like a laptop with command-line capabilities that can be tweaked and modified to your liking. The iPad’s closed environment device doesn’t invite tinkering. It uses a flash drive, rather than a conventional hard drive; combined with new, lighter battery technology, that brings the weight down to about 1.5 pounds. A touch-screen interface eliminates the need for a stylus, and if you need a keyboard, a near full-sized virtual keyboard appears at the touch of an icon. And at just a half-inch thick, it is easy to carry anywhere.

“Our office of information technology surveys students regularly and has found that while 90 percent of students own laptops, they don’t often bring them to class,” says Ernst. “They generally don’t want to lug them around. The iPads seem to fit a whole different niche. There are huge advantages in weight, ease of use, and instant access. Just push the home button and it’s instantly on.”

When Colorado State University planned the new building for its school of business, opened in April 2010, the process faced many obstacles that could have distracted from the foal of a technology-dense facility. This article is brief, but provides an outline for the process that resulted in the most advanced technology solution in the region.

“We were very lucky,” said Jon Schroth, director of Information Technology for the College. “Things could have blown up in a lot of ways,” he said, referring to the challenges of protecting the vision for a progressive technology plan for the building. “Because the technology is the last thing to go in, a lot of things can happen to the budget. Like if a water main breaks, it can cost $20,000… or if someone decides they want slate instead of tile.”

“There was a lot of resistance along the way, and a lot of things that could have killed it budgetarily,” he said. In spite of Schroth losing a lot of sleep over the whole process, CSU College of Business Dean Ajay Menon and Associate Dean John Hoxmeier championed the new technology plan. “That’s why it worked.”

The Economist gave us a holiday treat this year, a fairly deep dig into the value of a Ph.D., titled The Disposable Academic. (That'll give you some idea of the thrust of it.)

One thing many PhD students have in common is dissatisfaction. Some describe their work as “slave labour”. Seven-day weeks, ten-hour days, low pay and uncertain prospects are widespread. You know you are a graduate student, goes one quip, when your office is better decorated than your home and you have a favourite flavour of instant noodle. “It isn’t graduate school itself that is discouraging,” says one student, who confesses to rather enjoying the hunt for free pizza. “What’s discouraging is realising the end point has been yanked out of reach.”

Whining PhD students are nothing new, but there seem to be genuine problems with the system that produces research doctorates (the practical “professional doctorates” in fields such as law, business and medicine have a more obvious value). There is an oversupply of PhDs. Although a doctorate is designed as training for a job in academia, the number of PhD positions is unrelated to the number of job openings. Meanwhile, business leaders complain about shortages of high-level skills, suggesting PhDs are not teaching the right things. The fiercest critics compare research doctorates to Ponzi or pyramid schemes.

We don't doubt that "social learning" tools are either going to prove useful and popular or the equivalent functionality will eventually just be built into a student or a faculty member's tool kit for teaching and learning.

This article in The Chronicle of Higher Education by Marc Parry and Jeffrey R. Young discusses the concept, one early failure, and then takes a look at four of what the authors consider to be the most interesting new tools available for use: FinalsClub, OpenStudy, GradeGuru, and Mixable.

The comments below the article are interesting, if predictable:

I agree with drfunz. Students are being co-opted by companies/sites like Facebook that claim to link them globally in an instant--like a party all the time. The reality is that many of these sites depend on dollars from advertisers who depend on number of hits. Eventually, it all falls down. Look at Wikipedia who has its founder pictured above the entry, flogging for money to support a "social research" site. That comes now after years of teachers saying that Wikipedia is nothing more than a superficial knowledge site for those who don't know ANYTHING about the topic and banning it as a real source of research.

Teachers who immediately run to social network sites because that is where the students go are often only doing two things: wanting to show the students they are hip and cool, and therefore worthy of respect, OR letting the tail wag the dog--letting student habits dictate pedagogy. "Just in time" is a phrase that applies to shipments of goods, not learning. Students who learn "just in time" by looking it up, carrying PowerPoint sheets into tests, and only doing online research will forget that information very quickly--often before the test or paper due the next day. It's basic psychology: short term memory can only hold 7 items +/- 2 for 30 seconds. The only way to get it into longterm memory is to practice, restate, review--none of the processes that are part of the "click click" computer generation.

How can a degree program, general education program, or other course of study make substantial, widely appreciated improvements in who learns, what they learn, and how well they learn it? Under the right circumstances, such improvements are possible. What follows are suggestions, some counter-intuitive, that increase the chances of their being successful and sustained.

• Don't implement a change strategy by delegating each part of it to a different stakeholder—this recommendation for faculty, that one for the information technology unit, a third for administrators, a fourth for the assessment staff. Instead, work with a team composed of people from all those groups and more.
• Simultaneously upgrade content, deepen learning, and improve the program's ability to attract and retain a variety of students.
• But in doing so, take your time.
• Use technology as a lever for change, but slow down. Don't leap from one hot technology to the next.
• Find ways for faculty and students to save time.

Before elaborating on these suggestions, I'll explain why they allude to time so frequently.

We've seen a lot of reporting coming out of this year's EDUCAUSE conference. In this report, Joshua Kim says that this year's conference felt different than previous events - and that the Gates Foundation is the reason. Below, some language from this brief report. Here's a link to the Next Generation Learning Challenge website. Planners need to pay attention - this could be a major turning point in, for example, online learning.

This EDUCAUSE Conference has felt different from all the rest, and the reason I think is Gates Foundation Next Generation Learning Challenges. This is the first EDUCAUSE Conference that I've attended where there is a real feeling of confidence that information technology can be the lever for structural change in our higher ed system.

The real power of the Gates Next Generation Learning Challenge is not the money, although that helps, but the ability to focus the problems in higher education around a defined set of issues. Gates has us all speaking the same language. In talking with Cameron Evans (Microsoft), Ray Henderson (Blackboard), and Don Kilburn (Pearson), the conversation kept coming back to the role that their companies can play in addressing the issues that have been identified by Gates.

Leadership from technology, LMS, and publishing companies are now all focused on utilizing the power of their companies to work on the specific issues that the Next Generation Learning Challenges are designed to address.