How's your life?

Check out the newly released interactive OECD Better Life Index. You can also create your own better life index and have it compared to the average index. The index compares well-being based on 11 topics - housing, income, jobs, community, education, environment, governance, health, life satisfaction, safety and work-life balance - and integrates data on gender and inequality

Free online courses from Harvard and MIT

Harvard and MIT have teamed up to release edX an open source platform to deliver online courses worldwide.
The schools have committed to a combined $60 million ($30 million each) in institutional support, grants and philanthropy to launch the collaboration. Here is an excerpt of their FAQs.

Who can take edX courses? Will there be an admissions process?
EdX will be available to anyone in the world with an internet connection, and in general, there will not be an admissions process. For a modest fee, and as determined by the edX board, MIT and Harvard, credentials will be granted only to students who earn them by demonstrating mastery of the material of a subject.

Is there anything innovative about the online technology?
Yes. It will move beyond the standard model of online education that relies on watching video content and will offer an interactive experience for students. And the technology will be open source; other universities will be able to leverage the innovative technology to create their own online offerings.

edX press conference:

Video streaming by Ustream

Twitter for Academics, a 'how to' guide from LSE

Can anything of academic value ever be said in just 140 characters?

The LSE Public Policy Group and the LSE Impact of Social Sciences blog seeks to answer this question, and show academics and researchers how to get the most out of the micro-blogging site. The Guide is designed to lead the novice through the basics of Twitter but also provide tips on how it can aid the teaching and research of the more experienced academic tweeter. [full press release]

Download the guide: Using Twitter in university research, teaching and impact activities

Where all the money is - a visualization

Click on the picture below to zoom.



Sources.

E-textbooks: another project

Indiana University has released a summary of two years of research on their E-Textbook project.

About 60% of the students surveyed said they preferred the e-textbook to a paper textbook, although this ranged from a high of 84% to a low of 36% depending upon the course.

Factors influencing preference for e-textbooks:
Ability for instructor to annotate and share with the class:	69%
Sustainability (reducing paper)	67%
Cost	64%
Weight of Books	61%
Student Annotations	60%

See also Chronicle article on the topic:

The university requires certain students to purchase e-textbooks and negotiates unusually low prices by promising publishers large numbers of sales—now has the participation of major textbook publishers, and university officials plan to expand the effort.

The Case Study and the Tablet

The B-School Case Study Gets a Digital Makeover

'Tablet technology is beginning to transform case studies from straightforward narratives into complex and changeable plots—a metamorphosis nearly a century in the making.'

This BusinessWeek article describes how some B-schools are using digital tablet platforms (iPads, Kindles) to deliver course materials and case studies in particular.

Google+ Project

Google's new project Google+ while still available 'on invitation only' is growing fast and is already considered for use in the classroom according to this article.

It is also starting to get less enthusiastic coverage

Interactive tour.

TED talk: Let's use video to reinvent education

Salman Khan talk at the TED conference.

New player in digital content access and management

Official press release
Related HBR article discussing The Present and Future of Digital Publishing

Higher Education Emerging Technologies for 2011

Per Educause press release:

Each year, the Horizon Report describes six areas of emerging technology that will have significant impact on higher education and creative expression over the next one to five years. The areas of emerging technology cited for 2011 are:

Time to adoption: One Year or Less

• Electronic Books
• Mobiles

Time to adoption: Two to Three Years

• Augmented Reality
• Game-based Learning

Time to adoption: Four to Five Years

• Gesture-based Computing
• Learning Analytics

Data visualization tools

Brief round-up of data visualization tools mentioned on the web lately:

O'Reilly Radar started a new series this month tagged: Strata Gems
Example: using Twitter for graphs:

Taken from post.

Google Books and Google Labs released: Book Ngram Viewer, here is more about this new product.

Example:

Finally, this post details 10 Best Data Visualization Projects:

Example: Where the Tourist Really Flock (using Flickr)

The battleground that is business research

FT article

[...]in business research, [...] an exceedingly interesting battle rages. Only HBS, Darden and Ivey believe in case-based research and create a meaningful number of cases each year. The remaining schools focus primarily, if not exclusively, on what might be called contemporary social sciences research.

Mobile Teaching - Mobile Learning

From Educause Quarterly 2010 , Number 3

• Teaching America’s First Course on Mobile Phone Learning
• Mobile Learning Environment

See also, earlier this year, Rutgers initiative Mini-MBA™: Digital Marketing certificate for Executive, provides participants with free iPad containing course material.