TED talk: Let's use video to reinvent education

Salman Khan talk at the TED conference.

Professional Ranking of World Universities

2011 results of the Ecole des Mines ranking. This is the fifth edition, for previous years click here.
This school ranking is based on the number of alumni now CEOs (or equivalent) on the Fortune 500 2010 list.

Top 5

1. Harvard
2. Tokyo
3. Keio
4. HEC, France
5. Kyoto

NYU Stern drops GMAT requirement for EMBAs

Like Chicago Booth, Kellogg, Cornell's Johnson or others, Stern now drops GMAT requirement for EMBAs

• FT article
• Article from J. Byrne (Poets & Quants for Executives website)

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

Does online access boost citations?

This is the question posed by two researchers in their working paper:
Did Online Access to Journals Change the Economics Literature? (SSRN)

Mark McCabe, adjunct professor at the University of Michigan’s School of Information, and Christopher Snyder, economics professor at Dartmouth College question the often reported 'citation advantage' to publishing in online open-access journals.

This Steve Kolowich article explains more about the study and its potential  impact for the proponents of open-access publishing.

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)

New ways to measure impact

This Inside Higher Ed. article: New Measures of Scholarly Impact describes attempts at integrating new metrics in citation analysis and research impact.

Eigenfactor is currently looking into how to incorporate real-time usage data, as well as “citation-like references” from scholars on social networking sites. Shout-outs on scholarly blogs, Twitter, and Facebook, along with digital dog-earing on social bookmarking sites such as CiteULike and Connotea, might also be used as proxies for influence

The article also references research from the MESUR (MEtrics from Scholarly Usage of Resources) project.

image from the MESUR website.

Tenure expiration date?

Tenure: Mend It, Don't End It  Arthur Levine describes some the advantages and - in no uncertain terms - gives his views on the weaknesses of the tenure system.

More often tenure provides a lifetime of job security not to professors whose work requires protection, but to a significant minority of "deadwood" — individuals who are unproductive, out of date, or poor in their research, teaching or institutional commitment.

His suggestion is to have a 30 year contract to limit the length of tenure and thus insure an institution's ability to maintain 'intellectual vitality'.

Questionable Science Behind Academic Rankings

New York Times article questioning the reliability of university rankings after the release of the Times Higher Education ranking where Alexandria University in Egypt had placed 147th.

Paul Wouters - director of the Centre for Science and Technology Studies and professor of Scientometrics at Leiden University  - wrote on his blog about this issue: 

[...] the reason for this high position is the performance of exactly one (1) academic: Mohamed El Naschie, who published 323 articles in the Elsevier journal Chaos, Solitons and Fractals of which he is the founding editor.

His article mentions the fact that THE has "outsourced citation analysis to Thomson Reuters" 

THE World University Rankings 2010-2011, powered by Thomson Reuters