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April 11, 2007 | Dean Froslie: Universities Tackle Student-Athlete Use of Social Networking Sites

In the high-stakes world of college sports, new scandals and public relations nightmares continually emerge. Now a new online twist has surfaced: how to address less-than-flattering posts from student-athletes on social networking sites. One Minnesota university has taken a bold step by banning student-athlete use of Facebook, MySpace and other sites after disciplining students for online posts last year.

March 10, 2007 | Greg Ness: Worldly Teacher

Via Mike Neiss at Tom Peters’ blog, comes this point to a Did You Know PowerPoint presentation done by Karl Fisch, a teacher at Arapahoe High School in Centennial, Colorado. The presentation is filled with some amazing facts for students or anyone. Be sure to download both the PowerPoint and the mp3 file to the same place on your computer to get the full effect, or, as an alternative, you can download a Windows Media Player version.

March 05, 2007 | Greg Ness: Higher Learning For Free

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) plans to provide free Internet access to its entire 1800 courses by the end of the year (story here via Digg). We reported on MIT’s OpenCourseWare last fall (see Big Universities = Big Business), but this is a considerable expansion of that program.

There are an incredible number of free e-learning opportunities available to anyone in the world that has a computer and Internet access. That is why MIT has also put its weight behind the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative sponsored through the U.N. This is a remarkable example of a great university doing something big to change the world.

February 26, 2007 | Dean Froslie: Academia Wrestles with Wikipedia’s Potential and Limitations

The use of Wikipedia among college students has led to crackdowns from professors – and promising uses in other areas of academia. At Middlebury College, the history department has banned students from citing Wikipedia in papers or exams after several professors noted that inaccurate information was being cited. (see this story). Meanwhile, colleges and universities such as MIT, Cornell, Indiana and Yale have used Wikipedia in the classroom.

February 20, 2007 | Greg Ness: Enter SCADshorts, Win an iPod

Matt Charpentier, an Art Director at Sundog, and several of his creative fellow Dandy Dwarves were commissioned by the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) to develop SCADshorts. Check it out. Each month there’s a new contest with a short video, and all you have to do is look for clues and guess the name of the video. There are more details in the “About” and “How To Play” sections of the above link.

January 17, 2007 | Greg Ness: If You’ve Had To Buy Books At A College Bookstore, You May Cheer When You Read This

From a consumer viewpoint, the Internet has a remarkable track record for changing the status quo regarding monopolies, oligopolies or business categories where there is a strong middleman component that adds to the final price of goods. There’s even a big word for it: disintermediation. According to this story at Business Week, disintermediation may be coming to a college bookstore near you.

October 05, 2006 | Dean Froslie: Stanford Launches Wiki for Students

In a unique twist on social media, Stanford University has launched a wiki on its public web site. Modeled after Wikipedia, the Stanford Wiki can be viewed by anyone but edited only by students. It only has eight entries so far, but categories have been set up for academics, campus life, food and drink, orientation and technology topics.

October 03, 2006 | Greg Ness: More Free Higher Ed Courses

In a post a few weeks ago, I mentioned MIT’s incredible OpenCourseWare, a treasure trove of free online courses from one of the country’s top universities. Yesterday, Wendy Boswell at Lifehacker had a post that pointed to many more free online college courses from all over the country.