Tech-Ed News Round-Up

By John Glaser

• Joshua Kim on Scitable. Scitable is "a free online teaching/learning portal combining peer reviewed articles and teaching materials with social networking features." New steps like this one into the development of an improved tech-ed world in the cloud are happening all the time. In my opinion, one shouldn't wait until it's as popular as Facebook and Gmail to use it. Embrace these initiatives from the get go and start expanding your online learning cloud.
  
  
• Harvard presents free courses with open learning initiative. This is just the latest addition in a long line of top universities making their courses freely available online. Harvard has already done a bunch of this, but here is more. MIT OpenCourseWare is, I think, the model for these initiatives.
  
  
• Helping university libraries digitize their collections. This is fast becoming the new norm for university libraries, not to mention Google's book digitalization plans. There are some legitimate legal issues to be worked out here, but I think these moves are progress, for the better. The more accessible the academic world becomes (i.e. the more online it is), the more likely it is that people take advantage of those intellectual opportunities. Despite what Nick Carr has to say.
  
  
• A new blog-to-book tool is unveiled. Sophia Li writes, "a new Web tool that lets users turn blog entries into an electronic book. The creators intend their new tool, Anthologize, to make preparing a polished product—potentially for publication—a simple, quick process." Again....happening all the time.