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The NMC is pleased to announce the NMC iTunes U Collection. This site is home to nearly a decade's worth of content — all of it completely free and easy to find. We’re utilizing iTunes U to package and distribute all sorts of NMC media in forms that are both familiar and useful for educators and students. For example, every NMC publication, every keynote from dozens of NMC events, every NMC Horizon Report, plus podcasts, webinar archives, workshops, papers, conference programs, and communiqués are now all available at iTunes U > New Media Consortium.

Going forward, the iTunes U site will act as the official NMC content archives, and you can expect our catalog of publications, videos, keynotes, and webinars to continue to grow all the time. Wondering what that website was that Vint Cerf mentioned at the 2011 Summer Conference? The NMC iTunes U Collection is waiting for you. 

Wish you had a compelling NMC Horizon Report presentation? Why not download the one the NMC staff uses as a starting point? Want a copy of that paper published by the NMC on visual literacy?  It’s there too — and all of it is free and licensed for sharing under Creative Commons!

Begin building your own NMC library now at iTunes U!

> Launch the NMC’s iTunes U site

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Under the umbrella of the NMC Horizon Report, The NMC has launched the Technology Outlook, a new series of regional analyses aimed specifically at understanding both local and global differences in technology uptake, as well as the current and future state of education in different parts of the world. These publications are a product of collaborations between the NMC and innovative organizations across the world that seek to leverage the well-known medium of the NMC Horizon Report to bring important research, trends, and challenges in their regions to light. The Technology Outlook series furthers the NMC's goal of driving innovation in every part of the world.

The first report in this new series, Technology Outlook: UK Tertiary Education 2011-2016 is being released today at the annual Association for Learning Technology Conference (ALT-C 2011) in Leeds, England. Co-sponsored by the JISC Innovation Support Centres (CETIS and UKOLN), this Technology Outlook explores the impact of emerging technologies on teaching, learning, research, and information management in UK tertiary education over the next five years, as identified by the Horizon.JISC advisory board. That group of experts is comprised of an international body of knowledgeable individuals, all highly regarded in their fields representing a range of diverse perspectives across the learning sector. The work that produced the report can be viewed at http://jisc.wiki.nmc.org.

The NMC plans to continue the series with Technology Outlooks for Singapore and the surrounding region, Australia, New Zealand, and Africa in 2012. In the long term, additional reports are also planned for Latin America, Central Europe, and India.

> Download Technology Outlook: UK Tertiary Education 2011-2016

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Technology Outlook: UK Tertiary Education 2011-2016 is the first report in a new series of NMC Horizon Report Regional Analyses. Co-sponsored by the JISC Innovation Support Centres (CETIS and UKOLN), this Technology Outlook explores the impact of emerging technologies on teaching, learning, research or information management in UK tertiary education over the next five years, as identified by the Horizon.JISC advisory board. That group of experts is comprised of an international body of knowledgeable individuals, all highly regarded in their fields representing a range of diverse perspectives across the learning sector. View the work that produced the report at http://jisc.wiki.nmc.org.

Download Technology Outlook: UK Tertiary Education 2011-2016  (A4) (664 kb, 25 pp)

Vote for Challenge Based Learning

By now, much of the NMC Community is familiar with Challenge Based Learning (CBL). We published a report on the CBL pilot in 2009, and we're in the midst of finishing a follow-up study of the implementation phase. CBL draws from the best aspects of project- and problem-based learning while integrating emerging technologies, and it's a project were extremely proud to be a part of. This new learning approach has the proven capacity to transform the current education system into a model that is more engaging, effective, and inclusive. That change is already well underway, and now we need your help to propel it even further.

We've been involved in countless CBL presentations, where we've spoken to educators about the powerful results. Now, we have an opportunity to disseminate what we've learned to a broader audience at South By Southwest Interactive -- a renowned festival in Austin that attracts thousands of technology enthusiasts and change agents from all over the world. We have submitted a CBL workshop to be considered for the official SXSWi schedule, and we need your votes to make it into the line-up.

Please take a second to vote for our CBL workshop here: go.nmc.org/vote-cbl.

Then help us spread the word by tweeting this or making it your Facebook status:

Vote for @NMCorg Challenge Based Learning Workshop at #SXSWi to support real change in education: http://go.nmc.org/vote-CBL #NMCorg

Below is the official description of our workshop:

Challenge Based Learning (CBL) is an engaging multidisciplinary approach to teaching and learning that encourages students to leverage the technology they use in their daily lives to solve pressing global problems, such as reducing carbon footprints and helping nations recover from natural disasters. While this new concept has proven successful in inciting more active, authentic learning in K-12 education, it is also highly applicable and scalable to businesses, community organizations, and other group settings. Using iPads, laptops, and specialized apps, teams can manage and track their projects, launch related events, create videos and other challenge visuals, interact with each other remotely, and more. The power of technology brings each challenge and solution to life, allowing for easier collaboration, discovery and dissemination. Learn CBL firsthand from a team of educators who have successfully implemented it. Workshop attendees will frame a series of challenges, discover new technical resources, brainstorm solutions to local and global issues and start implementing them.

Want to receive news and updates on CBL? "Like" the official CBL Facebook page.

The NMC recently launched a social media experiment as part of its role in the HP Catalyst Initiative, a community of nearly 100 schools, universities, and NGOs around the globe. The experiment, which we call "Pay It Forward Friday," was aimed at understanding more about the ways information disseminates across social networks to grow communities.

The idea behind the experiment was simple: to provide the “most-connected” members of a community — defined as those with the most Facebook friends — an easy incentive to help expand the community, and to quantify the effect as it happened. To accomplish this, two fans of the HP Catalyst Facebook page were invited to help cultivate the community via posts across their social networks (in Twitter, Facebook, and other social media channels) that encouraged people to “Like” the HP Catalyst page. To build motivation, for each “Like” received during their designated “Friday,” a small cash donation would be made to the charity of their choice.

The results were immediate, substantial, and enormously positive. People resonated strongly with the “help us help others” nature of the campaign, and in just two days, the number of people in the community more than doubled — growth of 119%. Even more significant, the conceivable reach of the HP Catalyst page, defined as the friends of our friends, grew from 41,000 to 99,340 — an increase of 149%.  These two results together indicate that the growth was primarily people who themselves had large social networks.

Each Pay It Forward Friday campaign lasted 24 hours — the span of a single Friday. In the first installment, Michael Furdyk, co-founder of non-profit TakingITGlobal, leveraged his social networks to produce new likes for the HP Catalyst Facebook page. TakingITGlobal has been instrumental in instilling leadership skills in youth to foster global action. The second Pay It Forward Friday campaign included social connector Janice Reese who "played" on behalf of the Electronic Document Scholarship Foundation — an organization that enables students to receive the education necessary to pursue careers in the document management and graphic communications industries, without financial burden. Partnering with connectors who share a similar passion for improving education helped ensure that the HP Catalyst Facebook page didn’t just garner new fans, but also active participants.

Community members were defined as those who explicitly chose to receive information about the project — the number of Facebook “Likes.”  The success of the effort is easily documented.  The growth of the HP Catalyst Community — which was greatest among those people with more than 1,000 Facebook friends — is explicitly reflected in the analytics surrounding new Facebook “likes,” which you can see in the detailed metrics below. 

*These numbers are the tally of “known” Facebook connections. Due to privacy settings, we were only able to view 60% of the HP Catalyst friends’ pages, so these numbers are conservative estimates of the true reach; the actual numbers are likely to be much as 25% higher.

Watch this space, as interest in Pay it Forward Fridays is high and we definitely plan to run it again!

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We are excited to announce the launch of our latest e-publication: The NMC Pulse. Sent monthly to the NMC Community, The NMC Pulse keeps you up to speed on new events and videos, member perks, and the latest MIDEA news, while providing opportunities for you to get involved in our many initiatives and feature your own amazing projects. Plus, it allows us to consolidate all of our messaging into one monthly blast so we don't overwhelm your inboxes. It's free, it's open, and anyone can sign up to receive it.

Read this month's edition. Sign up for free here to receive future editions.

What's in a name?
If you've ever attended an NMC C-LAB meeting or Summer Conference, you may have overheard discussions about the NMC's goal to keep "the pulse" within the community. From analyzing new learning approaches to forecasting the impact of innovative technologies to participating in transformative global initiatives, we always want to keep the beat, and keep learning-focused institutions - and education - moving forward.

Want to be a part of the action?
As we are at the dawn of a new school year, we'll be including a special section in the upcoming September edition of The NMC Pulse, where we will feature news and events from NMC member institutions. So, if you are an NMC member looking to share your news, please shoot us an email by September 9, at communications@nmc.org, subject: The NMC Pulse.

Want to start receiving The NMC Pulse? Click here to enter your email address. All your contact info is kept 100% private - we take your privacy very seriously. We don't like eating SPAM and we sure don't like sending it.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
August 2, 2011

For more information, contact:
Jennifer McLennan
(202) 296-2296 x 121
jennifer [at] arl [dot] org

2011 SPARKY AWARD WINNERS ANNOUNCED, PEOPLE’S CHOICE CONTEST NOW OPEN

Washington, DC – Four new student films on the importance of Open Access to research and data have been voted the best by a panel of new media experts, students, and librarians in “Open Up!”, the fourth annual Sparky Awards. Calling on students to articulate their support in a two-minute video, the contest has been embraced by campuses all over the world and has inspired imaginative expressions of student support for the potential of Open Access to foster creativity, innovation, and problem solving. The Sparky Awards are organized by SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition.

This year’s winning videos highlight student views on how free, immediate, online access – plus the rights to reuse – the results of scholarly research is essential to the quality of student education, accelerates the discovery process, and has the potential to benefit society worldwide.

This year, the judges selected winners in three categories:

• BEST LIVE ACTION: Breaking News: Open Access Wave Sweeps World (http://vimeo.com/24171277), produced by Joshua Goodman (University of Pretoria).
• BEST ANIMATION: Free your Data (http://vimeo.com/24253452), produced by Nico Carver (University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill).
• BEST SPEECH: We’re In This Together (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xxg67UER7dc), produced by Paula Seligson (University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill).

Producers of each of the three winning entries will receive an iPad or iPhone along with a Sparky Award statuette.

“Special Merit” recognition is also being awarded to: Some Things Shouldn't Be in Halves (http://www.bu.edu/buniverse/view/?v=19iA0fOE), produced by Zack McGeehan, Olivia Kimmel, Dimitri Kouri and Jason Weitzman (Boston University). In this clip, students compare limited online access to wearing half a sock or having half a meal to eat.

Nico Carver, a Library Science Master’s student at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and winner for Best Animation, used his video to express the importance of making endangered datasets available to researchers and the public – an issue he came to claim in working on the Data-at-Risk Inventory (http://www.ibiblio.org/data-at-risk/). “The Sparky Awards provided a perfect platform for me to communicate this vital message,” he said.

“This year’s entries drive home the fact that student concern for Open Access runs deep,” added Jennifer McLennan, Director of Programs and Operations for SPARC. “They support Open Access because they see it fundamentally tied to their success as students, to advancing research in general, and to translating the fruits of research into worldwide societal benefits. Students continue to herald change in scholarly communication in their own unique and compelling voice.”

The organizers now invite students, faculty, librarians, and others on campus to weigh in for their favorite in the Sparky People’s Choice Award. The People’s Choice Award highlights all of the 2011 entries. The winner will also receive an iPad, iPhone, or iPod plus a personalized award certificate. To vote, visit http://www.sparkyawards.org. The deadline to vote for the People’s Choice Award is September 23, 2011.

The Sparky Awards are organized by SPARC and co-sponsored by: the Association of College and Research Libraries, the Association of Research Libraries, Campus MovieFest, the Center for Social Media, the New Media Consortium (NMC), the Open Video Alliance, Penn Libraries, Students for Free Culture, the Student PIRGs, and SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition).

For full details, visit the Sparky Awards Web site at http://www.sparkyawards.org.

# # #

THE SPARKY AWARDS are organized and sponsored by SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), an alliance of academic libraries and research institutions working to build on the opportunities created by the networked digital environment to advance the conduct of scholarship. Membership in SPARC is open to libraries of all sizes. For more information, visit http://www.arl.org/sparc.

The NMC Horizon Report > Edición Iberoamericana, a global research effort led by the NMC in collaboration with the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC), is now available in both English and Catalan. Originally released in late 2010, the report identifies the emerging technologies, key trends, and challenges that are impacting learning and creative inquiry in Latin America, Spain, and Portugal.

The report has already been downloaded all over the world and has been the subject of countless presentations and campus discourse. The two new versions will extend the content to an even broader audience.

Download the English and Catalan translations.

The NMC announced the recipients of the 2011 NMC Center of Excellence Award at this year's Summer Conference in Madison, Wisconsin. The award is the highest honor bestowed by the NMC and recognizes demonstrated excellence and outstanding achievement in the application of technology to learning or creative expression.

“The NMC Center of Excellence Awards celebrate the innovation and creativity that is part of the fabric of every member institution,” said NMC CEO Larry Johnson. “The NMC organizations recognized this year represent the best of our field, and each has had a tremendous history of accomplishment.”

Symbolized by a specially struck medallion suspended in a translucent obelisk, the NMC Center of Excellence Award has been designed purposefully to make it distinct from other award or recognition programs. Colleges do not compete for the award, nor is it granted within predefined categories.  The selection process is based on the MacArthur Awards, and like that program, the nominators and others involved in the selection process remain anonymous as a core principle of the program.  They are chosen from organizations both within and outside the NMC, and represent a considerable diversity of knowledge.

The 2011 NMC Center of Excellence Award recipients are:

Apple Education
Recognized for their significant contributions to the practice of teaching, to innovative pedagogy, and to making a real difference in the lives of students.

Full Sail University
Recognized for their extraordinary commitment to excellence in all aspects of new media production, creation, and pedagogy, and for the professional accomplishments of their graduates.

University of Southern California, Institute for Multimedia Literacy
Recognized for their leadership in new media, for their groundbreaking research, scholarly tools and publications, and for their commitment to the integration of new media across the curriculum.

“The selection committee had a tremendous task and did their job well,” Johnson stated at the NMC Center of Excellence Awards ceremony at the 2011 NMC Summer Conference when the awards were presented. “The 2011 recipients are all acknowledged leaders in the application of technology by any standard. The institutions recognized with the NMC Center of Excellence Award are a group that includes schools large and small, the well-endowed and the not-so-well-endowed; they represent the best of the NMC. Together and individually they exemplify the state of the art. Today’s recipients are worthy additions to that list.”

Download the full press release.

Have you ever read an NMC Horizon Report and thought, "I want to start implementing these technologies and learning approaches at my school...but where to begin?" We've got some fantastic breaking news for you!

The Consortium for School Networking (CoSN) today released The CoSN Horizon Report: 2011 K-12 Edition Toolkit, which is designed as a companion piece to The NMC Horizon Report: 2011 K-12 Edition. Produced by the New Media Consortium (NMC), the Report details emerging technologies likely to have a significant impact on teaching and learning around the globe. The Toolkit is geared toward education leaders who wish to learn more about and further the dialogue on the emerging technologies identified in the Report and their potential to re-imagine K-12 education. The Toolkit and Report are both made possible through a grant from HP’s Office on Global Social Innovation.

“To propel K-12 education forward through visionary leadership, boost student achievement and evolve the learning process, knowing what emerging technologies are on the horizon and the promise they hold to take education to an entirely new level is essential,” said CoSN CEO Keith Krueger. “The NMC Horizon Report: 2011 K-12 Edition and CoSN Toolkit are by far two of the most valuable resources education leaders have at their fingertips to help harness the power of emerging educational technologies and enrich teaching and learning.”

“The Report is a short- and long-term roadmap for the future of educational technologies, and the CoSN Toolkit is an additional component that will help continue the dialogue,” said Larry Johnson, CEO of the NMC. “The technologies profiled have the potential to shift the way we think about teaching and learning, and will help educators and students alike maximize the education experience.”

“HP is proud to support both the Report and Toolkit, as both help to create a vision for and generate new ideas around the role technology will play in classrooms both here in the United States and abroad,” said Jeannette Weisschuh, Education Director, Office of Global Social Innovation, HP. “As a global leader in technology, we see great value in both of these resources and know that educators will find them valuable as they uncover new ways to leverage emerging technologies to enrich learning.”

The Report includes a rich set of topics, examples and resources regarding the two most important emerging technologies for 2011; two technologies on the two- to three-year horizon; and two additional technologies on the four- to five-year horizon. Now in its second year, the companion Toolkit is designed as a roadmap for education leaders responsible for exploring and implementing new technologies. The Toolkit includes the following components:

• Presentation Template – PowerPoint presentation overview of the Report, with a suggested script for use in group discussions.

• Discussion Facilitator's Guide – Template and questions to stimulate group thinking about the Report and emerging technologies.

• Discussion Activities – Set of expanded activities to engage stakeholders in dialogue to identify local instructional and educational challenges and consider whether emerging technologies might have the potential to address them.

• New in 2011! Video Clips – Video overview of the Report, its approach and the challenges and trends identified in it, as well as six shorter videos featuring education leaders discussing each of the emerging technologies identified in the Report and featuring their thoughts on each technology’s promise for enhancing teaching, learning and creative expression. All videos were produced by JDL Horizons.

The Toolkit, Report and other supporting materials may be downloaded for free at www.cosn.org/horizon.

Questions? Contact CoSN's Jennifer Cummings at jcummings@cosn.org. Click here to download the official press release.