From The Guardian’s Higher Education blog, comes this post called Branding in higher education – just how feasible is distinctiveness? by Eliza Anyangwe.

At last week’s CASE Europe conference on distinctiveness in higher education, co-hosted by the Distinct Project, it quickly became clear that universities are in a bit of a pickle: they have to be able to stand out in a marketplace where all the others competitors offer the same basic service – teaching and research. And they have to make the case that they’re doing their own thing when the entire system for measuring excellence (which, in turn, influences student choice) sets out to compare one institution to another.

Tuesday’s conference set out to share the outcomes from a two-year investigation into what distinctiveness looks like, both within and beyond the HE sector. Led by Oxford Brookes University and funded by the Higher Education Funding Council (Hefce), the research defined distinctiveness as “the vehicle which enables an organisation to achieve many of its strategic goals through being memorable, authentic, and clearly articulating what it has to offer to the people that are important to it”.

The crux of the matter is that the very survival of universities rests upon their ability to be clear about who they are and then to use that knowledge to attract students, partners and ultimately, funding. Internally, a distinctiveness strategy is also credited with improving staff motivation and loyalty.

The Working Group on Expanding Access to Published Research Findings (aka the Finch group) of the Research Information Network just released a report recommending that open access to scholarly publishings was the best method to increase access :

The internet has brought much better access to research results for members of the academic community. But the full benefits of the digital and online revolutions have yet to be realised, especially for business, the professions, and the general public. Many people have expressed the ambition for a worldwide open access regime. The key policy questions are how to promote that shift in an ordered way which promotes innovation and maximises the benefits while minimising the risks.

The report recommends actions which can be taken in the UK which would help to promote much greater and faster access, while recognising that research and publications are international. It envisages that several different channels for communicating research results will remain important over the next few years, but recommends a clear policy direction in the UK towards support for open access publishing. This means that publishers receive their revenues from authors rather than readers, and so research articles become freely accessible to everyone immediately upon publication.

The Final report contains over 140 pages and an interesting bibliography.

See also this recent report from the Royal Society on Science as an Open Enterprise, which focuses heavily on data stewardship and sharing.

I recently blogged about Jim Duderstadt’s opening plenary talk at the Spring 2012 Coalition for Networked Information (CNI)
– well it seems that the report he mentions is now available on the National Academies Committee on the Future of the Research University website.

As I mention on Culturelibre.ca (my other blog), Jennifer Howard writes on the Chronicle of Higher Education’s «Wired Campus» blog about the very interesting report dealing with ebook publishing strategies by University presses in the USA.

The Association of College & Research Libraries has just released an updated bersion of its Characteristics of programs of information literacy that illustrate best practices: A guideline.

Worth a read: this survey of open education resources from C&RL News. It lists course initiatives, curriculum sources, databases of objects, etc.

Stephen Laster, Chief Information Officer, Harvard Business School, delivers his Viewpoint in the most receny Educause Review. Insisting on the dire financial situation of students and Universities alike, he stresses that technology offers an opportunity to solve these issues. The Learning Management Systems (LMS) as a plat-form or in the cloud….

Other articles present the top 10 technology issues Universities face as well as some functional requirements of technology applied to education.

In closing, see this article about 2012 top ten trends in academic from C&RL News.

A colleague of mine told me about Eric Mazur‘s Peer Instruction (PI) technique, recently presented at Dawson College in Montréal.

Professor Mazur teaches physics at Harvard and is also keenly interested in the effectiveness of teaching methods, such as peer instruction or just in time learning.

Here are short bibliographies generated from Library sources.

EBSCO’s Business Source Complete from peer-reviewed journals. The search query was simply for the terms “video games” industry. I picked the most interesting that touched upon “indie games” or labour issues for the past 5 years, 7 articles from about the first 40 hits.

Title: Under the radar: Industry entry by user entrepreneurs.
Authors: Haefliger, Stefan shaefliger@ethz.ch; Jäger, Peter pejaeger@ethz.ch; von Krogh, Georg gvkrogh@ethz.ch
Source: Research Policy; Nov2010, Vol. 39 Issue 9, p1198-1213, 16p

Title: User Communities and Social Software in the Video Game Industry.
Authors: Burger-Helmchen, Thierry, Cohendet, Patrick
Source: Long Range Planning; Oct2011, Vol. 44 Issue 5/6, p317-343, 27p

Title: The orchestrating firm: value creation in the video game industry.
Authors: Mikael Gidhagen; Oscar Persson Ridell; David Sörhammar
Source: Managing Service Quality; Jul2011, Vol. 21 Issue 4, p392-409, 18p

Title: Computer Hobbyists and the Gaming Industry in Finland.
Authors: Saarikoski, Petri1 petri.saarikoski@utu.fi; Suominen, Jaakko1 jaakko.suominen@utu.fi
Source: IEEE Annals of the History of Computing; Jul-Sep2009, Vol. 31 Issue 3, p20-33, 14p

Title: The business of playing games: players as developers and entrepreneurs.
Authors: Chazerand, Patrice1 patrice.chazerand@isfe.eu; Geeroms, Catherine1 catherine.geeroms@isfe.eu
Source: Digital Creativity; Sep2008, Vol. 19 Issue 3, p185-193, 9p, 1 Chart, 3 Graphs

Title: Work and Employment in Creative Industries: The Video Games Industry in Germany, Sweden and Poland.
Authors: Teipen, Christina1
Source: Economic & Industrial Democracy; Aug2008, Vol. 29 Issue

Title: Digital Consumer Networks and Producer–Consumer Collaboration: Innovation and Product Development in the Video Game Industry.
Authors: ARAKJI, REINA Y.1; LANG, KARL R.2,3,4
Source: Journal of Management Information Systems; Fall2007, Vol. 24 Issue 2, p195-219, 25p, 1 Diagram, 1 Chart, 1 Graph

Books from CLUES, Concordia University Catalogue, search on “Cultural Economy”:

>Creativity, innovation and the cultural economy [electronic resource] / edited by Andy C. Pratt and Paul Jeffcutt : Creativity, innovation and the cultural economy [electronic resource] / edited by Andy C. Pratt and Paul Jeffcutt

The cultural economy edited by Helmut K. Anheier, Yudhishthir Raj Isar ; Annie Paul, associate editor ; Stuart Cunningham, guest editor : The cultural economy / edited by Helmut K. Anheier, Yudhishthir Raj Isar ; Annie Paul, associate editor ; Stuart Cunningham, guest editor

The Blackwell cultural economy reader edited by Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift : The Blackwell cultural economy reader / edited by Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift

The Guardian’s Higher Ed blog has an interesting piece on “digital literacy” in the university classroom. Beyond skills, the post covers specific ideas from engaged faculty.

For example, Sue Thomas, professor of new media, De Montfort University has this to say about transliteracy:

Digital literacy as an important part of transliteracy: Transliteracy is the ability to read, write and interact across a range of platforms, tools and media from signing and orality through handwriting, print, TV, radio and film, to digital social networks. It is the literacy of convergence, unifying literacies past and present across different platforms, media and cultures. This means it encompasses all kinds of communications from scratching pictures in the sand to editing photos in Instagram, or from inscribing tablets to text-messaging. When promoting digital literacy on its own, we can alienate people who are already very literate in other areas, and that’s why I prefer to take an holistic approach and be as inclusive as possible.