My selection of the most interesting news on the internets:

• Scientometrics 2.0: Toward new metrics of scholarly impact on the social Web – The growing flood of scholarly literature is exposing the weaknesses of current, citation–based methods of evaluating and filtering articles. A novel and promising approach is to examine the use and citation of articles in a new forum: Web 2.0 services like social bookmarking and microblogging. Metrics based on this data could build a “Scientometics 2.0,” supporting richer and more timely pictures of articles’ impact. This paper develops the most comprehensive list of these services to date, assessing the potential value and availability of data from each. We also suggest the next steps toward building and validating metrics drawn from the social Web.
• Video: Who Pays For Open Access? – Is publishing an open-access journal good business? And for whom? Many in the academic community agree that the goal of open access—increasing the availability and usability of the results of research and scholarship—is laudable. Yet there is great uncertainty about the financial viability of open-access journals. Will authors have to pay publication fees out of their own pockets? Can universities afford to support open-access journals? Can respected journals convert to open access and survive? The panelists consider which models hold the most promise for sustainable open-access publishing.
• Colleges That Will Make You Rich – To find the colleges that make their students rich, we first control for student background, looking at things like the average SAT scores of incoming students, and the percentage of student body that receives financial aid. Then we calculate, based on those background factors, how much you would expect graduates at each school to earn in their careers–and we compare that to their actual earnings.

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My selection of the most interesting news on the internets:

• University Globalization Is Here to Stay – Anybody who makes confident predictions about the future of today's fast-growing global higher-education marketplace should be reminded that education trend lines can shift unexpectedly and relatively quickly.
• For Scholars, Web Changes Sacred Rite of Peer Review – For professors, publishing in elite journals is an unavoidable part of university life. The grueling process of subjecting work to the up-or-down judgment of credentialed scholarly peers has been a cornerstone of academic culture since at least the mid-20th century.
• French students face sharp cost increases – French President Nicolas Sarkozy has cancelled an austerity measure that would have penalised parents who subsidise their student children's accommodation. He made the announcement after warnings from two leading organisations representing students' interests that students were facing sharp increases in costs both as they enrolled for the 2010-11 academic year and during the course of their studies.

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My selection of the most interesting news on the internets:

• Economic recovery raises demand for skilled workers – Germany needs new recruits: according to a new survey by the German Chambers of Industry and Commerce there will be six million fewer Germans of working age by 2030. So what is the government doing about it?
• Dutch university aims to lure British students who lose out on UK places – A university in the Netherlands is hoping to attract some of the thousands of British students that may fail to gain a place after the A-level results are announced this week. Maastricht University is offering degrees in English across eight subject areas, with the cost of tuition about half that charged by UK universities.
• Expand students’ global experiences – Originally conceived to help working-class students pay for college, co-op programs offer students the opportunity to alternate classroom studies with long-term, paid internships in a wide array of settings — anything from major corporations to nonprofit organizations.

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My selection of the most interesting news on the internets:

• Online University Aims to Build Sites in 6 Developing Countries – Through a new partnership with World Computer Exchange, the upstart online institution University of the People hopes to build communication centers in six developing countries over the next six months, allowing students without good Internet access to take online courses.
• French education to undergo ‘a lot of change’ – French education has been undergoing major change lately. Reforms were instigated under the presidency of Jacques Chirac and have continued under Nicolas Sarkozy. They were largely based on the EU’s Lisbon Strategy objectives.
• Lukashenka directs that Belarus join Bologna Process – Alyaksandr Lukashenka has tasked Education Minister Alyaksandr Radzkow with starting the procedure of making Belarus a participating country of the Bologna Process, which is aimed at creating a European Higher Education Area, said the presidential press office, BelaPAN reports.

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My selection of the most interesting news on the internets:

• European Science Foundation – A new code of conduct for researchers – A new European Code of Conduct for Research Integrity is presented today by the European Science Foundation at the World Conference on Research Integrity. The code addresses good practice and bad conduct in science, offering a basis for trust and integrity across national borders. This Europe-wide code offers a reference point for all researchers, complementing existing codes of ethics and complying with national and European legislative frameworks. It is not intended to replace existing national or academic guidelines, but represents agreement across 30 countries on a set of principles and priorities for self-regulation of the research community. It provides a possible model for a global code of conduct for all research.
• Academic fraud in China: Replicating success – Hu Jintao, speaks often and forcefully of the need to foster innovation. He makes a strong case: sustaining economic growth and competitiveness requires China to get beyond mere labour-driven manufacturing and into the knowledge-based business of discoveries, inventions and other advances.
• ERC opens up €661 million call to early-career researchers anywhere in the world – The European Research Council (ERC) has announced its fourth call for proposals for ERC Starting Grants, open to early-career top researchers of any nationality, working – or moving to work – in host institutions in Europe. The total budget of €661 million is an increase of just over 25 per cent from last year’s call.

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My selection of the most interesting news on the internets:

• Ghostwriting and Academic Medicine – Pharmaceutical companies are masters of marketing, as witnessed by their impressive ability to create blockbuster drugs. Unfortunately, those include medicines like Vioxx (which was withdrawn from the market in 2004), Paxil (whose use in young people is being questioned), Fen-phen (the diet drug that was recalled), Zoloft, (which requires a "black box" warning about side effects), Zyprexa, (for which Eli Lilly agreed to pay up $500-million to settle lawsuits), hormone-replacement therapy, (which has come into question), and the now much-debated Avandia.
• International students significant source of international migration flows – International students, once they complete their studies, have become a significant source of international migration flows in OECD countries. And they tend to be skilled and to speak the national language. Overall, the number of international students more than doubled between 2000 and 2007, to over 2 million; the United States and the United Kingdom, Germany, France and Australia are the main destination countries.
• Making it on merit – What is it like to grow up male and middle class in a city where everyone sees a career in information technology (IT) as the road to success? Nicholas Nisbett, a social anthropologist, hung out at a cybercafé in Bangalore popular with young men and took an IT course with them at a private institute.

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My selection of the most interesting news on the internets:

• The OECD will launch a social media project called “Raise your hand” on 15 September 2010 – The OECD will launch a social media project called “Raise your hand” on 15 September 2010, during the closing of the IMHE General Conference. Students, teachers, and others involved in education will be asked for their views on the most important action to take in education today. The top 10 selected videos and responses will be shown during the Education Policy Forum at the OECD in Paris on 4 November 2010.
• The Times of India – Santiago Iniguez: ‘The idea is to produce global citizens, rather than specialists’ – We have a distinctly international approach and one of the major priorities is to bring together faculty and students from around the world. We recognise and acknowledge the fact that in these global times, we need to offer a holistic learning experience to our students that covers management skills, an element of innovation, an entrepreneurial mindset, a global vision and social commitment.
• World Bank – Equity of Access and Success in Tertiary Education – The global study on equity and access to tertiary education with funding from the Bank Netherlands Partnership Program (BNPP) aims to define measures of inequality in tertiary education, document the scope, significance and consequences of disparities in tertiary education opportunities, and expand our understanding of the main determinants of these inequalities.
• Internationalization is difficult – The latest news from Michigan State University is scaling back its operations in Dubai only underlines something we know all too well: internationalization is difficult. Many, many universities are looking to set up overseas operations but the barriers to successful operations overseas are legion. Nigel Thrift gives you five.

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My selection of the most interesting news on the internets:

• Isomorphism in Higher Education – Amitai Etzioni is upset that new firms are entering the higher-education market and offering — gasp! — a differentiated product. Worst of all, they operate on a for-profit basis! (“For-profit,” as all liberal intellectuals know, is synonymous for “evil.”)
• Vince Cable sets out vision for higher education – Vince Cable has set out his vision for higher education in England, suggesting that a graduate tax could be brought in. The business secretary said the idea could help universities increase their revenues, but admitted that there was "a long way to go in this debate".
• Why are liberals so impressed by China and Singapore’s school systems? – Obama and Kristof and all the other U.S. proponents of Singapore and China’s educational systems apparently aren’t thinking very hard about the relationship of their policies to democratic debate and democratic autonomy. Indeed, they are glorifying that which does not deserve praise.

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My selection of the most interesting news on the internets:

• Academic Outcomes of Study Abroad – In 2000, researchers began an ambitious effort to document the academic outcomes of study abroad across the 35-institution University System of Georgia. Ten years later, they’ve found that students who study abroad have improved academic performance upon returning to their home campus, higher graduation rates, and improved knowledge of cultural practices and context compared to students in control groups. They’ve also found that studying abroad helps, rather than hinders, academic performance of at-risk students.
• Journals step up plagiarism policing – Major science publishers are gearing up to fight plagiarism. The publishers, including Elsevier and Springer, are set to roll out software across their journals that will scan submitted papers for identical or paraphrased chunks of text that appear in previously published articles. The move follows pilot tests of the software that have confirmed high levels of plagiarism in articles submitted to some journals, according to an informal survey by Nature of nine science publishers. Incredibly, one journal reported rejecting 23% of accepted submissions after checking for plagiarism.
• Social Sciences: 2010 World Report observes growth in emerging countries – The social sciences, which were dominated by western universities for a long time, are gaining ground in Asia and in Latin America, according to a report by the International Social Sciences Council (ISSC), published jointly with UNESCO. Entitled “Knowledge Divides”, it is a worldwide status report about these disciplines.

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My selection of the most interesting news on the internets:

• Global open access slowly growing, study finds – One in five scientific papers is now available freely on the internet, the first global study of research papers across all disciplines has found. Researchers looked at global data for research papers published in 2008: almost nine per cent were freely available on publishers' sites ('gold' access) and another 12 per cent on authors' or departmental websites ('green' access).
• Isn’t it time you took advantage of a world of knowledge? – The Erasmus scheme is more popular than ever. In the last academic year, more than 200,000 European undergraduates had the chance to spend part of their studies in a different European country from their own. More than 10,000 of these students were British. But have you ever heard of Erasmus Mundus?
• Pension funds launch €200M Dutch/Canadian programme to invest in start-ups – Two pension funds, ABP of the Netherlands and OMERS of Canada, have set up a joint investment program INKEF Capital, to invest in start-ups in both countries. INKEF (Investing in the Knowledge Economy of the Future) is a 15 year programme that will invest €200 million on behalf of the two pension funds.
• What has gone wrong with the Chinese university system? – The major reasons that China does not have first-class universities is because its higher educational system does not give universities enough autonomy, and the schools' lack 'real' academic, intellectual and moral spirit.

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My selection of the most interesting news on the internets:

• University rankings: Diversity, excellence and the European initiative (pdf) – Two recent initiatives funded by the European Commission (U-Map and U-Multirank) represent a novel approach by attempting to map the diversity of Europe’s universities and by ranking their performance in multiple dimensions of excellence. Although LERU applauds the attempt, there are both principled and practical reasons for being sceptical about the ultimate validity and utility of rankings
• Germany Pursues Excellence Over Egalitarianism – The Excellence Initiative, which began in 2005, has unleashed a new dynamic that has reshaped German higher education, demolishing the pretense of egalitarianism and forcing universities to focus on defining their mission and sharpening their focus. "This kind of competition set free a lot of new forces within the universities," says Margret Wintermantel, president of the German Rectors' Conference, which represents the heads of the country's 258 institutions of higher education. "Over all, we are very positive about it."
• Survey Questions Impact of University Rankings – Despite the oft-touted importance of rankings on a university's reputation, they may not influence national reputation as much as some institutions have thought. A new survey of 49 of the top-ranked 137 universities found that those institutions noticed little or no impact on their reputation within their home countries from either a rise or a fall in the rankings.
• The Netherlands back in the top 5 (?) – Final report and video – The economic power of the Netherlands has significant room for improvement. This was the conclusion of the Innovation Platform’s Competitive Strength study group in the report The Netherlands 2020: Back in the Top 5.
• IBM Study: Education Lags in Preparing Students for Globalization and Sustainability – Today's university students are extremely concerned with issues of globalization and sustainability, but only four out of 10 believe their education has prepared them to address these issues, according to a new IBM study designed to gauge the attitudes and opinions of the next-generation global workforce and business leaders.

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My selection of the most interesting news on the internets:

• Erasmus: Record numbers of students receive EU funding to study or train abroad – More students than ever went abroad for studies and company placements with EU support through the Erasmus programme in 2008/09. According to new figures released today, almost 200 000 higher education students received grants to study or train abroad. This represents an overall increase of 8.7% on the previous academic year and means that more than two million young Europeans have benefited from Erasmus funding since the programme's launch in 1987. The biggest increase is in the number of students going on company placements – up more than 50% on the previous year. In addition, last year more than 36 000 staff from higher education institutions went abroad to teach or receive training in one of the 31 European countries participating in the Erasmus scheme.
• Digital Students, Industrial-Era Universities – The American university, like the nation’s other major social institutions — government, banks, the media, health care — was created for an industrial society. Buffeted by dramatic changes in demography, the economy, technology, and globalization, all these institutions function less well than they once did. In today’s international information economy, they appear to be broken and must be refitted for a world transformed.
• Jo Ritzen: Empowered to innovate – Europe is losing the battle for talent. International rankings show it clearly, but student flows are equally meaningful. In 2005, roughly four times as many students went from Europe (the UK excluded) to study in North America than the other way round. For those with experience in education, the picture is one of bright youngsters leaving Europe in search of lands more hospitable to their creativity.

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My selection of the most interesting news on the internets:

• The Rise of the Global University: 5 New Tensions – The "multiversity"—the university with multiple constituencies and demands that Clark Kerr, the former president of the University of California identified in the 1960s—has given way to the Global Research University, or GRU. The Global Research University is the multiversity with much more mobility, more cross-national research and learning, and more global systems and rankings.
• The Netherlands popular with highly-skilled migrants – The Netherlands is one of the most popular countries in the west for highly-skilled migrants to move to, according to a survey of 11 industrialised countries by the SEO Economic Research bureau for the economic affairs ministry. Only the US and Switzerland are more popular with so-called knowledge migrants, the research showed.
• The 1.5 billion Euro movie – Movie from the Dutch Association of Universities with a clear message to Dutch politicians: Investing in knowledge is essential for the international position of Dutch universities. Knowledge is the driving force behind sustainable growth. Especially in a time of crisis.

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My selection of the most interesting news on the internets:

• Cuts could drive the best scientific talent abroad, says Lord Rees – Times Online – Britain is on the brink of losing its best scientific talent to foreign competition, the head of Britain’s best regarded science establishment has warned. In an interview with The Times, Lord Rees of Ludlow, President of the Royal Society, said that the prospect of swingeing cuts to the science budget meant that universities would struggle to attract the best foreign researchers.
• Not For Profit: Liberal Education and Democratic Citizenship – All over the world, radical changes are occurring in what democratic societies teach both children and young adults, and these changes have not been well considered. Thirsty for economic gain, nations, and their systems of education, are heedlessly discarding forms of learning that are crucial to the health of democracy.
• The OECD Innovation Strategy: Getting a Head Start on Tomorrow – The world today faces significant economic, environmental and social challenges. While no single policy instrument holds all the answers, innovation is the key ingredient of any effort to improve people’s quality of life. Today’s recovery from the global financial and economic crisis remains fragile. As country seek to improve productivity performance and ensure sustained growth, they will need to boost their capacity to innovate.

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My selection of the most interesting news on the internets:

• Overseas student numbers plummet – International student enrolments could drop by as much as 20 per cent next year, costing the economy up to $2 billion, as a consequence of the Rudd government's "abrupt" tightening of immigration requirements and rising competition from North America and Britain for the lucrative student trade.
• Ten Years of Bologna: Threats and Opportunities for Students – More than a decade has passed since 29 European countries adopted an ambitious agenda of reforms with the view to create the European Higher Education Area (EHEA). The reforms were intended to harmonize Europe's higher education systems, facilitate mobility and employability of students across the continent, and increase the European dimension in higher education.
• Links that matter: Recurring themes in EU-Asian Higher Education Cooperation – A publication by the EU-Asia Higher Education Platform (EAHEP). EAHEP has been facilitated by the Asia-Link Programme, a programme of the European Commission established in 2002 to generate regional and multilateral networking between higher education institutions in Europe and developing countries in Asia.

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