I love this phrase "coaxing serendipity" as a way to describe the process that results when a loosely structured informal social environment of like minded people occurs. I've experienced this kind of serendipity in my own learning as a result of the loose connections I make using social networks.

I don't think these informal salons are something that are necessarily exclusive to the domain of artists or cultural creatives, but rather any type of CoP or NoP where a common practice occurs. Same thing with the tip on making it ridiculous - not something I think is crucial, but I agree that loose and fun will win out at the end of the day.

via Chris Lott http://sparkies.chrislott.org/post/3833957282/coaxing-serendipity

Amplify’d from the99percent.com

The establishment of informal "salons" or "circles" of artists or cultural creatives dates back to the Ancient Greeks and is a common feature of several touchstone cultural movements from impressionism to abstract expressionism to beat poetry.  The free-flowing exchange of ideas in a social setting serves to encourage deeper thinking, challenge assumptions, and expand resources – crucial aspects of any creative career.  Furthermore, a consistent regular forum for discussion acts as a method to "coax serendipity" or encourage chance overlaps that lead to something exceptional: an idea that turns into a novel, the mention of a name that turns into a mentor, an acquaintance that becomes a star client.

A few tips on coaxing serendipity

1. Gather the right people.

2. Don't dwell on making history.

3. Keep the agenda loose and social.

4. Establish consistency.

5. Keep it ridiculous.

Camaraderie can be potent. Read more at the99percent.com

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

Article from The Guardian about new research done on an MA level distance program and how some specific technology tools were incorporated into the program. Specifically, e-readers, Second Life and audio. Interesting that Second Life was being used as an asynchronous resource instead of a synchronous meeting space, which is how I usually read about Second Life being used. I also liked that students enjoyed & appreciated the audio feedback from other students & their tutor and appeared to pay more attention to comments received via audio than text. There is something appealing to me in the linear presentation of audio feedback that might make learners less likely to skim through feedback.

Amplify’d from www.guardian.co.uk

Research carried out recently among a group of students enrolled on a distance MA Tesol course at Leicester University offers a glimpse into a not-too-distant future when learners distributed around the world but linked via the internet will be able to enhance their learning experience with the use of some simple and low-cost digital tools.

with a simple voice recording program and headphone-and-mic sets it is possible for students to add audio clips to these message board postings

as part of the trial students and teachers were encouraged to post feedback about their work and exchange messages.

"It was incredibly successful," Witthaus said. "Audio feedback gives the students the sense of their tutor as a real human being."

She says tutors began to create a more effective, time-saving combination of text and audio. "They found they could write quick little annotations on students' essays and then elaborate more in the audio feedback."

The research also revealed that students appeared more willing to listen to feedback via audio than to commit time to reading written comments.

One other interesting result of the research was how communication could still be effective when it was asynchronous, particularly for study groups spread across different times zones.

This was most apparent with the use of Second Life. Instead of attempting to get student to congregate, in their avatar personas, in some part of the vast virtual world at the same time, the teaching staff identified where language learning was going on in SL and instructed students to carry out observations of what was happening in these virtual classrooms.

"The e-readers fitted into their lives. They didn't necessarily replace print or their laptops or smartphones, it just fitted in. They used them in contexts where it worked for them." Read more at www.guardian.co.uk

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

Lasting Change: Sustaining Digital Scholarship and Culture in Canada

Amplify’d from www.cwrc.ca

Lasting Change (available by clicking here) is a Knowledge Synthesis on the Digital Economy funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada from August to December 2010.

This report reflects the growing concern in the scholarly and cultural communities, and beyond, regarding the sustainability of Canada’s digital knowledge and heritage. Canada’s digital advantage is only of value if it can be carried into the future. Canadians must meet the challenge of preserving and enhancing scholarly and artistic knowledge production and our culture in a digital environment.

The report concludes the following:

Economics and the Public Good: Digital scholarship and artistic creation make major contributions to the public good; they also produce economic spin-off effects that are insufficiently understood.

Challenges of Diversity: Sustaining contemporary culture and digital heritage will require a multi-faceted approach that draws on the academic community to address cultural difference.

Shifting Ground: The pace of change creates major challenges and a need for agile, flexible responses to new developments on the part of both institutions and governments.

Policy Opportunities: Canada is well positioned to take a series of proactive steps towards achieving a position of leadership in relation to digital innovation, scholarship and the arts and humanities.

Digital humanities scholarship and creation sustains both the economic and the public good in Canada. It sustains the economic good by fostering innovation and knowledge mobilization, and by training highly qualified personnel with diverse intellectual and practical skills. Digital humanities scholarship sustains the public good by generating uniquely Canadian digital content while also preserving Canada’s digital and documentary heritage.

Alternative rights protocols model partnerships among scholars, artists and cultural practitioners to provide sustainable and equitable principles of access. They seek to acknowledge and balance the needs and investments of different sectors, and strive to foster a knowledge economy based on openness rather than a privatization of knowledge that results in the restriction of its dissemination.

New forms of digital research reach larger audiences, push the boundaries between the academy and communities, and provide opportunities for partnerships and collaborations across traditionally isolated sectors and disciplinary boundaries. Their difference from traditional research, however, means they may not be adequately assessed by existing systems of scholarly evaluation.

Academic institutions can support digital research creation by providing infrastructural support, policy-level support of open access practices and technical staff invested in humanities research. Emergent institutional frameworks contribute to producing citizens with diverse and adaptable skill sets.

Funding models must meet the particular needs of digital scholars, including fostering a range of partnerships beyond the academy and providing life-long learning to address the rapid shifts in digital technologies and practices. Read more at www.cwrc.ca

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

Something I have been noticing in my own virtual connections is that, whether on Facebook or Twitter, I am conversing more and more with people I associate with IRL. I've been wondering why this is, and I think it has to do with the mainstreaming of these two social networks. When I began using FB in 2007 and Twitter in 2008, they were still the domains of early adopters, who tended to be geographically dispersed. However, as these social networks have moved into the mainstream, there are many more people who I associated with face to face on a regular basis that I also communicate with in these forums. ICT's have always been a great way to geographically shrink the world, and I certainly do still have strong connections with people on the other side of the world that I have never met f2f. But increasingly my inner trusted virtual circle - the people who I have the most interactive discussions with - are people who I am in fairly close physical proximity to.

Amplify’d from economix.blogs.nytimes.com

In the language of economics, the core question is whether face-to-face interactions and electronic connections are substitutes or complements

In our original paper, we argued that the number of human interactions was hardly a zero-sum game, and more electronic interactions didn’t have to mean fewer meetings face-to-face.

If the new media increased the number of relationships – the connectedness of the world – more than it decreased personal meetings within any given relationship, then better electronic communications could increase the number of face-to-face meetings.

In later research and in my book “Triumph of the City” (The Penguin Press, 2011), I emphasized a slightly different idea: electronic connections and face-to-face connections are complements because new technologies increase the returns to innovation.

Better electronic interactions make it easier to produce new ideas in low-cost areas (think New York fashion designers’ ideas that are manufactured in China) or to sell creativity worldwide (think the global success of “Avatar”), and that means bigger returns to innovation.

As long as interpersonal contact – the sharing of knowledge at close quarters – remains an important ingredient in innovation (as it seemed to be in Facebook), then better electronic connections can make face-to-face contact, and innovation-assisting cities, more important.

We also cited earlier research that found that people tended to call people who were physically close: in the 1970s, more than 40 percent of phone calls connected places less than two miles apart. More recent data from Japan confirmed that proximity and phoning seemed to complement each other.

It shouldn’t be surprising that people both call and meet with their friends, and that suggests a certain kind of complementarity.

Another piece of evidence suggesting that information technology and face-to-face contact are complements is the geographic concentration of the tech cluster. America’s cutting-edge computer scientists have access to the best electronic means of long-distance connection, yet they have come together to form the world’s most famous industrial cluster: Silicon Valley.

A similar cluster exists in Bangalore.

In my own industry as well, there is little evidence that long-distance learning is eliminating demand for the high-intensity in-person education that places like Princeton and Yale provide. Anyone who teaches knows that good lecturing is far more than proclaiming wisdom from on high.

The teacher constantly struggles to understand what is getting across, and that’s far easier at close quarters. The more complex the idea, the more you need to rely on the rich cues that humans have evolved for signaling confusion or comprehension.

Humanity is a profoundly social species, with a deep ability to learn from people nearby. I believe that the future will only make that asset more important. Read more at economix.blogs.nytimes.com

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

Interesting and novel way to use Twitter - have a librarian lurk on the discussion and be able to interject timely resources at opportune moments.

Amplify’d from chronicle.com

At the start of each class session, the professor, Gardner Campbell, asked the 11 students to open their laptops, fire up Twitter, and say hello to their librarian, who was following the discussion from her office. During the hourlong class, the librarian, Ellen Hampton Filgo, would do what she refers to as “library jazz,” looking at the questions and comments posed by students, responding with suggestions of links or books, and anticipating what else might be helpful that students might not have known to ask.

“I could see the sort of germination of an idea, and what they wanted to talk about,” she said, noting that it let her in on the process of students’ research far sooner than usual. “That was cool for me,” she added. “When I work with students at the reference desk, usually they’re already at a certain midpoint of their research.” Read more at chronicle.com

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

The Sophia site is at http://sophia.org.

Amplify’d from chronicle.com

The basic idea behind Sophia is to identify the best teachers for any concept, put their instruction for that concept online, and students all over the world can use these “learning packets”  free of charge. For example, a professor who has a really great lesson on how to factor polynomials can package that lesson—complete with video and any other materials—on Sophia, and search engines like Google will let students find it and use it.

The difference between Sophia and a learning-management system that also allows professors to post instructional material, like Moodle or Blackboard, is that Sophia is not institution-limited. It starts with a public community, rather than just people affiliated with a particular course at a particular college. Read more at chronicle.com

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

Three academic studies are cited in this article about Twitter, and how it can increase student engagement, enhance social presence, and help develop peer support models among students through the formations of personal learning networks.

Amplify’d from spotlight.macfound.org

A small but impressive study of students at Lockhaven University in Pennsylvania found that those who used Twitter to continue class discussions and complete assignments were more engaged in their classwork than students who did not.

Four sections (70 students) were given assignments and discussions that incorporated Twitter, such as tweeting about their experiences on a job shadow day or commenting on class readings. Three sections (55 students) did the same assignments and had access to the same information, but didn’t use Twitter.

In addition to showing more than twice the improvement in engagement than the control group, the students who used Twitter also achieved on average a .5 point increase in their overall GPA for the semester.

An earlier study [pdf] by Joanna C. Dunlap and Patrick R. Lowenthal from the University of Colorado at Denver found that Twitter was able to “enhance social presence” and produce other instructional benefits in an online course.

Another experiment into the use of social media at the University of Leicester found that tweeting helps to develop peer support among students and personal learning networks and can be used as a data collection tool. Read a more detailed description of the experiment here. [via Faculty Focus] Read more at spotlight.macfound.org

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

Two points from this article. First, social software enables learning conversations to occur outside of the classroom, not only between students, but also between students and the larger community. Second, when students taking ownership of their own tools, they are set up to become lifelong learners. My take is that this requires flexibility on the part of educators in that they have to be willing to go where the learners are and let the learner decide where they want these conversations to occur.

Amplify’d from campustechnology.com

But, most importantly, their learning experiences often involve a conversation, a process, and this conversation can include teachers and others with knowledge in their field. The skills students gain in the process are those they need to join a wider community and succeed in today’s economy.

Colleges and universities need to do more to incorporate social software into their courses and methodologies. I hear from faculty and administrators regularly about transformations of entire programs to the social/conversational/active learning paradigm of today.

This extension of the learning conversation online (with blogs, wikis, e-mail, texting, chat, conferencing systems, portfolios, and so on), helps students develop online literacy skills. Though it is dependent on technology, it represents a return to the roots of human learning. Learning has always involved conversation. In fact, knowledge results from, or increasingly is, consensus-building through conversation.

To the extent that students are engaged in that conversation using their own--literally their own--Web and Internet applications, some of them have a chance to become independent, life-long learners and enjoy a better chance to develop their own expertise Read more at campustechnology.com

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

I like this case study. It's not from post-sec, but K-12, and the interview with the educators was done by Wikispaces so they have an interest in promoting wiki technology in a positive light. However, that said, it is still a great example of how educators living at a distance used a wiki to collaborate and develop an OER based on the Grade 6 social studies curriculum in Ontario. It also illustrates the benefits of being open, as the teachers involved sent out a tweet about their final result, which was picked up by the Wikispaces staff, who then interviewed the teachers and hilighted their wiki on their site - which was read by me, and is now being sent out to my network. Their work gets pushed around various networks and amplified, based on a single tweet that they sent.

Amplify’d from www.wikispaces.com

However, as we began to work on the project, we needed a way to share ideas, and work on pulling the assignment together without meeting in person as we all lived a distance away from each other.

We wanted to reach more educators than only those in our faculty and within the first week of our unit being posted, we had other universities' and your own recognition!

Rachel: As part of our IT course, we were all required to open Twitter accounts and we were encouraged to use it as a way to connect and collaborate with other educators. We were all very excited about our completed wiki so we decided to "tweet" about it. The fact that you found us through Twitter demonstrates first-hand the power of Web 2.0 tools and how effective they are for connecting and sharing with others around the globe.

Marsha: We learned so much for this experience beyond just how to create a unit of study. By jumping right in and being willing to try new things, we really discovered the value of technology in education and one’s own professional development. Now that we have each had experience with creating Wikispaces, we have been able to implement them in a practical way in the classroom and have experimented with its many uses.

Not having integrated vast amounts of technology before, we have realized its potential as educators through the power of collaboration and its use for professional development and its power for our students and their continued learning.

It becomes really difficult when the school isn’t equipped with technology and when— if you’re in a community that is accepting of the idea of integrating technology, I think that that just allows so much growth for your students.

And I think, too, with traditional education, when you think of online games and Web tools and, you know, doing things like this with technology, that it’s not “educational,” and that it’s more just fun, and you’re playing online. But we learned that there are tons of games and tools and resources online, and even just different technological tools that you can use in you classroom that are educational, depending on how you use them and what you want the kids to get out of it.

So if you’re learning from it and enjoying it, then imagine what the students will get from it.

you don’t know if it’s going to work until you’ve tried.

And don’t expect it to be the same experience that someone else had, because you go in, and it’s all trial and error. Does this work, and does that work, and we found that the best way to learn was to play with things ourselves instead of having the instructor sit beside us and set everything up for us, it was so much more, “See what works for you.” Read more at www.wikispaces.com

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

Qwiki looks like a very interesting platform. It's like Wikipedia in that it is like an encyclopedia of general knowledge, only instead of the knowledge being constructed primarily by contributors, it is created by machines, pulling all these little bits and pieces of content from other spots on the web. It does this on the fly using semantic web technologies. There is a way that users can participate, by suggesting sources of information that might improve a Qwiki, but the heavy lifting is primarily done by machines. And it looks very pretty. The UI is slick.

In taking a look at Qwiki, I came across this blog post from Gregory Roekens in which he connects semntic web technologies with a theory of knowledge creation and information processing called mental space theory, which, in turn, is based on something called a DIKW (data, information, knowledge and wisdom) hierarchy. DIKW illustrates a hierarchical relationship in that data and information lead to knowledge, which leads to wisdom. I haven't come across this term or theory before, but it is intriguing.

Amplify’d from tell.posterous.com

Qwiki is one of those emerging platform leveraging the semantic web. I often used the Ackoff's allocation of mental space theory to explain the importance of Semantic Web and its huge potential. This theory is based on the DIKW hierarchy.

In a nutshell and using the diagrams below, our brain is using 40% of mental space to process data into information, a further 30% to process information into knowledge, 20% to process knowledge into Wisdom and only the remaining 10% is used to process Wisdom into Vision (see diagram 1).

In his work Scott Carpenter explains that thanks to data-handling technology (think excel spreadsheet, charts and dashboard) it allows the human cognitive energy to shift upward and produce information out of data (see diagram 2). Without these technologies the cognitive is locked down by mundane and time consuming effort to process the data into information.

What's really exciting in Scott's theory is that with the Semantic Web and its semantic processing power cognitive allocation can shift to Wisdom and Vision with the machine effectively delivering the Knowledge (see diagram 3). Read more at tell.posterous.com

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

I went through asynch discussion burnout during my Masters. 5 courses back to back where the main tool of interaction with classmates was an asynchronous discussion board. Some tips that I appreciated as a student - faculty limiting us to postings of no more than 200 words, and breaking us into smaller groups to keep the conversation more manageable. I also appreciated having those groups mixed up during the course to keep it fresh and to introduce new ideas and ways of thinking into our discussion.

Amplify’d from www.facultyfocus.com

What Do Students Learn Through Discussion?

Using a qualitative design, researchers identified four different ways students reported they were using discussion to promote learning.

To challenge ideas – both their own and others with the goal of arriving at a more complete understanding

To develop ideas – using the ideas of others to improve their own thinking

To acquire ideas – using discussion as a way of collecting ideas

To check ideas – making sure that their ideas were the right ones; that they were learning the right things

The researchers identify the first two approaches as deep learning methods and the last two as more typical of surface learning approaches.

The researchers also point out that students don’t always see the potential for learning through discussion—it’s just another one of those things some teachers have them do. You think the reason for having discussions is obvious to students? I’d encourage you to test that assumption. Next time you’ve had a discussion, ask students why you had them discuss the topic rather than simply lecturing on it or have them read about it in the text. If I had to guess, I’d say that question will first be met with silence, followed by some glib answers, “You didn’t have time to prepare a lecture,” followed by other answers, none still very insightful, “It’s a way to keep us awake.” Read more at www.facultyfocus.com

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

This post is in regards to the recent $2 billion dollars that the US gov't has set aside for the creation of Open Educational Resources. A significant shot in the arm for OER's, except for on small glitch - the content has to be developed to be SCORM compliant. This post rips apart how that little gotcha put's the whole idea of resuability at risk. A good trashing of the SCORM standard. It should be noted that the trashing is being done by a person who is involved in creating a competing standard, but these remain valid concerns with SCORM. But really, what about just developing to web standards and be done with it?

Amplify’d from www.imsglobal.org

1. SCORM is severely outdated and narrow in scope. The model upon which it is based is 15 years old and very focused on one specific need: self-paced computer-based training (CBT). It is also old in terms of the technology used to implement it. It is not web friendly. It was even kind of outdated when it first came into the market. Now it is ancient.

. SCORM does not provide reliable interoperability or reuse. SCORM is very complex and notorious for providing inconsistent interoperability even among products achieving the SCORM certification.

3. SCORM was not designed for and has NOT typically been used for cohort-based educational courses with teacher and professors involved.

4. SCORM is especially bad for customizing and remixing by regular teachers and professors. SCORM objects are generally a "black box." They require complex authoring tools to create and edit SCORM content. Therefore, remixing and republishing by the users is extremely complex

5. SCORM has no concept of or support for assessment. At best SCORM can be set up to provide short quizzes or individual questions that are a black box.

6. SCORM has no concept of protecting access to content with license codes or any other protection mechanism.

7. SCORM has no concept of or support for existing in a wider Information Technology (IT) infrastructure in which there are administrative student systems. This means that SCORM does not think through how access to various content and resources is restricted to certain individuals, including cohorts of students for collaborative activities and courses, or how data gathered from the learning is reported to administrative systems

it is very difficult to find even a single higher education course that has been reused as a result of SCORM

So, why is SCORM a poor fit for education? SCORM may be part of the solution, but at best it only addresses 10% of the requirements, and unfortunately based on very outdated technology.

Social learning, collaborative learning? These were never even contemplated with SCORM. Read more at www.imsglobal.org

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

An interesting example of a collaborative project in curation among Colleges. College educators in Washington State are compiling a number of resources and Open Textbooks, and developing something called an Open Course Library. They are hoping to replace expensive publishers textbooks with affordable open textbook alternatives.

Amplify’d from seattletimes.nwsource.com

"Higher education has 200 years of history behind it of doing this a certain way," he said. "This is very disruptive to that model."

Sometimes, the best materials for a class may not be textbooks at all, Green said. The Open Course Library will tap into materials from such highly respected sources as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Carnegie Mellon University, which offer free videos, lecture notes and exams.

"The tide's turning," Green said. "Faculty are very excited about this."

Washington is one of the few states that has put a significant amount of money toward creating an open curriculum, said Nicole Allen, a textbook advocate for the national Student Public Interest Research Group (PIRG). "They're putting their money where their mouth is," she said.

The open-source textbook drive is part of a larger state effort, called the Open Course Library, to assemble all curriculum materials — including the course syllabus, videos, lecture notes and exams — for the 81 most popular courses, said Cable Green, director of elearning and open education for the State Board of Community and Technical Colleges (SBCTC).

The state's community and technical colleges are leading the way with an ambitious new initiative: They're assembling previously published "open-source" textbooks and course materials for the 81 most popular classes at state two-year colleges — including for such mainstays as "General Psychology" and "Introduction to Chemistry." Read more at seattletimes.nwsource.com

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

Research from Pew about the relationship between the internet, social networks and group formation and cohesion. Found it interesting that 35% of people say the internet has had a major impact on helping groups find leaders. I wonder if this reflects the fact that the internet, and social networks in particular, are becoming more important in our day to day lives and that organizations are looking towards those early adopters who have a strong social presence in these spaces to move into leadership roles in order to harness their knowledge of this emerging space?

Amplify’d from www.pewinternet.org

75% of all American adults are active in some kind of voluntary group or organization and internet users are more likely than others to be active: 80% of internet users participate in groups, compared with 56% of non-internet users. And social media users are even more likely to be active: 82% of social network users and 85% of Twitter users are group participants

It becomes clear as people are asked about their activities that their use of the internet is having a wide-ranging impact on their engagement with civic, social, and religious groups.

35% of all Americans said the internet has had a major impact on the ability of groups to find people to take leadership roles. Some 35% of internet users said that.

However, three times that number of active group members (75%) did not discover any of the groups they belong to online.

Groups and their members are using all kinds of digital tools to bind themselves together and some of the most innovative involve social networking sites like Facebook (used by 62% of the internet users in our survey), Twitter (used by 12% of internet users), blogs, and texting (used by 74% of the cell phone owners in our survey) :

Social network and Twitter users are also more active in some parts of group activity: They post about group activities on their Facebook pages and Tweets; they are more likely than others to invite newbies into a group; more likely than others to be targeted for invitation to groups; more likely to use the internet to discover groups; more likely to say the internet enables them to participate in more groups and more likely to say they spend more time on group activities because of the internet. Social media users are significantly more likely than other group participants who go online for group activities, to say that the internet has a “major impact” on their ability to engage with their groups. Read more at www.pewinternet.org

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

Good move by Wikipedia to help develop tools educators can use. By engaging the academic & teaching community, Wikipedia could actually become a much more substantive and "credible" resource. Plus by engaging educators in the act of editing Wikipedia and using them to introduce Wikipedia to their students as contributors and not just users, I can see these resources expanding the Wikipedia contributor user base as more students and educators become engaged in not only using, but contributing, to Wikipedia.

Amplify’d from chronicle.com

As Wikipedia hits its 10th year of operation, it is making efforts to involve academics more closely in its process. The latest is a new plan to build an “open educational resource platform” that will gather tools about teaching with Wikipedia in the classroom.

Rodney Dunican, education programs manager for Wikimedia, Wikipedia’s parent company, is part of the team working to build the platform, which he said will highlight the ways in which Wikipedia can be used to improve student learning.

“We don’t want them to cite Wikipedia,” he said of students. “What we really want them to do is understand how to use and critically evaluate the articles on Wikipedia and then learn how to contribute to make those articles better.” Read more at chronicle.com

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

Research on how a larger amygdala region in the brain may make it easier for some people to maintain a large social network.

Amplify’d from www.theglobeandmail.com

People with large, highly complex social networks tend to have larger amygdala regions than those with fewer friends, according to a study published in Nature Neuroscience.

It’s the first study to demonstrate a link between amygdala volume and social network characteristics within a single species.

They found that the gregarious types, those who reported having regular contact with comparatively large numbers of people from a variety of social groups, tend to have larger amygdala volumes. Read more at www.theglobeandmail.com

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

I like this term "chronocentricity," "the egotism that ones own generation is poised on the very cusp of history." I think I am guilty of this with regards to the role technology plays in education - that we are one step away from an edtech revolution, especially in higher education. Partially because I think I live in that Twitter echo chamber, and partly because I have drunk the Kool-aid so to speak, and see the value in embracing technology as a core tool for my own personal learning. But that's just me.

Amplify’d from www.rferl.org

As the events in Tunisia continue to unfold they will be ripe for study by academics and experts, but in so quickly applying our theories of social mobilization, or our frameworks of revolutionary change, we become blind to what is really happening. As Evgeny Morozov’s makes clear in his recent book, by over-focusing on the technology, we lose sight of what’s really important. The problem is that we so desperately want there to be a Twitter revolution. In a 24-hour news cycle, we don’t just seek instant news but instant answers, clear explanations and narratives that can be book-ended with events and wrapped up into a three-word headline. At first it is just a catchy headline beloved of journalists in need of page views, but quickly that moniker becomes a narrative, an established truth that is often wildly divergent with the reality on the ground. In our search for a single cause, we're much more likely to settle on an "new technology" explanation rather than something as dull as a great many of the participants were unemployed or wearing socks. Not only do "Twitter revolution" explanations mean more page views, but they fulfill some deterministic urge within us -- the dual promises of technology and modernity. There was as much breathless enthusiasm about the power of the telegraph to do good as there is the Internet. In Tom Standage’s wonderful book on the growth of the telegraph he says these reactions are amplified by what he terms "chronocentricity," "the egotism that ones own generation is poised on the very cusp of history."

More than that, Twitter revolution narratives are popular because rather than being about Tunisia, they are often really about ourselves. When we glorify the role of social media we are partly glorifying ourselves. Some of us are not only praising the tools we know and love and use every day, but also the tools we build and have stakes in. To proclaim a Twitter revolution is almost a form of intellectual colonialism, stealthy and mildly delusional:  We project our world, our values, and concerns onto theirs and we shouldn’t. We use Twitter and so must they. In our rush to christen the uprising, did we think to ask Tunisians what they wanted to call their revolution? Read more at www.rferl.org

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

From my own experience, I agree with the statement that most educators use technology for administrative purposes rather than instruction. It's a tool to manage their classes. If I look at the more popular tools used by our instructors in the LMS, the gradebook, dropbox, classlist, quizzes (which I see as an administrative tool since most instructors are drawn to it because it reduces their marking load) are well used. Discussion boards are the only real venue for actual learning activities within the LMS. Not that there is anything wrong with this as that is an important and compelling reason to adopt technology. But it isn't really using the web for learning activities.

As for the rest of the article, this is a good case study on integrating blogging into class, and what the perceptions of the students was of the assignment.

Amplify’d from campustechnology.com

"What I found lacking was research that examined blogging's effectiveness from the student perspective. There was little discussion of student perceptions concerning the value of blogging as an activity or whether the students believed blogging impacted their learning."

"Most educators use technology for administrative tasks rather than instruction because they don't feel prepared and aren't getting the technical support needed. The results of the study, I believed, could help suggest best practices for using blogs as learning tools." Read more at campustechnology.com

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

I agree. Not that you need to know all the ins and outs of how to properly declare a page, or make sure you are outputting the right type of HTML. But rather a little knowledge of the basics of HTML makes your ability to publish in digital format much, much easier.

Amplify’d from teachpaperless.blogspot.com

Interestingly enough, however, whereas an essay has an audience of 1 (the teacher) -- a blog post has an audience of potentially millions physically anywhere. And blog posts are written in HTML, which makes using HTML the equivalent of knowing how to use Microsoft Word (or OpenOffice, or Pages, etc.). HTML is how you put your thoughts on digital paper.

Every educator and student should know HTML. Read more at teachpaperless.blogspot.com

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

I haven't taken a look yet, but I wonder what are the additional support structures, or design considerations they have had to account for when designing for fully autonomous learners.

Amplify’d from tofp.wordpress.com

Dubbed “OCW Scholar” courses, these materials are designed from the start for independent learners who have few additional resources available to them. The courses are substantially more complete than typical OCW courses and include new custom-created content as well as materials repurposed from MIT classrooms. The materials are also arranged in logical sequences and include multimedia such as video and simulations.

When we first launched OCW, the number of independent learners using the site was a big surprise to us. They were forty to fifty percent of our visitors,” says Professor Shigeru Miyagawa, OWC’s Faculty Advisory Committee Chair. Read more at tofp.wordpress.com

Permalink | Leave a comment  »