Have you personally found that as your use of technology has increased, you are more easily distracted? These are certainly timely issues to consider, especially as technology isn’t going away.

It will be interesting to see how Google Buzz can be leveraged for learning opportunities. Since Google Buzz is integrated in Gmail, you won’t have to create a new account or password to use it. This should make Buzz easily accessible to students and teachers that are using Gmail but yet at the same time will isolate users who don’t or choose not to have a Gmail account.

What are your thoughts about Google Buzz? Might you consider trying it either Buzz in your classroom?

• You can create student accounts for an entire class with just a few clicks (and student email addresses are optional for account creation)
• Students of the same class are automatically set up as a Diigo group so they can start using all the benefits that a Diigo group provides, such as group bookmarks and annotations, and group forums.
• Privacy settings of student accounts are pre-set so that only teachers and classmates can communicate with them.
• Ads presented to student account users are limited to education-related sponsors.

Learn more >>

I’ve personally applied for my own educator account upgrade and I encourage anyone else with a Diigo account to do the same. In doing so, you’ll be able to continue to use your Diigo account that you’ve already setup but you’ll have additional teacher-only features that may be even more helpful to you and your students as you use Diigo in your teaching.

You can find me on Diigo at diigo.com/user/jrhode

Here are a few details about the course…

• 4 week course taught as an advanced online seminar offered by Illinois Online Network as part of the Making the Virtual Classroom a Reality course series
• 4 modules, 1 week per module
• 5 to 10 hours per week of engagement and interaction time to justify 4 continuing education units that would be granted for it
• all required “textbook” readings should be freely available online
• Moodle will serve as the learning management system for the course, but other free social networking technologies can be incorporated where they add value to the course
• target date for course to launch: March 2010

What would the ideal online social networking course consist of? What texts/readings should be included? What technologies should be discussed? What activities should students engage in?

Leave a comment here with your ideas, suggestions, and resources! I’m also collecting suggestions on Google Wave at the wave titled, “Ideal online social networking course?” that is available by searching with:public tag:ion

…web-based application that represents a rethinking of electronic communication. Users create online spaces called “waves,” which include multiple discrete messages and components that constitute a running, conversational document. Users access waves through the web, resulting in a model of communication in which rather than sending separate copies of multiple messages to different people, the content resides in a single space. Wave offers a compelling platform for personal learning environments because it provides a single location for collecting information from diverse sources while accommodating a variety of formats, and it makes interactive coursework a possibility for nontechnical students. Wave challenges us to reevaluate how communication is done, stored, and shared between two or more people (7 Things You Should Know About Google Wave).

Google Wave is currently only available in a limited preview but I’ve been fortunate to receive access. I’m personally using Wave to design a new online social networking course that I am working on developing for the Illinois Online Network and am finding the tool to have a lot of potential! More about that project in another post.

I have received a few invites that I can give out to others who would like to try to Google Wave. If you’d be interested in giving Google Wave a try, please leave a comment here with the email address you’d like to have the invite sent to and if I still have an invite available, I’ll send one your way!

This video is produced by the author of Socialnomics.

Learning Web Design: A Beginner’s Guide to (X)HTML, Style Sheets, and Web Graphics (3rd ed.). ISBN 10: 0-596-52752-7

This thoroughly revised edition teaches you how to build web sites according to modern design practices and professional standards. Learning Web Design explains:

• How to create a simple (X)HTML page, how to add links and images
• Everything you need to know about web standards — (X)HTML, DTDs, and more
• Cascading Style Sheets — formatting text, colors and backgrounds, using the box model, page layout, and more
• All about web graphics, and how to make them lean and mean through optimization
• The site development process, from start to finish
• Getting your pages on the Web — hosting, domain names, and FTP

Learning Web Design starts from the beginning — defining how the Web and web pages work — and builds from there. By the end of the book, you’ll have the skills to create multi-column CSS layouts with optimized graphic files, and you’ll know how to get your pages up on the Web.

The book includes exercises to help you to learn various techniques, and short quizzes to make sure you’re up to speed with key concepts. If you’re interested in web design, Learning Web Design is the place to start.

• Read the complete Table of Contents
• Buy it at O’Reilly.com

The Non-Designer’s Web Book: An Easy Guide to Creating, Designing, and Posting Your Own Web Site (3rd ed.). ISBN: 0-321-30337-7

If you think web design is beyond your reach, or if you want your existing web site to look more professional, this thoroughly updated classic is the place to turn! In these pages, best-selling authors Robin Williams and John Tollett share the creative ideas, useful techniques, and basic design principles that are essential to great Web design-all in the context of the most current technology, software, and standards. Throughout, the authors’ aim is to inspire you and spark your creativity rather than sedate you with pages and pages of code. To that end, you’ll find loads of real-world examples, interesting illustrations, and the simple instructions you need to implement the techniques and concepts described in these pages.

• Read sample chapter, "What are Web pages anyway?"
• But it a Peachpit.com

No more excuses for having smudges and dust on your laptop screen!

Sound intriguing? Take a look at this demo video:

I’ve created my Google profile and have joined the Google experiment. I’ll no doubt be tweeting my experience in the days ahead. How might Google Social Search impact teaching and learning?