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A key reason some ideas are so successful, conventional wisdom has held, is that a few highly influential people espouse them. In his book The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell wrote that what he calls "social epidemics" are "driven by the efforts of a handful of exceptional people." Those exceptional people tend to be experts on a subject who love to talk. Such people can convince dozens of others of their opinions. An excellent sales strategy, then, would be to find those few critical people, persuade them of the value of your product, and leave it to them to convince others. It's a compelling idea, but does it really work? Social network theorists Duncan J. Watts of Columbia University and Peter Sheridan Dodds of the University of Vermont in Burlington decided to put the notion to a test. What they found is a disappointment for "viral marketers" who specialize in selling products by influencing influential people.

a collection of instructional strategies that illustrate how the principles of positive psychology might be applied in the classroom. ( - See more at: http://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/teaching-professor-blog/two-activities-that-influence-the-climate-for-learning/#sthash.ABCJKqB0.dpuf

Coursera is a platform for instruction, discussion and grading at Internet scale. It extends the influence of universities around the world, and it provides them data-driven insights into how to adapt higher education to the global promise of the Internet.

Abstract: Learning!analytics!is!a!significant!area!of!technologyHenhanced!learning!that!has! emerged!during!the!last!decade. This!review!of!the!field!begins!with!an!examination!of!the! technological,!educational!and!political!factors!that!have!driven!the!development!of analytics!in!educational!settings.!It!goes!on!to!chart!the!emergence!of!learning!analytics,! including!their origins!in!the!20 th century,!the!development!of!dataHdriven!analytics,!the!rise! of!learningHfocused!perspectives!and!the!influence!of!national!economic!concerns.!It!next! focuses!on!the!relationships between!learning!analytics,!educational!data!mining!and! academic!analytics.!Finally,!it!sets!out!the!current!state!of!learning!analytics!research,!and! identifies!a!series!of future!challenges.

He says 'effect sizes' are much the best way of answering the question 'what has the greatest influence on student learning'. An effect-size of 1.0 is typically associated with: * advancing learner's achievement by one year, or improving the rate of learning by 50%, * a correlation between some variable (e.g., amount of homework) and achievement of approximately .50. * average students receiving that treatment exceeding 84% of students not receiving that treatment. * A two grade leap in GCSE, e.g. from a C to an A grade. An effect size of 1.0 is clearly enormous! (It is defined as an increase of one standard deviation)

The developing themes have influenced the design and strategy of media production at SCE, including: Strategizing videos to tie directly to course assignments and/or assessment Advising faculty members to use conversational language in production; also encouraging them to use humor and draw on past experiences Adding audio/visual elements to the video that supplement the content; the videos should not convey information that students could just read as text Producing high-quality videos (despite mixed findings related to production values, elements such as professional sound, lighting, and graphics are considered important when creating high-quality media) Keeping the four-minute view time as a design consideration, especially when producing longer-form content lectures that can be broken up into shorter segments

The Society Pages is an online, multidisciplinary social science project headquartered in the Department of Sociology at the University of Minnesota. The Society Pages' mission is to bring social scientific knowledge and information to broader public visibility and influence.

 this study underscores the need to test environmental and health technologies in real-world settings where behavior may temper impacts, and to test them over a long enough horizon to understand how this behavioral effect evolves over time