Social news curation hits the tipping point

Can you describe how you personally use technology to access, create and share information? 2. In terms of technology use, what were the most innovative ideas for education that you saw in the Race To The Top applications that you reviewed?

While social media use has grown dramatically across all age groups, older users have been especially enthusiastic over the past year about embracing new networking tools. Social networking use among internet users ages 50 and older nearly doubled-from 22% in April 2009 to 42% in May 2010.

OCR software let you easily convert images, such as digital photographs, scanned documents, printed books, etc. into text. Once you perform OCR on an image, you'll be able to copy-paste or edit the text content of that image without any retyping and it also becomes more searchable.

A nice chart that compares blogs, wikis, and Google Docs in terms of purpose and functions

kCELTER's - we can use this to frame our conversation about WHY use Twitter. Nice and simple post to get started. How do you actually do it? I'm going to leave behind the pedagogy (mostly) in this post, and instead offer some practical advice for teaching with Twitter. I'll cover six aspects of Twitter integration where it pays to plan ahead of time (i.e. sometime last week): organization, access, frequency, substance, archiving, and assessment. I'll deal with of each of these areas in turn, but before I do, and if you're new to Twitter, I want to urge you to read Ryan Cordell's comprehensive ProfHacker primer on Twitter. Ryan addresses many common questions about Twitter, and his guide is perfect for sharing with colleagues-and students-before you move into the nuts-and-bolts aspects of teaching with Twitter.

Welcome to TRAILS, the ASA Teaching Resources and Innovations Library for Sociology.  With over 2,700 peer-reviewed resources in more than 70 subject areas, TRAILS is the place to find fresh ideas for your classroom.  It's also the perfect place to publish your own teaching and learning innovations.

This fall, I am requiring the students in my seminar to have a Twitter account. Students will post items on a regular basis, using the hashtag #BIO361. We also will devote some time on a regular basis to discussing items or responses from Twitter. Our first post probably will be on the first day of classes - Tuesday, August 24, 2010. For this project to work most effectively, we need a critical mass of people outside of our class to participate. If you, your students, friends, or colleagues would like to join us, please do. We will appreciate any new comments, retweets, or responses. I'm looking forward to an engaging discussion throughout the semester.

Radbox works through a simple bookmarklet that you click whenever you're on a page with a video you want to save. The basic compatibility list reads "YouTube, Vimeo, Metacafe, DailyMotion, CollegeHumor, Hulu, Blip.tv, Megavideo, TED, etc." In my own testing, I liked the way Radbox lined up and played my selected videos with a note about when I saved them, but found that, about half the time, I'd need to click on a video and bring it up on its original site (i.e. click embedded YouTube clips and view them on YouTube) to ensure the Radbox bookmarklet picked up the video for sure. Radbox is a free service, requires a quick sign-up to use

Dual enrollment is widely seen as a strategy to help advanced high school students begin college early. More recently, interest is growing in using dual enrollment as a way to smooth the transition to college for students traditionally underrepresented in higher education.1 Many scholars and practitioners are coming to believe that high school students who have the opportunity to participate in college courses are more likely to enroll in college and succeed once there.

My article about the use of Twitter in Orange Class (@ClassroomTweets) was recently published in English 4-11. I have changed some of the ways in which we use Twitter even within the short time between writing and publication of the article. I plan on writing another more up-to-date reflection on how we have been using Twitter soon but in the meantime hopefully this will provide you with the context in which our work is based. As this is the first article I have ever had published I would value any comments or feedback as to what you think about it.

The Internet's primary effect on how we think will only reveal itself when it affects the cultural milieu of thought, not just the behavior of individual users. The members of the Invisible College did not live to see the full flowering of the scientific method, and we will not live to see what use humanity makes of a medium for sharing that is cheap, instant, and global (both in the sense of 'comes from everyone' and 'goes everywhere.') We are, however, the people who are setting the earliest patterns for this medium. Our fate won't matter much, but the norms we set will.

There is something in the air, and it is nothing less than the digital artifacts of over one billion people and computers networked together collectively producing over 2,000 gigabytes of new information per second. While most of our classrooms were built under the assumption that information is scarce and hard to find, nearly the entire body of human knowledge now flows through and around these rooms in one form or another, ready to be accessed by laptops, cellphones, and iPods. Classrooms built to re-enforce the top-down authoritative knowledge of the teacher are now enveloped by a cloud of ubiquitous digital information where knowledge is made, not found, and authority is continuously negotiated through discussion and participation.

Reading content on the web feels so 2007. I don't Delicious because I don't bookmark, and I don't bookmark because I'm no longer searching for and jumping around the web looking for content. Nowadays I consume most content on my iPad or Touch, using apps such as the one from the NYTimes. The app may restrict where I go, meaning less variety but a higher quality consumption experience. I imagine that over time more of the magazines and journals I read will morph into apps, providing high quality multimedia reading and viewing experiences on portable devices. Reading the NYTimes on my Touch or iPad is better than through a browser because I'm in "lean back" consuming mode. If I'm on my browser it means that I'm on my computer, with all the attention pulls from e-mail and writing projects.

"Simply putting traditional courses online could have negative consequences, especially for lower-performing and language minority students."

Last month, Erica Goldson graduated as valedictorian of Coxsackie-Athens High School. Instead of using her graduation speech to celebrate the triumph of her victory, the school, and the teachers that made it happen, she channeled her inner Ivan Illich and de-constructed the logic of a valedictorian and the whole educational system.

Google workshop led by Luci - MAT program

Te OPEN edition - must read