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the evolution of what was initially a group into a community of practice is illustrated, as well as how social media enables one CoP to interact with others to become part of a distributed learning network. Participants in the networked communities continually leverage each other’s professional development, and what is modeled and practiced in transactions there is applied later in their teaching practices

Teachers can be shown how to use social media, but unless they use it themselves they are unlikely to change their practices. There is evidence that teachers trained in programs where their instructors used social media (modeled it) are more comfortable with technology than if their instructors did not themselves use these tools. This article suggests how teachers can interact with numerous communities of practice and distributed learning networks where other participants are modeling to and learning from one another optimal ways of using social media in teaching. This strongly suggests that teachers must be trained not only in the use of social media, but through its use.

“To teach is to model and demonstrate. To learn is to practice and reflect.”

ELA: There are more sobering notes among the n-grams. For instance, here's the trajectory of Marc Chagall, an artist born in 1887. And this looks like the normal trajectory of a famous person. He gets more and more and more famous, except if you look in German. If you look in German, you see something completely bizarre, something you pretty much never see, which is he becomes extremely famous and then all of a sudden plummets, going through a nadir between 1933 and 1945, before rebounding afterward. And of course, what we're seeing is the fact Marc Chagall was a Jewish artist in Nazi Germany. Now these signals are actually so strong that we don't need to know that someone was censored. We can actually figure it out using really basic signal processing. Here's a simple way to do it. Well, a reasonable expectation is that somebody's fame in a given period of time should be roughly the average of their fame before and their fame after. So that's sort of what we expect. And we compare that to the fame that we observe. And we just divide one by the other to produce something we call a suppression index. If the suppression index is very, very, very small, then you very well might be being suppressed. If it's very large, maybe you're benefiting from propaganda.

Now when Google digitizes a book, they put it into a really nice format. Now we've got the data, plus we have metadata. We have information about things like where was it published, who was the author, when was it published. And what we do is go through all of those records and exclude everything that's not the highest quality data. What we're left with is a collection of five million books, 500 billion words, a string of characters a thousand times longer than the human genome -- a text which, when written out, would stretch from here to the Moon and back 10 times over -- a veritable shard of our cultural genome.

Packard claims the evolution of Web technologies such as streaming video, social networking and interactive gaming have made for a more collaborative and classroom-like experience online.

Then the company spent $116 million in July to acquire Wimba and Ellmuniate, two companies that apply synchronous learning technologies such as online audio, video and digital whiteboards to distance-learning classes.

Given the evolution of new media, how can educators determine what to use, when, and why? Hence, our guiding question is, how should educators assess the effectiveness of new media using performance-based measures—not relying only on the often-used survey of student satisfaction?

One strategy we employ applies equally to any new approach in teaching, whether it employs “new media” or not. That strategy is to apply some of the best current knowledge from cognitive and learning sciences to assess proposed teaching innovation.

What is the educational need, problem, or gap for which use of new media might potentially enhance learning?

Harvard has invested heavily in a system of residential housing and high-quality tutoring.  This means that even students who pay the tuition sticker price aren’t covering the full cost of their education.  Thus, growing the size of its “customer” base, which is how businesses achieve scale economies and greater profitability, is financially problematic for Harvard and for other universities with similar operating models. 

What is the purpose of a university as depicted in this book? Is it: A. A university is an institution that provides a degree, which is a credential or screening device for the economy and for society? Or B.  A university is an institution in which people acquire the knowledge they need for a particular job? Or C.  A university is an institution in which people acquire the knowledge they need to be a citizen? Or D.  A university is an experience where you acquire a capacity to be a lifelong learner (because most of the knowledge you acquire will be obsolete within a few years and the jobs of tomorrow will not be the jobs of today)? Or E. Something else?

One of the best ways to learn to learn is to be an active learner and a teacher of one’s fellow students in college. This instructional philosophy isn’t yet widespread, but its effectiveness has been proven, and it doesn’t require additional financial investment, only a change in the attitudes of faculty members and students.  Broader adoption seems likely, with time.