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"By making its inaugural higher education partnership with Duke, Ustream aims to help empower educational experiences across physical and financial boundaries,” said John Ham, Ustream’s chief executive officer. “We look forward to enabling Duke professors to reach students across the globe."

“Duke has a strong commitment to sharing its knowledge and expertise to serve society,” said Michael Schoenfeld, vice president for public affairs and government relations at Duke. “We’re using a growing number of new media platforms to invite the public to participate in the debates that animate our campus, on issues ranging from health care to foreign policy. These new services and programs make it possible for our faculty to connect with audiences around the world.”

She told me that she regularly pitches stories to journalists via Twitter, and she believes that watching the feeds of journalists helps her build personal relationships with them.

But the real value of Twitter, he says, is what he learns by watching the other messages coming in — from college students, venture capitalists, journalists, and others he follows. "The fact that they're watching the news for me, scouting the Web for me, and editing the Web in real time — that's the value of it," he said. He started using the service more than a year ago after he was encouraged to do so by his friend, the journalism blogger Jeff Jarvis. Mr. Rosen says it complements his own blog, PressThink, letting him reach new audiences and interact with more people.

Mr. Parry was one of the first to try Twitter as a teaching tool — we wrote about his experiments last year (The Chronicle, February 29, 2008). He has gained many followers of his Twitter feed, where he shares his experiences using technology for teaching and research. He led a panel about microblogging at the annual conference of the Modern Language Association in December, which he organized via Twitter.

Over the past decade, higher education has invested millions of dollars in classroom technology. The addition of document cameras, DVD players, Internet access, and projectors (to name a few) has added new functionality to the classroom. It is now possible to bring much more diverse materials to the classroom, to present them in a variety of ways, and to devise new classroom activities for students. As a result, the concept of the classroom has expanded to include this set of new functions.

RSS is a defined standard based on XML with the specific purpose of delivering updates to web-based content.

Meanwhile, consumers use RSS readers and news aggregators to collect and monitor their favorite feeds in one centralized program or location.

RSS is becoming increasing popular. The reason is fairly simple. RSS is a free and easy way to promote a site and its content without the need to advertise or create complicated content sharing partnerships.

's only a question of which technology, and of the alignment between technology in the learning situation and in the assessment situation."

"It's not that we want kids to cheat," Prensky said. "It's that the definitions of learning, cheating, researching, and collaborating are changing right in front of our eyes."

The ideas about how people find information are very fluid, he added, and that can be seen perhaps most easily in medicine, where medical students and doctors are allowed texts in which to look up the answers to questions--but what is most important is knowing which questions to ask.

others say its high cost and lack of certain key features-such as a video camera-will keep them from investing in the device for their classrooms,

The program—called the Virtual Computing Initiative—would expand a concept that has been in use at N.C. State since 2004, when the school and IBM started the virtual lab, which university students can use from remote locations. N.C. State also said it would make the programming code that underpins the system available to other universities around the world, so they can set up similar cloud-computing systems for schools in their regions.

The only requirements to participate are broadband internet access and a computer or mobile device capable of accessing the internet.

A new report by Josh Bernoff of Forrester Research states that usage of social technologies increased markedly in 2008: three in four US online adults now use social tools to connect with each, up from 56% in 2007. According to the report, the largest growth came from ratings and reviews, "voting" on websites, and user-generated video. Blogging and tagging were also popular.

Forrester has come up with different categories of social media usage (see image below). It claims that Creators are still growing slowly (it's now 21%), but "Critics" have increased more (to 37%). Critics are defined as people who post online reviews and comments. Collectors are at 19%, Joiners 35% and unsurprisingly "Spectators" are the biggest group with 69% of US online adults 'consuming' social media.

As report author Josh Bernoff notes in a blog post, the growth in consumption of online content is mostly coming from older people: "social activity is way up among 35-to-44 year-olds, especially when it comes to joining social networks and reading and reacting to content. Even among 45-to-54 year-olds, 68% are now Spectators, 24% are Joiners, and only 28% are Inactives."

The subject is Japanese, the topic is "travelling in Japan" & the idea is to create a map in google maps with placemarks that describe various tourist locations in a city (in this case Kyoto).

The subject is Japanese, the topic is "travelling in Japan" & the idea is to create a map in google maps with placemarks that describe various tourist locations in a city (in this case Kyoto).

Why have I done this? What use could it have? Why didn't I simply create a reading comprehension & stick some pictures in?Well ...The students all visited the locations in Kyoto on a school trip last December so they are relevant to themI will create comprehension questions for the students to answer - a simple activity (but important in gauging their understanding of the unit vocab and kanji)I will embed or link to the map in our class ning so that the students can access the map from anywhere at anytime and comment on the whole process. Easy access.I will invite the class as collaborators (allowing them to edit the map) and have them add to the map. Each student will be given 2 locations that they have visited and will be required to write a written piece in each placemark describing the location and what you can do there.Students will then (via the ning forum) comment on each others creations and suggest grammar and vocabulary that they could have used

Dr. Michael N. DeMers New Mexico State University Room 118 Breland Hall MSC MAP, P.O. Box 30001 Las Cruces, New Mexico, 88011 USA Email Address: - demers01@gmail.com Phone Number: - (575) 496-5231

After the surprise of learning that the students wanted to use SL for a study group, I was amazed at the consistency of attendance. The students and I would gather every sunday evening for 60 to 90 minutes to review PowerPoint slides they had selected and I displayed in-world using a whiteboard. This worked so well because the students could get together without having to travel at all.

During the review sessions I did the following. 1. Required text (no voice was allowed). 2. Displayed the frames the students themselves selected from the f-2-f lecture as ones they were having difficulty with. 3. Asked them to review the slides before showing 4. Put up the slides and employed the Socratic Method and asked them to describe and verbally explain things. The result of using text only was utterly astonishing. I did it at first because some didn't have the equipment. Later, I discovered, that requiring the students to "write out" their answers in full sentences was a wonderful preparation for the essay exams. Prior to this I was always frustrated that the students seemed to know the material, displayed the "aha" reaction, but did terribly on the exams because they weren't thinking in full sentences and paragraphs during the lecture. In Second Life they had to think in the same terms in which the exams would be given. It was fabulous. Their exam scores showed the improvement as well.

So how do you find non-English-writing Twits? Serendipity:  Search Twitter for a term you’re interested in, see who’s talking about it.  For example, I searched for “Dokdo,” hoping to learn more about the controversy between Japan and South Korea over the islands known as Dokdo in Korean and Takeshima in Japanese, and found Mojin, a Japanese Twit I now follow. Twitter Search’s Advanced Search Page:  Select the language you want, put in words you’re interested in, and see what you get.  Note that for Japanese I’ve found it to be a little difficult to use actual Japanese words for some reason… Use FriendFeed’s Rooms to find interesting Twits in your target language.  Here’s a Japanese Room I belong to; here’s a Japanese News Room, although more of the links are in English. Search the followers and followings of a Twit you like.  For example, I like the NHK (Japan’s version of PBS or BBC) Twitter feed, and have found some interesting Twits to follow from the list of who NHK follows.

Proponents of the concept say it capitalizes on the benefits that both face-to-face and online learning can provide—and now, there is some evidence to suggest that hybrid courses can help students learn more effectively.

Though the sample size is too small to draw any definitive conclusions, it raises some interesting questions to explore more fully.