Group items tagged

Ask timely questions

Ask specific questions

Ask poll questions

Embed short graded or self-assessments either in the video itself, or at the end of each video. Including one or two multiple-choice questions or requests to post to a forum—either between scenes (using a post-production editing tool such as Camtasia or Captivate) or after the video—alerts students to the “take homes” they should be getting from the material. It also helps teachers assess, at point of contact, whether students understand the major concepts.

In the industry right now – as we see in the Social Media for Learning report research data – there is considerable use of social media tools in instruction delivery efforts. But there’s less evidence that people are using the tools to support social learning. Often, people use social media tools as another means of delivering content. For example: Publishing the training department newsletter on a blog uto-scheduling tweets about class assignments from a Twitter account that does not otherwise engage with the learners or ask them to engage with each other Hosting a software application development course, in tutorial format, on a wiki By contrast, using social media to support and extend social learning invites learners to contribute, engage, and participate with one another online. For instance, when: Setting up a wiki for those in a new-hire induction program to work together to edit a FAQs page for use by the next group coming to the program Having managers-in-training use a microblogging tool for a leadership book-club discussion Helping to support and participating in a community of the organization’s customer service reps, to give them a place to share war stories and strategies for dealing with challenges           So just using the online tools to deliver content doesn’t support “social learning;” that happens when you use the tools to invite interaction from and between the learners. It’s about social, not media, and it’s about shared learning, not just pushing content.

The @Sweden program, known as Curators of Sweden, came about when the Swedish Institute and Visit Sweden, the government tourist agency, sought to develop a plan to present the country to the world on Twitter. They hired an advertising company, Volontaire.

Wired: You’re interested in massive open online courses and have championed Salman Khan’s videos. If these had been around when you were young, would it have affected your schooling? Gates: No. For a highly motivated learner, it’s not like knowledge is secret and somehow the Internet made it not secret. It just made knowledge easy to find. If you’re a motivated enough learner, books are pretty good. Now, if you’re the kind of person who gets stuck on Chapter 5 and will give up if you don’t have someone to answer questions, don’t try and pick up the Feynman lectures on physics. That’s true whether it’s online or offline. A MOOC is an attempt to gather a group and encourage students, almost like a typical classroom, forcing you to interact during the lecture so that it kind of wakes you up and keeps you engaged. A hyperlearner doesn’t have to have those things.

Companies are STILL dragging their asses trying to decide if it’s worth the investment.  The longer they weight, the farther behind they’re going to get.

Businesses are still wrestling with the concept of integrating with social media, and it’s completely understandable.  Despite the many reports that can be found online, along with case studies that speak to the success of social media being used for business there are still a number of questions being raise

In the schools, too, there is no reward for helping others (indeed, it is heavily penalized). Suppose educational achievement was measured at least partially according to how much (and how well) you helped others. The value of the achievement would increase if the person is a stranger (and conversely, decrease to zero if it's just a small clique helping each other) and would be in proportion to the timeliness and utility of the assistance (both of which can be measured).

Suppose instead students were rewarded for cooperation. Not collaboration; this is just the school-level emulation of the creation of cliques and corporations. Cooperation, which is a common and ad hoc creation of interactions and exchanges for mutual value.  Cooperative behaviours include exchanges of goods and services, agreement on open standards and protocols, sharing of resources in common (and open) pools, and similar behaviours. Imagine receiving academic credit for contributing well-received resources into open source repositories, whether as software, art, photography, or educational resources. Imagine receiving credit for long-lasting additions to Wikipedia or similar online resources (we would have to fix Wikipedia, as it is now run by a gang of thugs known as 'Wikipedia editors'). We can have wide-ranging and nuanced evaluations of such contributions, not simple grades, but something based on how the content contributed is used and reused across the net (this would have the interesting result that your assessment could continue to go up over time).

There is, again, no reason why public service cannot be incorporated into individual assessment. Adding value to fire and police services by means of monitoring and reporting (not the piece-work model of something like CrimeStoppers, but actual prevention), supporting environment by counting birds, sampling water, servicing sports events by acting as a timer or umpire - all these can add to a person's assessment. I'm not thinking of the simple sort of tasks grade school students can perform. Indeed, a person hoping to attain a higher level qualification would need to contribute to the public good in a substantial and tangible way. Offering open online courses (that are well-subscribed and positively reviewed by the community) should be a requirement for any graduate-level recognition. The PhD used to be about offering a unique research contribution to the field; now it's about paying tuition and being exploited as a TA. These three things - helping others, being cooperative, contributing to the public good - are obviously not easy to assess. To be sure, it's far easier to ask students simple questions and grade the number of correct responses. But assessing students in this way, far from measuring putative 'content knowledge', is really an exercise in counting without any real interest in what is being counted. It acts as an invitation to cheat, as it places self-interest ahead of the values it is actually trying to measure.

High school and college students may be “digital natives,” but they’re wretched at searching. In a recent experiment at Northwestern, when 102 undergraduates were asked to do some research online, none went to the trouble of checking the authors’ credentials. In 1955, we wondered why Johnny can’t read. Today the question is, why can’t Johnny search?

"Content is fire. Social media is gasoline."

1. Know Your Audience If you don't know who your audience is, how will you ever connect with them? Most brands have an understanding of their audience's demographics - age, gender, HHI, ethnicity. But you have to go beyond these statistics to get a better understanding of their interests, needs, mindsets, and behaviors to truly make a connection and become an important part of their lives. In addition to the standard methods of audience discovery - industry research, focus groups, and brand surveys - you can also use social media data to build audience personas. Social monitoring software, Facebook Custom Audience, social referrals to your website, and question-and-answer sites are just a few of the sources you can use to learn more about your audience.

2. Provide Value Your content must provide some type of value to your audience. That value could be education, increased productivity, entertainment, or cost savings. To the consumer, it shouldn't seem like marketing, even though we know it is by nature. It's providing long-term awareness and brand recall. It's making sure your brand is right there with the consumer at each step along their path to purchase so that when it comes time to make a decision, you're the first brand that comes to mind.

Dog, a new programming language, could make it easier and more intuitive to write all sorts of social applications—anything from peer-to-peer question-and-answer sites to online dating. And because Dog incorporates natural language, this may make it easier for newbies to learn to code, too.

Forget uni, teach yourself, learn more, have fun.

Teach yourself at your own pace and learn what you want, when you want. Keep up to date, buy a few good books, get on Twitter, read articles and have a genuine passion and interest and you’ll do a better job than any university will do.

Design and education

I have been getting a lot of questions about the Apps we have on our iPod Touches at school, so here you are: