Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

Social learning has taken on a kind of religious fervor among learning practitioners during the past couple of years—and not without good reason. It often creates more powerful and enduring learning experiences; it helps people establish and leverage social connections to accelerate the distribution and sharing of experiences, content, and guidance; and it allows learners to be more productive, learn faster, and work smarter.

it’s easy to lose focus on what matters, and to assume the end game is the technology

A social learning strategy should paint a compelling picture of the future state, clearly articulate the business case for change, and outline the roadmap for how you will get from “here” to “there” (including what must change, stop, and continue)

Teaching with Facebook is a way for me to engage my students, since many of them will be on the site before, after, and during any lecture. More than engagement, using Facebook allows me to build a bridge between my classroom curricula and what my students are doing outside the lecture hall. I must admit that student expertise with digital media often exceeds my own, and my attempts at using Facebook function as a common language that sets up my classroom as an experimental space allowing students to take risks, make connections, and participate with an alternative teaching style. As much as there are a number of other Facebook educators—there is even a Facebook groups for educators—I am certain that on my university campus I am the only instructor using this social network. My university administration has accused me of subverting our institutional course management system. They are correct. Facebook may be a commercial enterprise, but I argue that students can maintain a Facebook identity after they leave university. The work done in our lecture as represented in our Facebook group is something that lasts beyond a typical university course management system. In other words, access to the information, discussion, links, and learning is not cut off once the course is over.

Mobile learning games offer opportunities for: Mapping:  games that require players to  notice and interact with their communities and physical spaces Touring: games that connect people to organizations (e.g., non-profits, neighborhood organizations) and  people who work there.  These games tell a story through a space, not necessarily about a space. Performing: games that immerse players in role-playing, simulations, and alternative and/or augmented realities

Mobile games can incorporate conversations and activities in real-time as well as asynchronous activities through the use of physical and virtual social networks.

mobile learning games are more likely to connect learners to physical and social spaces than online games played on personal computers  or using video consoles.

Frequent use of mobile devices does not mean that students or instructors are ready for mobile learning and teaching

Wherever one looks, evidence of mobile penetration is irrefutable: cell phones, PDAs, MP3 players, portable game devices, handhelds, tablets, and laptops abound. No demographic is immune from this phenomenon. From toddlers to seniors, people are increasingly connected and are digitally communicating with each other in ways that would have been impossible only a few years ago.5

Consequently, it comes as no surprise that sooner or later people would begin to look for ways to integrate mobile computing into e-learning to make courses more accessible and portable. For example, Duke University made headlines when it provided all incoming freshmen with their own 20-gigabyte iPods. Similarly, the Virginia Tech College of Engineering became the first public institution to require all students to purchase a tablet PC beginning with incoming freshmen in fall 2006.

A pair of MIT Media Lab alums have come up with a do-it-yourself kit for making smart environments. David Carr and John Kestner, partners in the industrial design firm Supermechanical, have developed a small, durable, inexpensive remote sensor node, and an easy-to-use web app that turns data from the sensor node into timely information. The system, dubbed Twine, lets you tie everyday objects into your digital life.

Twine is a palm-size block of rubber that contains a WiFi node, temperature sensor and accelerometer. It’s powered by two AAA batteries or a mini USB connection. And it has a port where external sensors can connect. The initial external sensors are a magnetic switch, moisture sensor and a breakout board for building your own sensor. Supermechanical is also considering an RFID reader, pressure sensor and current sensor.

The Games Businesses Play with Customers Boomers and Generation X will remember the days when the Yellow Pages was the encyclopedia of local business. Now services such as Foursquare bring the Yellow Pages alive. Add to the fact that the people we know and trust share their experiences and endorsements or critiques with every checkin, we’re given access to something quite remarkable. Additionally, businesses are given a special opportunity to learn more about the people who are checking-in and also about those who are not. Foursquare offers a powerful set of business tools that can help local businesses, chains, destinations, you name it, more effectively connect with the people who can not only keep them in business, but grow it as well.

"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.

Typical instructional design and pedagogy focus on breaking down a subject into component parts, gaining mastery of those parts, whether they are steps in a process or techniques or parts of the anatomy, and then reassembling them in the learner's mind and in practice so that the result is overall mastery of the broader subject. That may be oversimplified, but this basic approach goes back to Aristotle, at least. It's not debated in education, it's assumed that this is the best approach for learning anything, including complex processes or highly nuanced behaviors in shifting contexts.

Centola's conclusions. He studied positive changes in people's behaviors regarding health care, changes that resulted directly from placing subjects in carefully designed social networks with the goal of improving their health decisions. What he concluded was that smaller, tighter social groups had more success improving health behaviors than larger, looser social groups (ie, the typical Facebook connections). Maybe you already see what it took me a while to notice. Both of them had success. Social networks designed for a specific purpose can do something pretty amazing: They can change people's behaviors. Any educator or trainer whose goal is actually to impact both thinking and behaviors (to change lives!) rather than just getting people to pass a test or check a box, should be paying close attention. And maybe getting a little excited.Researchers in education have long known the power of social groups to alter behavior. Brown, Collins, and Duguid made this case a while back

these three went on to say that highly complex behaviors are picked up, absorbed, through relatively informal social exchange more quickly than they could be if they were "taught" in the usual break-it-down sense. We're talking about complex behaviors. Processes. Highly nuanced interpersonal interactions. Centola's study suggests to me that we now have an online tool, the social network, that is fully capable of carrying the power of culture to shape behaviors and establish norms. And it can be done on purpose.

LEGOs and Lincoln Logs are for Luddites. Sifteo cubes are the new building blocks. Each cube has a 128-pixel color LCD screen, wireless connectivity, a 32-bit ARM microprocessor, and an accelerometer that responds to tilting and stacking. You can arrange them to create everything from vocabulary puzzles to building challenges, all of which can be enjoyed by as many people as you can crowd around the coffee table.

Sifteo founders Jeevan Kalanithi and David Merrill previewed the cubes at TED 2009 when they were grad students at MIT. The cubes debuted at CES this year. The design marries classic tactility with new hardware and software. “Sifteo cubes are the first gaming solution to deliver truly hands-on play,” Merrill said. “[The cubes combine] the latest in embedded computing and sensing technology with a timeless play style.”

Story Bumping: Stories you haven’t seen yet because they were “below the fold,” on News Feed are eligible to be bumped up further in News Feed the next time you check Facebook. Last Actor: Facebook will take into account the last 50 engagements of a user, giving more weight to people and pages the user has recently interacted with.

The Levels of Teaching Innovation (LoTi) Framework was first conceptualized by Dr. Chris Moersch in 1994 as a research tool to assess authentic classroom technology use.

measure classroom teachers implementation of the tenets of digital-age literacy

The LoTi Framework focuses on the delicate balance between instruction, assessment, and the effective use of digital tools and resources to promote higher order thinking, engaged student learning, and authentic assessment practices in the classroom--all vital characteristics of 21st Century teaching and learning.

I use Evernote, Everywhere: Android (phone and Tablet) Windows Web Clipper (Chrome)

1. Evernote for staying focused

2. Evernote for getting organized

Everybody’s Doing It.

There are all sorts of new trends that have hit the world of viral marketing over the past year. People are doing cool things with HTML5, creating interactive YouTube videos and interactive games, creating cool YouTube takeover campaigns, response campaigns and more. These ideas are still relatively new and surprising, but if you don’t act now they’re going to be old hat. Get into web video in 2011, while its still approaching its apex and you’ll have more of a chance of standing out and not just fading into the piles of copycat campaigns.

Online video is everywhere and it is only going to go further in 2011. This year we’ve seen Facebook become a major online video engine with viewers watching 16 minutes of video on Facebook per month and growing; the New Twitter launched, allowing users to watch videos directly from their Twitter feeds; more and more television viewers are cutting the cord and making the switch over to online video; and connected television services like Google TV and Apple TV are bringing web video to the television set