Group items tagged

This paper explores the impact of communication media and the Internet on connectivity between people. Results from a series of social network studies of media use are used as background for exploration of these impacts. These studies explored the use of all available media among members of an academic research group and among distance learners. Asking about media use as well as about the strength of the tie between communicating pairs revealed that those more strongly tied used more media to communicate than weak ties, and that media use within groups conformed to a unidimensional scale, showing a configuration of different tiers of media use supporting social networks of different ties strengths. These results lead to a number of implications regarding media and Internet connectivity, including: how media use can be added to characteristics of social network ties; how introducing a medium can create latent tie connectivity among group members that provides the technical means for activating weak ties, and also how a change in a medium can disrupt existing weak tie networks; how the tiers of media use also suggest that certain media support different kinds of information flow; and the importance of organization-level decisions about what media to provide and promote. The paper concludes with a discussion of implications for Internet effects.

"It's a long process of aculturation that transitions students into the adult world." I agree with this 100% and was glad to read it. While I support online learning, this reason alone makes me believe that if the college campus was taken away, we would be doing those young students a disservice.

Challenge: The Completions Priority "The completions marketplace should be redesigned to improve overall scalability, measurable impact, mutual affordability, and sustainability. To do so while avoiding intrusive government regulation and retaining local autonomy will require voluntarily confirmed "rules of the road" that enable effective completions practices at autonomous micro levels to be rolled up collectively into mutually affordable common-good macro solutions." Solution: Economic Governance for the Completions Marketplace - a common good critical to economic and social progress "The wisdom of a crowd willing to inform and support adaptive change leadership might help create common ground in a nonprofit, non-governmental global Education Leadership Commons (ELC) formed for the purpose of developing and evolving open interoperability of common educational services, processes, and accountability metrics, all at a minimally intrusive, trusted level of economic governance. Modeled along the lines of the Internet Society's so-far successful governance mechanisms, the ELC could be operationalized through standing working groups, their advisory or governance committees, and other nested and loosely-coupled, efforts to advance and sustain educational attainment within and across the three dimensions of the completions marketplace." - Completions Productivity Task Force - Economic Governance Council chart on page 6: Governance Matrix of Rights and Responsibilities in the Completions Marketplace student, assessment provider, education provider, government (other other funding source) 8 possible outcomes, including accreditation's formative peer-review process is retained "to create "trust-but-verify" economic governance collaborations" "If government can't provide the leadership and funding stability required for victory, then we the people should do so through a social networking micro-contribution mechanism, not unlike the micro-loan infrastructure cr

Internet redefining citizenship in 21st century - Civic Information API, e.g., Kenya Elections Hub - Sunlight Foundation programs for open govt data - MySociety collaboration among developers esp open source code

Technology in Education can be used to facilitate instruction and realise many long-standing and sound goals around personalised learning, and clear learning outcomes, on campus and in online education.

a wise and wonderful essay - especially important for those scholars who might buckle under the bullying and harassment so common in academia but more frightening when open and in the public domain. MOOCs should encourage public scholarship - and help to make it more valued... and of higher quality - but they will need to include in the design that the facilitators modeling advocacy and constructive kinds of alliances for the participants. That is, providing that "institutional commitment" for public scholarship that is thoughtful and intriguing (vs. public showboating).