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Time and money often prevent educators from attending as many conferences as they want, but Web 2.0 is really changing this. Many conferences today have some aspect of online participation either in real-time or via archived sessions. One really great directory to check out is the 2009 T.H.E. Conference Calendar. Set up your search according to month and geographical location. Clicking on a particular conference will give you details such as when and where, a conference description, who should attend, website location/reference and contact information. While not all of these will have a virtual participation component, it certainly is the trend.

Should we try to use social networking services such as Facebook and Myspace as serious educational tools, or should they remain the domain of informal chat and backstage antics?

A FREE resource aimed at all learning professionals who want a quick, easy-to-use, structured introduction to social media for formal and informal learning as well as a practical guide to using social media tools.

A FREE resource from guru Jane Hart aimed at all learning professionals who want a quick, easy-to-use, structured introduction to social media for formal and informal learning as well as a practical guide to using social media tools.

This page is being built not only to generate content about social networking for teachers, but also as a demonstration of the effects of social networking, as the process of building out this page will be captured and produced as a video.

Electronic literature uses links, images, sound, navigation, as well as text to convey meaning. Electronic literature is ergodic, and thus it is up to the reader to piece together the materials as the reader goes through the work. Elit 101explains how these elements work to convey meaning and provides examples and exercises for each element.

Social networks are rapidly growing in popularity and use by all ages in society. The most popular social networks are web-based, commercial, and not purposely designed for educational use. They include sites like Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, and Xanga. For individuals, social networking sites provide tremendous potential opportunities for staying in touch with friends and family.   Other educational networking sites are also growing in use. These sites are usually restricted to only certain users and not available to the general public. These include resources such as Moodle, educational wikis, a professional online communities such as the Classroom2.0 Ning, or district adoptions of online applications such as Google Apps for Education.

Starting today, the Massachusetts Historical Society will be offering up excerpts from John Quincy Adams' line-a-day diary as tweets. The diary entries track Adams' voyage to Russia, which kicked off on Aug. 5, 1809. Two hundred years after Adams' journey began, accounts of his trip and his ensuing work as the first American ambassador to Russia will be chronicled daily on Twitter.

The American Association for the Advancement of Science, "Triple A-S" (AAAS), is an international non-profit organization dedicated to advancing science around the world by serving as an educator, leader, spokesperson and professional association. In addition to organizing membership activities, AAAS publishes the journal Science, as well as many scientific newsletters, books and reports, and spearheads programs that raise the bar of understanding for science worldwide.

Interesting post from Derek Wenmouth, who asks: * Who are our learners? * What are we preparing them for? * How are we preparing them for this? * What are the implications of connectivity for learning and schooling? This is good, and all very well, but... A few weeks ago I met a young lad, still at school, smartly dressed in a business suit, making a reasonable job of selling himself. Except that for reasons best known to himself he deemed it acceptable to not only chew gum the entire time, but to do so in a way that allowed me to see the contents of his mouth throughout. I realiuse this is off-message, as it were, but surely one of the most basic skills we should be teaching young people, by example as much as anything, is how to present yourself?

A young Google executive who helped ignite Egypt's uprising energized a cheering crowd of hundreds of thousands Tuesday with his first appearance in their midst after being released from 12 days in secret detention. "We won't give up," he promised at one of the biggest protests yet in Cairo's Tahrir Square. Once a behind-the-scenes Internet activist, 30-year-old Wael Ghonim has emerged as an inspiring voice for a movement that has taken pride in being a leaderless "people's revolution." Now, the various activists behind it - including Ghonim - are working to coalesce into representatives to push their demands for President Hosni Mubarak's ouster. With protests invigorated, Vice President Omar Suleiman issued a sharply worded warning, saying of the protests in Tahrir, "We can't bear this for a long time, and there must be an end to this crisis as soon as possible," in a sign of growing impatience with 16 days of mass demonstrations. For the first time, protesters made a foray to Parliament, several blocks away from their camp in the square. Several hundred marched to the legislature and chanted for it to be dissolved.

"Its point is that the old one-size-fits-all education model is not as well suited to growing up in the Web age as the custom fit that new technology allows"

Great article.

The Encyclopedia of Life (EoL), a free and collaborative website, said on Monday it now has pages for each of 750,000 species, meaning more than one-third of all the planet's 1.9m species are now covered. "EoL is the ultimate online field guide for citizen scientists," said Jennifer Preece, dean of the College of Information Studies at the University of Maryland. "There are many online sites dedicated to specific groups of species such as insects, birds or mammals. Not since Noah, however, has there been an effort like this to bring all the world's species together." The site uses content from 180 partners to bring together images, videos and scientific information, including 35m pages of scanned literature created by the Biodiversity Heritage Library. The new site allows members to create their own collection of species. "The virtual collections put life into meaningful contexts from scholarly ones such as Invasive Insects of North America or Endangered Birds of Ecuador to personal collections such as A Checklist of Trees in My Backyard. Only imagination and energy limit the possibilities," said Jesse Ausubel, vice president of the Alfred P Sloan Foundation which helps fund the EoL.

Who's hipper? Mac folks, of course - more educated, too!

Historic maps for students & teachers Welcome to ETC's collection of historic maps. Here you will find over 5,000 maps representing many different time periods. A friendly license allows teachers and students to use up to 25 maps in non-commercial school projects without further permission. All maps are available as GIF or JPEG files for screen display as well as in PDF for printing. Use the GIF or JPEG maps for classroom presentations and student websites. Use the PDF maps for displays, bulletin boards, and printed school reports.

Threaded discussion is an old technology. It's inspiring to think of new ways we can talk together at a distance that allow integration of both synchronous and asynchronous technology. I often thing we'll look back on the course management systems we use today and think of them as something like a 300 baud modem. Eyes Front! What's over the horizon line?

Students feel that writing a dissertation is a very stress full job. In this post author is going to share how he write a dissertation as a fun as well as how students make dissertation writing is an easy task.

"In a fantastic discussion as a part of +Ed Tech Crew Episode 240 focusing on what it takes to be an IT co-ordinator, +Ashley Proud spoke about the demise in tinkering amongst students. Although +Mel Cashen and +Roland Gesthuizen mentioned about taking things a part, giving the conversation a more mechanical theme, I feel that tinkering is best understood as a wider curiosity into the way things work."