Group items tagged

For me, conferences are no longer primarily about learning, at least not in the traditional sense of attending lectures, doing activities and taking notes.

What I realized is that I often get better information through my RSS reader and Twitter than I do via more traditional, formalized educational experiences like a conference. While I learned something new from every session I attended, there were a few sessions where I was glad to be able to sit within range of the wifi and go through my reader, finding exactly what I needed at that moment. This wasn’t because the presentations were lacking, it’s just that I’m starting to realize that there’s a limit to what I can gain from a pre-constructed session, devised for a broad audience, about something that might only be indirectly related to my learning needs.

Encourages contact between students and faculty

Offers collaborative peer review,

Using reply-with-quote for peer revision and exchanging documents online facilitates collaborative peer review

Mark Johnson, Powerset/Microsoft Program Manager, commented that "the next era of the Web will represent greater understanding of computers." He went on to suggest that "if Web 1.0 was about Read and Web 2.0 was about Read/Write, then Web 3.0 should be about Read/Write/Understand." Specifically he said that "a computer that can understand should be able to: find us information that we care about better (e.g., smart news alerts), make intelligent recommendations for us (e.g., implicit recommendations based on our reading/surfing/buying behavior), aggregate and simplify information. . . and probably lots of other things that we haven't yet imagined, since our computers are still pretty dumb."

Aziz Poonawalla said "folksonomy, leveraged en masse, could render algorithmic search obsolete. you get Semantic web almost for free."

Education is one area ripe for Web innovation. Harley of WorldLearningTree recently submitted his suggestions on how to revolutionalize online education to Google's "Project10ToThe100" contest.

Although these numbers look promising for our favorite genre, social media, they should probably be taken with a grain of salt. While we do believe that text messaging is an important method of communication, it doesn't quite fit with what the standard definition of social media is: blogging, social networking sites, and other web properties that engage collective groups of people to drive their content. We would like to see how the numbers really break down among the three "social media" activities they measured, but that data was not immediately available.

In exploratory qualitative research, we have undertaken indicates the consumer might take a broader view of what social media might mean. For example, it could be taken by consumers to mean any digital form of personal communication that helps enable peer collaboration and sharing. This softer, less-structured definition is possibly useful in determining possible future growth areas of personal social P2P media from a consumer-centric POV."

Combined