Group items tagged

To create a social networking site, you can either register a free account with a ahird party social networks provider or install open source software on your server and be your own administrator. There are pros and cons in these two methods. The first method allows you to handle your social networks without any technical knowledge, but you risk losing all your data when the third party site close down. The latter requires you to have certain technical knowledge, but you get full control over every single detail in your site. With the release of BuddyPress, there is now a third way that is both easy to handle and allows you to have full control: turn your WordPress site into a social networking site. BuddyPress is not a standalone social networking software. It is in fact a set of WordPress plugins and themes that enables the users to add social networking modules to their sites. You can either use it as an addon service to your existing blog, or convert your domain to a full fledge social networking site.

T&L blogger Ryan Bretag recently sat down with his students and asked them about 21st-Century Learning strategies. Their suggestions are amazing. Read the whole piece here: http://www.techlearning.com/blogs.aspx?id=15776 Some snippets: Each discussion point started and ended with the focus on learning. For example, the students talked about creating a learning environment that was about learning not just memorization. To do this, they wanted to seek out partnerships both locally and globally in order to build connections that would foster a "learning to learn" movement where students are learning for learning, open to learning, and innovative. Clearly, textbooks were not fast enough nor diverse enough in their eyes. They longed for ways to interact with materials that were updated frequently and offered a wealth of perspectives. In fact, a good portion felt there was a need to move beyond the textbook because "information changes to rapidly" for textbooks to be the main source in the classroom. Along with this, information and resources needed to come in a variety of formats if the curriculum was going to remain progressive and current: narrative, fiction, digital, multimedia, and non-fiction.

good intro for twitter for journos Twitter Basics for Journalists & Recovering Journos On Saturday, at the annual conference of the Society of Environmental Journalists, I gave a talk to an audience of mostly journalists explaining the basics of blogs, social media, and search visibility. People had lots of questions, more than I could get to in the session. I was getting stopped in halls, at parties, and even in bathrooms, to be asked things like, "Does it really make that big a difference if I blog under my own domain?" (Answer: Yes!) OK, I don't mind answering those questions. That's really why I went to this conference - because I know that journalists (many of whom are facing potential layoffs, or who have already been laid off) are in dire need of online media awareness and skills. So I'm going to do a bunch of posts answering questions, because it's more efficient to do that via blogging. This is one of those posts. By now you've probably heard about Twitter, the social media service that allows you to publish posts of 140 characters max. What Twitter does, in a nutshell: This service allows you to receive posts ("tweets") from other Twitter users whom you choose to "follow." Likewise, other Twitter users can choose to follow you. When you follow someone on Twitter, their tweets show up in reverse chronological order in the "tweetstream" that scrolls down the Twitter home page when you're logged in. The effect is somewhat like an ongoing Headline News version of what's happening in the minds and worlds of people you know or find interesting.

Edupunk From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump to: navigation, search This article is an orphan, as few or no other articles link to it. Please introduce links to this page from other articles related to it. (February 2009) Edupunk is an approach to teaching and learning practices that result from a do it yourself (DIY) attitude.[1][2] The New York Times defines it as "an approach to teaching that avoids mainstream tools like PowerPoint and Blackboard, and instead aims to bring the rebellious attitude and D.I.Y. ethos of '70s bands like The Clash to the classroom."[3] Many instructional applications can be described as DIY education or Edupunk. Jim Groom as "poster boy" for edupunk The term was first used on May 25, 2008 by Jim Groom in his blog,[4] and covered less than a week later in the Chronicle of Higher Education.[1] Stephen Downes, an online education theorist and an editor for the International Journal of Instructional Technology and Distance Learning, noted that "the concept of Edupunk has totally caught wind, spreading through the blogosphere like wildfire".[5]

Essential multimedia tutorials and resources for do-it-yourself training Wednesday, March 25, 2009 The funny thing about the new wave of journalism is that news organizations are requiring journalists to learn additional technical skills, but aren't making the necessary training readily available. In order to be or remain employed in this industry its essential to hunker down and learn some new skills. The following tutorial sites will take you from journalist to multimedia journalist, something that looks great on any business card.

Year 2009: Current Passions I spend most of my time these days writing my next book. It is about "what technology wants." I'm posting my thoughts in-progress on The Technium. I solicit comments there, which in turn influence my ideas. It is a wonderful way to craft a book. Writing in public is more work, but it makes the book better. The final draft is due to be delivered in October 2009, and will most likely be published by Viking/Penguin sometime in 2010. In order to finish this book on deadline, I've drastically cut down on travels and speaking, but when I do, I am represented by Monitor Talent. In addition to The Technium I post to 9 other blogs, detailed below. All these bits are consolidated into one uber-blog I call my Lifestream. Anything that I write on any blog will be posted in this stream. (Anything written by other authors on my blogs will not be posted here.) This is an easy way to keep up with what I am working on, thinking about, conjuring with. I am exploring Twitter. My handle is kevin2kelly in case you want to follow.

I like telling stories. What sort of stories do I like to tell? Stories about days at school, life in the ANZ Bank, stories my father told me, historic sagas and the like. lots of links to digital storytelling later down on the page

I like telling stories. What sort of stories do I like to tell? Stories about days at school, life in the ANZ Bank, stories my father told me, historic sagas and the like.

Twitter Literacy (I refuse to make up a Twittery name for it) Post-Oprah and apres-Ashton, Twittermania is definitely sliding down the backlash slope of the hype cycle. It's not just the predictable wave of naysaying after the predictable waves of sliced-breadism and bandwagon-chasing. We're beginning to see some data. Nielsen, the same people who do TV ratings, recently noted that more than 60% of new Twitter users fail to return the following month. To me, this represents a perfect example of a media literacy issue: Twitter is one of a growing breed of part-technological, part-social communication media that require some skills to use productively. Sure, Twitter is banal and trivial, full of self-promotion and outright spam. So is the Internet. The difference between seeing Twitter as a waste of time or as a powerful new community amplifier depends entirely on how you look at it - on knowing how to look at it. When I started requiring digital journalism students to learn how to use Twitter, I didn't have the list of journalistic uses for Twitter that I have compiled by now. So I logged onto the service and broadcast a request. "I have a classroom full of graduate students in journalism who don't know who to follow. Does anybody have a suggestion?" Within ten minutes, we had a list of journalists to follow, including one who was boarding Air Force One at that moment, joining the White House press corps accompanying the President to Africa.

Twitter Literacy (I refuse to make up a Twittery name for it) Post-Oprah and apres-Ashton, Twittermania is definitely sliding down the backlash slope of the hype cycle. It's not just the predictable wave of naysaying after the predictable waves of sliced-breadism and bandwagon-chasing. We're beginning to see some data. Nielsen, the same people who do TV ratings, recently noted that more than 60% of new Twitter users fail to return the following month. To me, this represents a perfect example of a media literacy issue: Twitter is one of a growing breed of part-technological, part-social communication media that require some skills to use productively. Sure, Twitter is banal and trivial, full of self-promotion and outright spam. So is the Internet. The difference between seeing Twitter as a waste of time or as a powerful new community amplifier depends entirely on how you look at it - on knowing how to look at it. When I started requiring digital journalism students to learn how to use Twitter, I didn't have the list of journalistic uses for Twitter that I have compiled by now. So I logged onto the service and broadcast a request. "I have a classroom full of graduate students in journalism who don't know who to follow. Does anybody have a suggestion?" Within ten minutes, we had a list of journalists to follow, including one who was boarding Air Force One at that moment, joining the White House press corps accompanying the President to Africa.

"Now that I've had a little while to think about it, I'm ready to distill my initial enthusiastic reaction to Google Wave down to a manageably short (and hopefully non-fanboi) post. Let me say at the outset that I have no idea whether Wave will succeed. I am convinced, however, that something like Wave will succeed, in part because much about it is not new. My initial thought was was, "Hey, somebody finally got Apple's OpenDoc to work." Scott Wilson twittered that Google had reinvented ActiveX. In some ways, Wave is, like many great inventions, an old idea with some new twists. This is not to minimize the value of those twists. To the contrary, they are astonishing. My point is simply that the essence of Wave will survive whether ore not Wave itself is a success because many of the core ideas have been proven to be compelling in the past."

"The Delta Initiative, a consultancy group, just did a terrific webinar in cooperation with the Cal State system on the state of the LMS. This is not one of those predict-the-demise or predict-the-next-flux-capacitor presentations, though. It's just an excellent, down-to-earth institutional view of how LMS adoption is going in the real world and what the challenges are, especially for large university consortia."