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"Social Media Revolution: Is social media a fad? Or is it the biggest shift since the Industrial Revolution? This video details out social media facts and figures that are hard to ignore. This video is produced by the author of Socialnomics."

From Knowledgable to Knowledge-able: Learning in New Media Environments Posted January 7th, 2009 by Michael Wesch , Kansas State University Tags: * Essays * Teaching and Technology * anthropology * Assessment * information revolution * multimedia * participatory learning * Web 2.0 2 Comments | 9313 Page Views Knowledge-able Most university classrooms have gone through a massive transformation in the past ten years. I'm not talking about the numerous initiatives for multiple plasma screens, moveable chairs, round tables, or digital whiteboards. The change is visually more subtle, yet potentially much more transformative. As I recently wrote in a Britannica Online Forum: There is something in the air, and it is nothing less than the digital artifacts of over one billion people and computers networked together collectively producing over 2,000 gigabytes of new information per second. While most of our classrooms were built under the assumption that information is scarce and hard to find, nearly the entire body of human knowledge now flows through and around these rooms in one form or another, ready to be accessed by laptops, cellphones, and iPods. Classrooms built to re-enforce the top-down authoritative knowledge of the teacher are now enveloped by a cloud of ubiquitous digital information where knowledge is made, not found, and authority is continuously negotiated through discussion and participation.1 This new media environment can be enormously disruptive to our current teaching methods and philosophies. As we increasingly move toward an environment of instant and infinite information, it becomes less important for students to know, memorize, or recall information, and more important for them to be able to find, sort, analyze, share, discuss, critique, and create information. They need to move from being simply knowledgeable to being knowledge-able.

The "Google generation" of today's students has grown up in a digital world. Most are completely au fait with the microblogging site Twitter; they organise their social lives through Facebook and MySpace; 75% of students have a profile on at least one social networking site. And they spend up to four hours a day online. Modern students are happy to share and participate but are prone to impatience - being used to quick answers - and are casual about evaluating information and attributing it, and also about legal and copyright issues. With almost weekly developments in technology and research added to increasingly web-savvy students' expectations, how are British universities keeping up? Pretty well, according to Sir David Melville, chair of Lifelong Learning UK and author of a new report into how students' use of new technologies will affect higher education.

Terms and conditions, Warwick Blogs [c] A blog is a personal web page and the University is not responsible for any of the content contained in a blog, nor does the University assert any ownership over blog content. There may be some exceptions to this rule, where a blog is being written by University staff for some official purpose, but such exceptions will be individually identified and do not affect the general principle that responsibility and ownership of a blog rest with its author(s). Even though blogs are personal web pages, the university's acceptable use policy still applies. In particular, this implies that:-

Asynchronous and Synchronous E-Learning Asynchronous and Synchronous E-Learning Author(s):Stefan Hrastinski (Uppsala University) © 2008 Stefan Hrastinski EDUCAUSE Quarterly, vol. 31, no. 4 (October-December 2008) Asynchronous and Synchronous E-Learning A study of asynchronous and synchronous e-learning methods discovered that each supports different purposes By Stefan Hrastinski Today's workforce is expected to be highly educated and to continually improve skills and acquire new ones by engaging in lifelong learning. E-learning, here defined as learning and teaching online through network technologies, is arguably one of the most powerful responses to the growing need for education.1 Some researchers have expressed concern about the learning outcomes for e-learners, but a review of 355 comparative studies reveals no significant difference in learning outcomes, commonly measured as grades or exam results, between traditional and e-learning modes of delivery.2

18th September 2009 Our 21st Century Challenge: Developing Responsible, Ethical and Resilient Digital Citizens by Robyn Treyvaud posted in ethics, isafety, socialnetworking | These are my notes from Robyn Treyvaud's keynote, "Our 21st Century Challenge: Developing Responsible, Ethical and Resilient Digital Citizens." at the 21st Century Learning @ Hong Kong Conference on 18 September 2009. MY COMMENTS ARE IN ALL CAPS. Robyn is the author and owner of www.cybersafeworld.com. Her wiki on digital citizenship (created with WetPaint) is http://digicitizen-wiki.com. On delicious, Robyn is rtreyvaud.

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.

"What is a wiki? A Wiki can be thought of as a combination of a Web site and a Word document. At its simplest, it can be read just like any other web site, with no access privileges necessary, but its real power lies in the fact that groups can collaboratively work on the content of the site using nothing but a standard web browser. Beyond this ease of editing, the second powerful element of a wiki is its ability to keep track of the history of a document as it is revised. Since users come to one place to edit, the need to keep track of Word files and compile edits is eliminated. Each time a person makes changes to a wiki page, that revision of the content becomes the current version, and an older version is stored. Versions of the document can be compared side-by-side, and edits can be "rolled back" if necessary. The Wiki is gaining traction in education, as an ideal tool for the increasing amount of collaborative work done by both students and teachers. Students might use a wiki to collaborate on a group report, compile data or share the results of their research, while faculty might use the wiki to collaboratively author the structure and curriculum of a course, and the wiki can then serve as part of each person's course web site (excerpt from my contribution to a Business 2.0 article --Stewart.mader 11:35, 14 Dec 2005 (PST))"

December 2005/January 2006 | Volume 63 | Number 4 Learning in the Digital Age Pages 8-13 Listen to the Natives Schools are stuck in the 20th century. Students have rushed into the 21st. How can schools catch up and provide students with a relevant education? Marc Prensky School didn't teach me to read-I learned from my games. -A student Educators have slid into the 21st century-and into the digital age-still doing a great many things the old way. It's time for education leaders to raise their heads above the daily grind and observe the new landscape that's emerging. Recognizing and analyzing its characteristics will help define the education leadership with which we should be providing our students, both now and in the coming decades. Times have changed. So, too, have the students, the tools, and the requisite skills and knowledge. Let's take a look at some of the features of our 21st century landscape that will be of utmost importance to those entrusted with the stewardship of our children's 21st century education. Digital Natives