The key goals of The Commons on Flickr are to firstly show you hidden treasures in the world's public photography archives, and secondly to show how your input and knowledge can help make these collections even richer.
You're invited to help describe the photographs you discover in The Commons on Flickr, either by adding tags or leaving comments.*
The Educator's Guide to the Creative Commons
Wednesday, December 3, 2008
As not every teacher understands how to implement the Creative Commons into their curriculum, I thought I'd take a minute to explain how I would use it if I was in their shoes.
UChannel presents public affairs events from academic institutions all over the world.
Here you can see the full-length presentations of faculty, policy-makers, and researchers who have been invited by member universities to discuss the problems of the world -- and how to solve them.
These events are put online as a public service, brought to you by the institutions who support UChannel.
The UChannel consortium is led by Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.
The other Charter Members are:
- Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA)
- Middlebury College's Rohatyn Center for International Affairs
- The LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin.
These lectures are distributed under the Creative Commons "Attribution, NonCommercial, NoDerivatives" Deed.
The eXe project developed a freely available Open Source authoring application to assist teachers and academics in the publishing of web content without the need to become proficient in HTML or XML markup. Resources authored in eXe can be exported in IMS Content Package, SCORM 1.2, or IMS Common Cartridge formats or as simple self-contained web pages.
eXe is currently supported by CORE Education, a New Zealand-based not-for-profit educational research and development organisation. eXe grew out of the New Zealand Government Tertiary Education Commission's eCollaboration Fund and was led by the University of Auckland, The Auckland University of Technology, and Tairawhiti Polytechnic. It has also been greatly assisted by a global group of participants and contributors.
eXe was named a finalist in the New Zealand round of the IMS Global Learning Impact Awards 2008 and went on to claim a Leadership Award at the international judging. (eXe was rated Best in Show for "Content Authoring", and also one of the top 3 participant rated projects!)
"Grand Valley State University Social Media Guidelines
As a public institution, Grand Valley State University's purpose is to educate and inform. This coincides with the spirit of social media, to share the wealth of knowledge for the common good.
For this reason, Grand Valley maintains official pages on various social media platforms. You can find links to those pages at: www.gvsu.edu/socialmedia. They have been set up and are maintained for the purpose of disseminating information and connecting people to the university and its services.
Although you are encouraged to use social media in your work, please respect university time and resources as you provide or read content. Our first priority is to execute the business of the university so find the right balance to do this. If you are an avid user, please consider two accounts - one you maintain for the university and one for your personal use outside of work."
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.
Abstract
A recent draft manuscript suggested that Facebook use might be related to lower academic achievement in college and graduate school (Karpinski, 2009). The report quickly became a media sensation and was picked up by hundreds of news outlets in a matter of days. However, the results were based on correlational data in a draft manuscript that had not been published, or even considered for publication. This paper attempts to replicate the results reported in the press release using three data sets: one with a large sample of undergraduate students from the University of Illinois at Chicago, another with a nationally representative cross sectional sample of American 14- to 22-year-olds, as well as a longitudinal panel of American youth aged 14-23. In none of the samples do we find a robust negative relationship between Facebook use and grades. Indeed, if anything, Facebook use is more common among individuals with higher grades. We also examined how changes in academic performance in the nationally representative sample related to Facebook use and found that Facebook users were no different from non-users.
wealth of networks online as a wiki
Table of Contents
From Yochai Benkler - Wealth of Networks
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The Wealth of Networks
by Yochai Benkler
* 1. Introduction: A Moment of Opportunity and Challenge 1
* Part One. The Networked Information Economy 29
o 2. Some Basic Economics of Information Production and Innovation 35
o 3. Peer Production and Sharing 59
o 4. The Economics of Social Production 91
* Part Two. The Political Economy of Property and Commons 129
o 5. Individual Freedom: Autonomy, Information, and Law 133
o 6. Political Freedom Part 1: The Trouble with Mass Media 176
o 7. Political Freedom Part 2: Emergence of the Networked Public Sphere 212
o 8. Cultural Freedom: A Culture Both Plastic and Critical 273
o 9. Justice and Development 301
o 10. Social Ties: Networking Together 356
* Part Three. Policies of Freedom at a Moment of Transformation 379
o 11. The Battle Over the Institutional Ecology of the Digital Environment 383
o 12. Conclusion: The Stakes of Information Law and Policy 460
* Notes 475
* Front Matter
* Epigraph: John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
* Acknowledgments
* Library of Congress data
Changing Nature of Physical Spaces
Each Saturday I meet my friend and colleague, Scott McDonald, at a local coffee shop for an hour or so to discuss some emerging research topics we're working towards. Each week we are amazed at the number of people in Saint's sitting on their laptops working - most of them are doing browser based work like google docs, Facebook, and the like. It is rare that I see anyone not using the browser as the primary mode of work. That is a big change from even a year or so ago.
The same can typically be observed if you walk onto our campus and into the student union building. You see table after table of students on laptops, living in their browsers - Facebook, gmail, and ANGEL seem to be what I see. Rarely do I observe work happening in "real" applications. I am guessing that will only get more common as the Blogs at PSU gain wider adoption for writing and students begin to weave google docs into their daily workflow.
Community Member Roles and Types
By Nancy White
Updated 1/12/01
Every community and online group is different. The purposes vary, the structures are different -- and the people are different. But there are some common participation styles or patterns that have been observed. These can be helpful when you are trying to understand participation patterns in an online interaction space. Take note that for each style, there are attributes that can be seen as both positive and negative. That said, be careful of stereotyping people.
Strategic Content Alliance
The aim of the Strategic Content Alliance (SCA) is to build a common information environment where users of publicly funded e-content can gain best value from the investment that has been made by reducing the barriers that currently inhibit access, use and re-use of online content.
The Meyer and Land Threshold Concept
"The idea of threshold concepts emerged from a UK national research project into the possible characteristics of strong teaching and learning environments in the disciplines for undergraduate education (Enhancing Teaching−Learning Environments in Undergraduate Courses). In pursuing this research in the field of economics, it became clear to Erik Meyer and Ray Land [1−6, 7−12], that certain concepts were held by economists to be central to the mastery of their subject. These concepts, Meyer and Land argued, could be described as 'threshold' ones because they have certain features in common."
Glynis Cousin, An introduction to threshold concepts
Over the past five years this concept has been embraced by many disciplines outside economics; indeed the above quote is from Glynis Cousin's excellent short introduction to the concept written for earth scientists. The threshold concept has been seen as a valuable tool, not only in facilitating students' understanding of their subject, but in aiding the rational development of curricula in rapidly expanding arenas where there is a strong tendency to overload the curriculum (Cousin, [1, 13]). This web page will describe, briefly, the characteristics of a threshold concept and list selecteted references to the work of those examining its value in the engineering and computer sciences, the physical and biological sciences, economics, accountancy, mathematics and statistics.
Thinking about building or hosting an online community? Looking for specific tips, tools and ideas? Start here. The following is a collection of articles that may help inform your work. They are all covered by our Creative Commons license which makes the material available with limited restrictions. Check it out. Have something to contribute? Let us know!
Twitiquette is not enough
DateThursday, May 1, 2008 at 07:46PM
Three days of student information system training (as a participant) has given me the opportunity to use Twitter for an extended amount of time. I really, really, really was hoping to get hooked and discover what all the educational excitement is about this tool.
But all I am left with are questions about being "Minnesota nice" in a micro-blogging environment and why anyone would use Twitter.
I freely admit that I am not the most social of creatures. I am uncomfortable in environments where I don't know the social norms, the accepted rules. So after feeling edgy for a couple days, I started doing a little digging about Twitiquette. (I thought I was clever in inventing the term, but others beat me to it.) Here's a very short list of sources:
* The Twitter Fan Wiki, the etiquette page
* Stuart Ciske's 5 Essential Twitter Truths.
* GrammarGirl's Twitter Style Guide.
* David Jakes Tragedy of the Commons
* Global Geek News Blog. Twitter Etiquette (Thanks to Darren Draper for last three links.)
"When having to get up in front of a group to present, it's always important to remember, know and master the basics of what makes a presentation great (those include structure, knowing your content, making eye contact, hand gestures, etc...).
There is no doubt about it, the big things that will take a presentation from good to great are critical at every level in your professional development. While you're at it, it's also important to remember the little things that make even bigger differences. Sometimes fixing up and focusing on a few of the little things can also take your presentations to the next level."
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All Things in Moderation | E-moderating | 5 stage model
The 5 stage model
This model, how it was researched and developed, is explained in much more detail in chapter 2 of the book. Here's a summary: Individual access and the ability of participants to use CMC are essential prerequisites for conference participation (stage one, at the base of the flights of steps). Stage two involves individual participants establishing their online identities and then finding others with whom to interact. At stage three, participants give information relevant to the course to each other. Up to and including stage three, a form of co-operation occurs, i.e. support for each person's goals. At stage four, course-related group discussions occur and the interaction becomes more collaborative. The communication depends on the establishment of common understandings. At stage five, participants look for more benefits from the system to help them achieve personal goals, explore how to integrate CMC into other forms of learning and reflect on the learning processes.
Each stage requires participants to master certain technical skills (shown in the bottom left of each step). Each stage calls for different e-moderating skills (shown on the right top of each step). The "interactivity bar" running along the right of the flight of steps suggests the intensity of interactivity that you can expect between the participants at each stage. At first, at stage one, they interact only with one or two others. After stage two, the numbers of others with whom they interact, and the frequency, gradually increases, although stage five often results in a return to more individual pursuits."
"ePioneers is a new approach to e-learning adoption, based on mentoring of 'quick gain' projects, with individual and School-wide outcomes. It offers a way to move e-learning beyond early adopters and into the mainstream.
Through 23 video conversations, and supported by 29 documents, 11 School of Education staff offer a balanced view of e-learning adoption …"
http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/epioneers/programme/auditing/ Check this one out in particular - I like the way it highlights the common misconception that there are just a couple of innovators in each person's 'sphere'; it reminded me of the plan you had about the 'go to' survey.