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Over the years, social networks have lured us from the confines of our existing realities into a new genre of digital domains that not only captivated us, but fostered the creation of new realities. As George Bernard Shaw observed, "Life is not about finding yourself, life is about creating yourself." Such is true for social networks and the digital persona and resulting experiences we create and cultivate. It was the beginning of the shift in behavior toward an era of digital extroversion, self-defined by varying degrees of sharing, connections, and engagement.

There are growing expectations among college students to be able to access and manage their course materials over the World Wide Web. In its early days, faculty would create web pages by hand for posting this information. As Internet technologies and access have matured over the past decade, course and learning management systems such as Blackboard and Web CT have become the norm for distributing such materials. In today's Web 2.0 world, wikis have emerged as a tool that may complement or replace the use of traditional course management systems as a tool for disseminating course information. Because of a wiki's collaborative nature, its use also allows students to participate in the process of course management, information sharing, and content creation. Using examples from an information technology classroom, this paper describes several ways to structure and use a wiki as a course management tool, and shares results of a student survey on the effectiveness of such an approach on student learning. Keywords: Wiki, Course Management, Collaboration, Web 2.0, Content Creation, Student Learning.

"Creating a Transmedia Symphony I re-read the article in Wired on transmedia today, and found it as good a read as the first time. Coming to the last paragraph I read Jeff Gomez's comment about transmedia and the birth of a new Mozart, "We are going to see visionaries who understand the value of each media platform as if it's a separate musical instrument, who'll create symphonic narratives which leverage each of these multimedia platforms in a way that will create something we haven't encountered yet." This rings true for me as an analogy of what many of us are trying to create. The question that popped up in my head was, however, "but hey, how do you create a "normal" symphony?". Lo and behold, a Google search later I found this wikihow on, yes, how to create a symphony. After reading it, the analogy rings truer still. So, to translate the creation of a "normal" symphony to the creation of a transmedia symphony, these would/could be the steps to take:"

From Participation to Creation This 2020 Forecast illuminates how we are shifting toward a culture of creation in which each of us has the opportunity - and the responsibility - to make our collective future. People are creating new selves, organizations, systems, societies, economies, and knowledge. We are seeing "educitizens" define their rights as learners and re-create the civic sphere. Networked artisans and ad hoc factories are democratizing manufacturing and catalyzing new local economies. These creators are highlighting the significance of cooperation and cross-cultural intelligence for citizenship and economic leadership. Furthermore, advances in neuroscience are creating new notions of performance and cognition and are reshaping discussions of social justice in learning. Communities are beginning to re-create themselves as resilient systems that respond to challenges by replenishing their vital resources and creating flexible, open, and adaptive infrastructures. Together, these forces are pushing us to create the future of learning as an ecosystem, in which we have yet to determine the role of educational institutions as we know them today.

Silent movie from Alex Spiers walking you through the creation of a voice e-mail with Wimba through Blackboard.

"A full-featured web site-creation package solely for the academic community. Scholars create web sites in seconds and can easily manage everything themselves (for free)"

"Session Notes This session will focus on social bookmarking and web annotation with the resource Diigo.com. Participants will learn the basics of account creation, bookmarking, annotating (highlights & stickies), creating and bookmarking to groups and lists, and also how to form accounts and groups for students. We will also discuss best practices for use with teachers and students."

"The emergence of the networked information economy is unleashing two powerful forces. On one hand, easy access to high-speed networks is empowering individuals. People can now discover and consume information resources and services globally from their homes. Further, new social computing approaches are inviting people to share in the creation and edification of information on the Internet. Empowerment of the individual -- or consumerization -- is reducing the individual's reliance on traditional brick-and-mortar institutions in favor of new and emerging virtual ones. Second, ubiquitous access to high-speed networks along with network standards, open standards and content, and techniques for virtualizing hardware, software, and services is making it possible to leverage scale economies in unprecedented ways. What appears to be emerging is industrial-scale computing -- a standardized infrastructure for delivering computing power, network bandwidth, data storage and protection, and services. Comsumerization and industrialization beg the question "Is this the end of the middle?"; that is, what will be the role of "enterprise" IT in the future? Indeed, the bigger question is what will become of all of our intermediating institutions? This volume examines the impact of IT on higher education and on the IT organization in higher education."

A story has a beginning, a middle, and a cleanly wrapped-up ending. Whether told around a campfire, read from a book, or played on a DVD, a story goes from point A to B and then C. It follows a trajectory, a Freytag Pyramid-perhaps the line of a human life or the stages of the hero's journey. A story is told by one person or by a creative team to an audience that is usually quiet, even receptive. Or at least that's what a story used to be, and that's how a story used to be told. Today, with digital networks and social media, this pattern is changing. Stories now are open-ended, branching, hyperlinked, cross-media, participatory, exploratory, and unpredictable. And they are told in new ways: Web 2.0 storytelling picks up these new types of stories and runs with them, accelerating the pace of creation and participation while revealing new directions for narratives to flow.

Useful notes on legal issues around the creation of time-based media (audio, video, screencasts etc).

In this article we describe the planning, creation, use, and initial assessment of our university's first Learning Studio-a space that had to be immediately useful but also unabashedly provocative and experimental. Even with a limited budget, we needed this prototype to guide UMSL in evolving new approaches to learning appropriate to our context. We also needed an efficient process for the project and to demonstrate effectiveness of the resultant space.

Learning as a Network Posted on May 7th, 2009 by Harold Jarche Mohamed Amine Chatti extends the framework on personal knowledge networks with his post on Learning as a Network (follow link for graphic): The Learning as a Network (LaaN) perspective draws together some of the concepts behind double-loop learning and connectivism. It starts from the learner and views learning as the continuous creation of a personal knowledge network (PKN). For each learner, a PKN is a unique adaptive repertoire of: - One's theories-in-use. This includes norms for individual performance, strategies for achieving values, and assumptions that bind strategies and values together (conceptual/internal level) Tacit and explicit knowledge nodes (i.e. people and information) (external level

"This evolving consumer mentality might be called "the templated mind." The templated mind searches for text fields, metatags and rankings like the handles on a suitcase. Data entry and customization options are the way prosumers grip this new generation of products. The templated mind hungers for customization and the opportunity to add their input - in essence to do-it-themselves. The templated mind trusts the result of social production more than the crafted messages of designers and copywriters. And this mentality is changing the design of products. "