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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.

Yochai Benkler's wealth of nations book online Next Chapter: Part I: The Networked Information Economy » read paragraph Chapter 1: Introduction: A Moment of Opportunity and Challenge 1 Information, knowledge, and culture are central to human freedom and human development. How they are produced and exchanged in our society critically affects the way we see the state of the world as it is and might be; who decides these questions; and how we, as societies and polities, come to understand what can and ought to be done. For more than 150 years, modern complex democracies have depended in large measure on an industrial information economy for these basic functions. In the past decade and a half, we have begun to see a radical change in the organization of information production. Enabled by technological change, we are beginning to see a series of economic, social, and cultural adaptations that make possible a radical transformation of how we make the information environment we occupy as autonomous individuals, citizens, and members of cultural and social groups. It seems passé today to speak of "the Internet revolution." In some academic circles, it is positively naïve. But it should not be. The change brought about by the networked information environment is deep. It is structural. It goes to the very foundations of how liberal markets and liberal democracies have coevolved for almost two centuries.

* About Netskills * Staff * History * News & Publicity * Projects o Past Projects * Clients * Contact * This Web Site Teaching Information Skills: Materials for Secondary Schools The need to equip the 'Google generation' with effective information literacy skills was highlighted recently in a report by JISC and the British Library. These materials provide guidance to staff in schools about teaching information literacy, as well as including a selection of activities which can be used with pupils. The materials have been produced as part of a project funded by Eduserv's Information Literacy Initiative and delivered by Helen Blanchett from Netskills. The information literacy activities for use with pupils were developed by Pauline Roberts, school librarian at Longbenton Community College.

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.

wealth of networks online as a wiki Table of Contents From Yochai Benkler - Wealth of Networks Jump to: navigation, search 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

"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."

Welcome to myUNE myUNE is your one-stop web site with a single login to find and manage your personal UNE information. Information you need will be presented to you automatically and is specific to your role at UNE. Information and services will be gradually added to myUNE as they are developed.

Portal Integration Student portals are becoming the place for student materials and council portals are becoming the hub of all public services. Portal Integration mean users no longer need to remember multiple passwords to login to multiple systems to access institutions services. Yet often valuable library services are missing from this new first point of interaction with students and citizens. Providing library information such as reservations waiting collection, library fines and which books are on loan to the user; Portal integration offers several key outcomes: * Improved user experience * Promotes the online visibility of the library service Talis have developed a complete solution that enables library information to be integrated with major portal solutions such as: * Microsoft Sharepoint * Students/campus portals (uPortal, Moodle etc) * Virtual Learning Environments (Blackboard) What our Portal Integration customers think: "The integration with Talis Keystone has enabled us to deliver a seamless service to staff and students visiting us via the University's portal. We are delighted that our efforts are available on the Talis Developer Network to help other libraries, and look forward to benefiting from their contributions to this open community in the future." Lorraine Beard, Head of Information Services at The University of Manchester

Welcome to the University's Personal Information System. These pages allow you to access your own information, as stored by the University. The system ensures that the data we store is accurate - feedback is encouraged and links allow you to inform us of updates and changes. Check the message board for updates.

"Social Media Guidelines Social media tools have allowed people and organizations to go beyond the physical boundaries of location, language, culture, and other limitations to connect and collaborate in powerful ways. We strongly encourage the Feinberg School of Medicine community - faculty, staff, researchers, students and alumni groups - to engage, build a network of like-minded scholars, stay connected, share information, and help us promote the medical school's goals and vision. Social media technologies, such as blogs, Facebook, and Twitter, are primarily communication tools. They create opportunities for us to take part in global conversations and reach out to the broadest possible audience. Your professional activities online and off-line reflect both on you and our organization. Therefore, it is important that any members of the Feinberg community engaging in online dialogue are informed of established guiding principles and available tools. The Office of Communications provides the following guiding principles to raise awareness of current best practices and help members of the Feinberg community participate within social media channels. For additional employee code of conduct information, please refer to the Faculty handbook (pdf) and the Staff handbook (pdf). "

Videos. Interview recordings. Documents. Photos. Media clips. Music. Podcasts. Whatever your materials, whatever your project, whatever your background - NVivo 8's superior technology lets you explore, analyze and glean insight from your information like never before. If you need to handle very rich information, where deep levels of analysis on both small and large volumes of data are required, NVivo 8 is your solution. It removes many of the manual tasks associated with analysis, like classifying, sorting and arranging information, so you have more time to explore trends, build and test theories and ultimately arrive at answers to questions.

"The National Research Council of Canada's Institute for Information Technology (Learning and Collaborative Group) has started a research and development project exploring the Personal Learning Environment. The project researches how new technologies can be used in a personalized informal learning environment and focuses on two dimensions. The first dimension is the pedagogical: given the new affordances offered by web technologies, how can access to a wide variety of learning opportunities best be managed in an online environment? The second dimension is technical. Given a set of desired types of connections, what technologies can be assembled to best provide seamless access to a large variety of educational resources and services? Existing learning management technology (such as the Learning Management System) is centered on the institution that owns and operates it as enterprise software. With the increase of lifelong and student-centered learning, individuals are more frequently enrolling in learning opportunities from multiple institutions and have a need to manage their learning through an entire career. Thus there is a need for a type of application that is centered on the learner and would constitute the person's personal learning record, portfolio, business and educational contacts, communications and creativity tools, library and resource subscription management, and related services. Stephen Downes, the project leader:"

Personal Knowledge Management: A way to deal with ever-increasing digital information. Requires an open attitude to learning and finding new things (I Seek). Develops processes of filing, classifying and annotating for later retrieval. Uses open systems that enable sharing. Aids in observing, thinking and using information & knowledge (I Sense). Helps to share ideas with others (We Share). "You know you're in a community of practice when your practice changes" (We Use). PKM prepares the mind to be open to new ideas (enhanced serendipity).

"exploring informal education, lifelong learning and social action"

RSS Britannica Blog via RSS RSS Posts by admin via RSS print Print Brave New Classroom 2.0 (New Blog Forum) October 20th, 2008 - (Brave New Classroom 2.0) homeimage12Students at every level, from grade school to grad school, face dramatic changes in the institutions they attend thanks to new digital technologies. PCs, the Internet, whiteboards, presentation software, and other high-tech devices, once considered educational aides for the library, the media lab, and the home, are increasingly a central part of the classroom curriculum itself, with results that have yet to be fully understood. The new classroom is about information, but not just information. It's also about collaboration, about changing roles of student and teacher, and about challenges to the very idea of traditional authority. It may also be about a new cognitive model for learning that relies heavily on what has come to be called "multitasking." Many educators voice ambivalence about the power of educational technologies to distract students and fragment their attention. Do the new classroom technologies represent an educational breakthrough, a threat to teaching itself, or something in between? Utopian and dystopian visions tend to collide whenever the topic comes up.

good articles on current state of e learning

As the internet replaces library databases as students' primary research option, a new discussion is emerging in academic circles: Is the vast amount of information at students' fingertips changing the way they gather and process information for the better--or for worse? In a recent Atlantic Monthly article titled "Is Google Making Us Stupid," author Nicholas Carr asserts that technology has changed the way we think, making our minds a "high-speed data-processing" machine under the influence of internet search engines. But he questions whether this development has led to a focus on surface-level skimming at the expense of deeper reading.

With the YaleInfo Portal you can: * Customize Yale and other Internet resources with your NetID login * Access important academic & business information and Yale web resources in one place * Save bookmarks, organize your news and local information, check for alert messages, network backup, systems status and more!

Join Course Hero's Learning Network! Connect with facebook now. First time logins: Facebook will ask you to "Allow Access" to Course Hero. Our intent is to make the login process seamless and allow you to import Facebook information at your discretion. Your personal information shall not be transferred or sold to any other third party. Our Social Learning Network was built to provide students and key learning partners like professors a platform to share, meet and collaborate while accelerating their comprehension of course-related theories and concepts. We are committed to providing you immediate access to a growing wealth of study materials and an unparalleled academic network of students, professors and other key partners. Why do you care? Because you want the best grade possible and at times need a 24/7 resource that's responsive to your needs.

"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."

October 28, 2008 Kevin Kelly Q&A Filed under: Uncategorized - wadatripp @ 9:56 am Tags: Kevin Kelly, masie, Q&A On Collaboration Tools of the Future: Tools we have right now are minimal. Not good in sense that they dont structure the information we are generating. Info needs structure to be readable and parseable. We'll see tools come along where the structure of the information is parsed and shared. Example: Parsing out arguments. If you use the word "Pacifica" for my hometown, the machine should know that…because we know that. Tools today are not aware of semantic structure of an argument. Hello Semantic Web ; ) Awareness of structure and interactions of conversations. Meaning of what we are doing is better captured and parsed.