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"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). "

" The following document is posted by the University to guide SFU faculty members, employees or students who manage social media channels online in the name of the University. It may also aid those who have personal social media channels. It is a compilation of "best practices" from universities and social media pioneers. Blogs, social networks and Web sites such as Wikipedia, Facebook, Flickr, Second Life and YouTube are exciting channels to share knowledge, express creativity, and connect with others. The University supports your participation in these online communities. The following guidelines from respected online university, agency and industry sources will help you use these forums effectively, protect your personal and professional reputation, and help you to follow SFU branding and policies. "

"Abstract Purpose - This paper investigates the specialist learning undertaken in graphic design classrooms and its relationship to industry practices. It considers how well students are prepared for work and the nature of this vocational preparation. "

"As promised, I am presenting a step-by-step approach to a low-cost knowledge management (KM) program using social computing, and will focus on the functionality that has been touted but rarely delivered by communities of practice (CoPs). The name brings to mind Etienne Wenger's pioneering work in observing naturally occurring use of virtual environments by engineers. The problem was that when people went from a researcher's description of what had grown naturally in the past to a prescriptive recipe, things went wrong. People never accurately report all the factors that lead to the success or failure of a project; retrospective coherence clicks in. Also, the fact that something worked once in a specific context does not mean that it will work again even in the same conditions, or that you can accurately replicate the starting conditions. The other big problem was that people built over structured, formal top-down systems that replicated the design methodologies for enterprisewide systems like SAP. So, let's look at a bottom-up, naturalizing approach to building communities for knowledge flow using blogs:"

"Supporting Learners In a Digital Age (SLIDA) Overview This project is investigating how institutions are creating and enabling opportunities that promote the development of effective learning in a digital age. The main deliverables of the study are 10 institutional case studies and a final report with recommendations for further and higher education on how to develop effective institution-wide strategies and practices which better support effective learners in a digital age. There is an opportunity here to build capacity in researching learners' needs and experiences. The project team are working collaboratively with each institution to assess what evidence they have available and what further evaluations they could conduct."

"Institutional approaches to curriculum design Curriculum design blog JISC Curriculum Design & Delivery1 * The Future of QA & QE2 Tue, 06 Jul 2010 18:25:50 +0000 Various group discussions and the panel session at the QA & QE in e-Learning conference at the Unive... * QA QE Toolkit3 Tue, 06 Jul 2010 18:03:22 +0000 A toolkit created by the QAQE SIG was the subject of discussion & consultation at the QA & QE in e-L... * Review of QAA Code of Practice4 Tue, 06 Jul 2010 17:41:27 +0000 Brief notes from the QA & QE in e-Learning conference at the University of Hertfordshire on 2nd July... The aim of the JISC e-Learning programme is to enable UK further and higher education to create a better learning environment for all learners, wherever and however they study. Its vision is of a world where learners, teachers, researchers and wider institutional stakeholders use technology to enhance the overall educational experience by improving flexibility and creativity and by encouraging comprehensive and diverse personal, high quality learning, teaching and research."

"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."

Imagine your workplace as an award-winning garden - a place where you nurture knowledge and success. A place where people grow and learn from one another by sharing best practices. A place where training content expands and improves through crowdsourcing. A place that's self-sustaining, dynamic, and always fresh.

"Join us 6th - 8th July 2011 for a creative approach to your professional environment! The University of Salford's 6th Education in a Changing Environment Conference, Creativity and Engagement in Higher Education, will explore and discuss international best practice in teaching and educational research in higher education. Through themes of Social Media; Learning, Teaching and Assessment; Networking and Partnerships, the Conference will identify creative models for engagement in a shifting educational landscape. "

"The term 'educational technology' is a difficult one to pin down. There are some who would argue that every tool we use, from a ballpoint pen to an electronic whiteboard, is an educational technology. Others strive to pin down best practices with choice technologies and advocate for this or that brand of technology enhanced pedagogy as scientifically proven to better the learning process in some way. Some people think that social networking is faddish, or, worse, a sign of the decline of our civilization. Others will argue that if we do not bring it into our classrooms we are doing our students a disservice and becoming increasingly out of date. As an educator working on such slippery foundations, I have taken the position that all these things are true. Social networking is both faddish and dangerous as well as critical to moving forward. Our tools are both simply a reflection of the same tools and methods of millennia and complex mechanisms fraught with implicit pedagogy. This course takes all opinions on education and technology as valid and mixes them together, to be interpreted by our own class as well as being validated by a wider network of educators. "

"Before & After magazine has been sharing its practical approach to graphic design since 1990. Because our modern world has made designers of us all (ready or not), Before & After is dedicated to making graphic design understandable, useful and even fun for everyone."

"The helpful advice from designer and executive director John McWade from Before & After is one of the most useful websites out there. I'm a huge fan of John's simple, straight forward approach to graphic design and teaching. His advice is always very practical and he has helped thousands and thousands of people over the years communicate more clearly by learning the essentials of graphic design. John even contributed a lovely four-page spread about using images in presentations which appears in the Presentation Zen Design book."

Most of this material comes from Blumberg, P. (2008) Developing Learner-Centered Teachers: A Practical Guide for Faculty. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Please cite this reference if you use material from this website This site contains links to presentation or workshops I have done at various places over the past few years. These presentations provide more information about learner-centered teaching and offer some insights into how I conducted the workshops. All workshops have an active learning component either through small group discussions or individual reflection questions.

I've been preparing a class session on communities of practice this weekend, and it's been underscoring for me just how important people are to an effective learning environment. We're independent adults, and we like to think of learning as something that each of us does for ourselves, but all the terrific resources in the world can't hold a candle to the power of what can occur between people.

Eduserv Foundation The Eduserv Foundation contributes to Eduserv's charitable mission, realising the effective use of IT for learners and researchers, by offering research grants, contributing to international interoperability standards-making activities, seed-funding and developing pilot projects and offering advice on good practice. We also sponsor meetings, events and other activities. We focus these activities in the following areas: * resource discovery, metadata and open access, * access and identity management, * service architectures and Web 2.0, * e-portfolios and the use of 3-D virtual worlds such as Second Life in education.

Online Communities and Their Impact on Business. Part One: How online community works This is Part One of the report. To return to the Introduction, click here. Summary Working with online communities has long been touted as a great way for a company to save money in its marketing, support, sales, and even product development. But for most companies, the diversity of communities online, and the challenge of learning how to work with them, is daunting. Most companies don't understand how online communities work, how they make a difference, and how to engage with them. Among the companies that have tried to work with communities online, many have found that they conversation is dominated by extreme enthusiasts rather than average users, and have concluded that online community is a distraction from their real customers. That turns out to be a very dangerous mistake. Rubicon Consulting's web practice team recently conducted a broad survey of US web users to understand better how people in the US use the web, with a special focus on web community and its effect on consumers. Key findings of that survey, and its implications for companies, include:

* View o view my articles How to Master Screencasts in Seven Steps October 22, 2008 - 1:58 pm PDT - by Torley 10 Comments Making screencasts (also known as "video tutorials") is already easy, and becomes easier with better tools and broadband proliferation. However, no tech is complete without a human who dives in, does experiments, and discerns best practices from the results.

Welcome to LearnHigher LearnHigher - Excellence in Learning Development Who are we? The LearnHigher Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CETL) is a partnership of 16 Universities, led by Liverpool Hope University, committed to improving student learning through providing excellent resources to support students' learning development, and through practice-led research to inform the effective use of those resources.

8 Online Discussion Response Techniques Posted by: wiredinstructor in Course Design Reflections, Technology Integration, Top Posts, UW-Stout, Virtual School, e-learning, research, virtual high school Online discussion is the heart of a community of practice oriented e-learning course. However, it can be difficult to know how to respond. It's a good idea to think in terms of value added responses. What can you add to advance the discussion? I like to post the following list at the top of discussion forums in my online courses. It's a good reminder and a handy reference! Here are some suggestions to guide you as you respond to each other in discussion forums.

Science fiction novelist William Gibson is attributed with the quote, "The future is already here. It's just not very evenly distributed." He was speaking of course about the science facts upon which much sci-fi is based, and learning professionals also know something about understanding the realities of right now such that we can begin to support the organization of tomorrow. The fact is that the business of learning and development is about always looking forward. Whether gaining awareness about Millennial generation talent, the future of the LMS, or the promise of more successful remote collaboration, the realm of knowledge is very often tied to the practice of thinking ahead. We spoke with leaders and thinkers in the learning industry to get their insight into what the next decade holds for workplace learning and why we should be paying attention now.