Mediated Cultures: Digital Ethnography at Kansas State University netvibes site for mike wesch's course using rss feeds etc

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.

Participatory media may be the future, but a look at most comment threads shows that technology hasn't figured out a good way to force humans to act like citizens instead of fifth graders. UC Berkeley's Center for New Media hopes it has a way to fix that mess in its Opinion Space visualization tool, which provides a planetarium view of users opinions. Opinion Space, which launched Wednesday, is quite pretty, mildly addictive and full of rich possibilities for visualizing a community's opinions. Wired.com would love to have such a tool at its disposal, though its almost certainly going to be an addition to, rather than an substitute for, traditional comment systems. The center built the tool as a response to President Barack Obama's call for greater civic participation, which it says is "designed to go beyond one-dimensional polarities such as left/right, blue/red to actively encourage dialogue between people with differing viewpoints."

Looking for Mr. Goodtweet: How to Pick Up Followers on Twitter Picture 6.jpg At 10:15 pm I discovered that I had not brought a Macbook power supply on the trip. I was in a hotel on Coronado Island, and early the next morning I was flying to an aircraft carrier off San Diego for an overnight visit. I doubted that the carrier had Macbook power supplies laying around, so I was in trouble. I posted a message to Twitter that I was in this predicament, and within ten minutes, five people offered to bring me a power supply. I took one of them up on the offer, and he delivered it to me within an hour. This illustrates the practical implications of a large following on Twitter. In addition, of course, there is the sheer vanity of amassing more followers than your friends. The question, "How do I get more followers on Twitter?" is unspoken because admitting that you want more followers is to acknowledge that you don't have many. Thus, you probably don't need this advice, but you may "have a friend" who will find it useful.

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good intro for twitter for journos Twitter Basics for Journalists & Recovering Journos On Saturday, at the annual conference of the Society of Environmental Journalists, I gave a talk to an audience of mostly journalists explaining the basics of blogs, social media, and search visibility. People had lots of questions, more than I could get to in the session. I was getting stopped in halls, at parties, and even in bathrooms, to be asked things like, "Does it really make that big a difference if I blog under my own domain?" (Answer: Yes!) OK, I don't mind answering those questions. That's really why I went to this conference - because I know that journalists (many of whom are facing potential layoffs, or who have already been laid off) are in dire need of online media awareness and skills. So I'm going to do a bunch of posts answering questions, because it's more efficient to do that via blogging. This is one of those posts. By now you've probably heard about Twitter, the social media service that allows you to publish posts of 140 characters max. What Twitter does, in a nutshell: This service allows you to receive posts ("tweets") from other Twitter users whom you choose to "follow." Likewise, other Twitter users can choose to follow you. When you follow someone on Twitter, their tweets show up in reverse chronological order in the "tweetstream" that scrolls down the Twitter home page when you're logged in. The effect is somewhat like an ongoing Headline News version of what's happening in the minds and worlds of people you know or find interesting.

13 Twitter Tips and Tutorials for Beginners by Darren Rowse on April 18, 2009 in Twitter for Beginners Just starting out on Twitter? Looking for some Twitter Tips to get you started?

When Tweeting Less Can Help You be a More Effective Twitter User by Darren Rowse on November 4, 2008 "How much do I need to Tweet each day to build a successful Twitter presence?" I get this question a fair bit from new Twitter users and while I think Tweet frequency is an important topic (one I'll cover in a future post here at TwiTip) I think that there's another more important aspect of successful use of Twitter that I've not heard many people talk about… Silence….. (cue the crickets and tumbleweed). Regular tweets may well be an important part of successfully using Twitter but one thing that I've found equally important is regularly 'not tweeting'.

Composica 4.0 is a social e‑learning authoring system that offers real-time collaboration among team members and provides a powerful programming- free WYSIWYG environment to create and deliver high-quality interactive e‑learning 2.0 content with embedded social media.

Engagement Streams As Course Portals April 18th, 2009 This podcast comes from a presentation Chip German and I did at the ELI 2009 Annual Meeting earlier this year. Here's the session abstract: What if course portals, typically little more than gateways to course activities and materials, became instead course catalysts: open, dynamic representations of "engagement streams" that demonstrate and encourage deep learning? The session will begin with case studies in enabling and designing such course portals, from both administrative and faculty perspectives. Participants will then form groups to imagine and design their own catalytic course portals. Finally, the presenters will discuss action steps that can lead to effective innovation at participants' home institutions. Presentation resources, including a record of the participants' design work, will be posted to an online collaborative space for continued discussion after the session.

Edupunk rules: Technology I, II and 3 - understanding and improving the practice of instructional technology The following is a summary and perhaps a bit of a reflection on McDonald and Gibbons (nd). This is a journal article that has been accepted, but not yet officially published. It appears to be based on the PhD thesis of McDonald. The paper uses the criteria of technology I, II and III to examine differences between researchers description of a theory and how practitioners implement it. This identifies 3 reasons for technological gravity and 3 approaches to avoid it.

Introducing Edupunk by Leslie Madsen Brooks Jim Groom recently coined the term "edupunk" to refer to a scrappy, DIY spirit in some sectors of educational technology. Edupunk, he writes, is opposed to capitalist co-optation of the labor of educators and progressive educational technologists. He highlights "a scary reality that often gets overlooked (or is it intentionally downplayed?) in educational technology,"

Given that Mike Caulfield has already provided an awesome way to start thinking about the DIY spirit of EDUPUNK, I figured I'd do my part by shaving my head, busting out the sharpee, and sporting my WordPress hoodie (thank you, thank you Lloyd). Share This

Edupunk From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump to: navigation, search This article is an orphan, as few or no other articles link to it. Please introduce links to this page from other articles related to it. (February 2009) Edupunk is an approach to teaching and learning practices that result from a do it yourself (DIY) attitude.[1][2] The New York Times defines it as "an approach to teaching that avoids mainstream tools like PowerPoint and Blackboard, and instead aims to bring the rebellious attitude and D.I.Y. ethos of '70s bands like The Clash to the classroom."[3] Many instructional applications can be described as DIY education or Edupunk. Jim Groom as "poster boy" for edupunk The term was first used on May 25, 2008 by Jim Groom in his blog,[4] and covered less than a week later in the Chronicle of Higher Education.[1] Stephen Downes, an online education theorist and an editor for the International Journal of Instructional Technology and Distance Learning, noted that "the concept of Edupunk has totally caught wind, spreading through the blogosphere like wildfire".[5]

Introducing Edupunk The concept of Edupunk has totally caught wind, spreading through the blogosphere like wildfire. This post summarizes several recent posts and offers something like a definition (I would like to think that true edupunks deride definitions as tools of oppression used by defenders of order and conformity): "edupunk is student-centered, resourceful, teacher- or community-created rather than corporate-sourced, and underwritten by a progressive political stance. Barbara Ganley's philosophy of teaching and digital expression is an elegant manifestation of edupunk. Nina Simon, with her imaginative ways of applying web 2.0 philosophies to museum exhibit design, offers both low- and high-tech edupunk visions. Edupunk, it seems, takes old-school Progressive educational tactics--hands-on learning that starts with the learner's interests--and makes them relevant to today's digital age, sometimes by forgoing digital technologies entirely."

A history of technology-mediated learning The following is a section from my PhD thesis. It is part of the "Past Experience" section of the Ps Framework. It aims to give a potted history of technology-mediated learning and show how it connects with e-learning. Since these terms are somewhat overused, it starts with some definitions. The plan is that this history will be used to identify lessons from history, which e-learning (generally) hasn't learned. I've been working on this for at least a month. I have been doing other work on the thesis, but the fact that this has take soooo long is not all the heartening. I think perhaps may sights are set a little high. The alternatives are that I'm either a crap writer or I'm currently not in the mood to write. We'll see where we go from here. The following has not been proof-read thoroughly. I'm leaving that for a later task. If you have any suggestions for improvement, fire away.

Tracy Boyer is an award-winning multimedia producer, specializing in Flash development and multimedia production. She is obtaining her masters degree at UNC-Chapel Hill, studying Human-Computer Interaction in the School's Information Science program. Previously, she was a multimedia producer at Roanoke.com, served as the UNC correspondent for CNN.com and interned with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. In 2007, she was selected to participate in the Poynter Summer Fellowship. Boyer graduated with a multimedia degree from UNC's School of Journalism and Mass Communication. Her passions lie in travel and multimedia production with a focus on video, audio and Flash-based interactives. See more of her work at www.tracynboyer.com.

Building an online learning community to support nurse education 24 March 2009 This article explores developing an online learning community that student nurses can use to support their education Abstract Lee, P. (2009) Building an online learning community to support nurse education. Nursing Times; 105: 11. This article explores the topic of developing an online community for student nurses to use in learning. It examines the different definitions and types of e-learning and outlines the online community's role in healthcare education, together with some of its pitfalls. A comparison is then made to the process of bidding on eBay, to determine possible similarities.

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

Towards a Process for K-12 Students as Content Producers Beyond the Blog - Leveraging Wikis for Curriculum & Instruction I am frequently asked to clarify what I mean by "students as producers of content", and how that would fit into a school district's curriculm. This outlines in brief fashion an approach doing just that using wiki-based collaborative writing technologies. Our primary use of wikis in the district started out with collaborative curriculum content production. It's what we've been referring to as our "Currwikulum process" for a few years. We crack ourselves up, and can only imagine Elmer Fudd as our spokesmodel.