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Some general comments on the "Twitter Experiment" by Monica Rankin (UT Dallas) There has been a lot of interest in the "Twitter Experiment" video posted by Kim Smith chronicling my U.S. History class at U.T. Dallas and our use of twitter in the classroom. I have fielded a number of inquiries from educators across the United States and even overseas who are interested in finding ways to use social networking in an educational setting. This write-up is intended as an informal summary of my use of twitter in the classroom. I hope it will help to clarify my experience and I welcome additional questions and commentary, particularly suggestions for how to improve this type of classroom interaction. The class: I used twitter in the basic U.S. History II survey course at U.T. Dallas in the spring 2009 semester. This is a "core" course requirement in the state of Texas. It generally enrolls students from all majors across campus. At the beginning of the semester, there were 90 students enrolled in my class. The class met in a large auditorium-style classroom on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday from 11:30-12:20. I had one graduate student teaching assistant to help with grading and other administrative duties for the class.

The "Google generation" of today's students has grown up in a digital world. Most are completely au fait with the microblogging site Twitter; they organise their social lives through Facebook and MySpace; 75% of students have a profile on at least one social networking site. And they spend up to four hours a day online. Modern students are happy to share and participate but are prone to impatience - being used to quick answers - and are casual about evaluating information and attributing it, and also about legal and copyright issues. With almost weekly developments in technology and research added to increasingly web-savvy students' expectations, how are British universities keeping up? Pretty well, according to Sir David Melville, chair of Lifelong Learning UK and author of a new report into how students' use of new technologies will affect higher education.

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.

Dubbed "the explainer" by Wired magazine, Michael Wesch is a cultural anthropologist exploring the impact of new media on society and culture. After two years studying the impact of writing on a remote indigenous culture in the rain forest of Papua New Guinea, he has turned his attention to the effects of social media and digital technology on global society. His videos on culture, technology, education, and information have been viewed by millions, translated in over ten languages, and are frequently featured at international film festivals and major academic conferences worldwide. Wesch has won several major awards for his work, including a Wired Magazine Rave Award, the John Culkin Award for Outstanding Praxis in Media Ecology, and he was recently named an Emerging Explorer by National Geographic. He has also won several teaching awards, including the 2008 CASE/Carnegie U.S. Professor of the Year for Doctoral and Research Universities.

Frustrated With Corporate Course-Management Systems, Some Professors Go 'Edupunk' A group of tech-savvy professors are claiming punk music as inspiration for their approach to teaching. They call their approach Edupunk. Punk rock was a rebellion against the clean, predictable sound of popular music and it also encouraged a do-it-yourself attitude. Edupunk seems to be a reaction against the rise of course-managements systems, which offer cookie-cutter tools that can make every course Web site look the same.

Action research for professional development Concise advice for new action researchers Jean McNiff

Welcome! It is a real pleasure to welcome you to my web site - a place for learning, sharing and creating new knowledge.

About FFFFOUND! FFFFOUND! is a web service that not only allows the users to post and share their favorite images found on the web, but also dynamically recommends each user's tastes and interests for an inspirational image-bookmarking experience!!

T&L blogger Ryan Bretag recently sat down with his students and asked them about 21st-Century Learning strategies. Their suggestions are amazing. Read the whole piece here: http://www.techlearning.com/blogs.aspx?id=15776 Some snippets: Each discussion point started and ended with the focus on learning. For example, the students talked about creating a learning environment that was about learning not just memorization. To do this, they wanted to seek out partnerships both locally and globally in order to build connections that would foster a "learning to learn" movement where students are learning for learning, open to learning, and innovative. Clearly, textbooks were not fast enough nor diverse enough in their eyes. They longed for ways to interact with materials that were updated frequently and offered a wealth of perspectives. In fact, a good portion felt there was a need to move beyond the textbook because "information changes to rapidly" for textbooks to be the main source in the classroom. Along with this, information and resources needed to come in a variety of formats if the curriculum was going to remain progressive and current: narrative, fiction, digital, multimedia, and non-fiction.

Turning a College Lecture into a Conversation with CoverItLive Alfred Hermida by Alfred Hermida, April 13, 2009 Tagged: coveritlive, journalism school, social media, twitter, university of british columbia Journalists who also teach will know that one of the challenges of teaching a large, undergraduate class is the sheer number of students. It can be hard to foster a discussion in a lecture hall, where many students may be too intimidated to speak up. So instead the lesson often becomes a lecture, as the professor stands up in front of the class and talks at them for the best part of an hour. In this instructor-centered model, knowledge is a commodity to be transmitted from the instructor to the student's empty vessel. There is a place for the traditional, one-to-many transmission. This is the way the mass media worked for much of the 20th century and continues to operate today. But the emergence of participatory journalism is changing this. Most news outlets, at the very least, solicit comments from their online readers. Others, such as Canada's Globe and Mail, use the live-blogging tool CoveritLive both for real-time reporting and for engaging readers in a discussion, such as in its coverage of the Mesh conference in Toronto. Tools such as CoveritLive or Twitter can turn the one-to-many model of journalism on its head, offering instead a many-to-many experience. The same tools may also have a use in the classroom, as a way of turning the traditional university lecture into a conversation.

from Educators' eZine Introduction and Background: Bloom's Taxonomy Bloom's Taxonomy In the 1950's Benjamin Bloom developed his taxonomy of cognitive objectives, Bloom's Taxonomy. This categorized and ordered thinking skills and objectives. His taxonomy follows the thinking process. You can not understand a concept if you do not first remember it, similarly you can not apply knowledge and concepts if you do not understand them. It is a continuum from Lower Order Thinking Skills (LOTS) to Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS). Bloom labels each category with a gerund.

Online Education - Introducing the Microlecture Format by Thomas Most college students would likely concur - fifty minute lectures can be a bit much. With current research indicating that attention spans (measured in minutes) roughly mirror a students age (measured in years), it begs the question as to the rationale behind lectures of such length. teddY-riseDGiven that it is tough to justify the traditional lecture timeframes, it is no surprise to see online educational programs seeking to offer presentations that feature shorter podcasts. But in an astonishing switch, David Shieh of the Chronicle of Higher Education recently took a look at a community college program that features a microlecture format, presentations varying from one to three minutes in length.

In-Class Use of YouTube Videos In connection with the Engaged Classroom professional development opportunity, we would like to share "model" lessons of how technology can be used to teach the curriculum. One particularly powerful piece of technology that can be used for educational purposes is the use of online video for instruction. YouTube is currently the industry standard in user-generated video distribution. Therefore, we think it only reasonable to allow the use of educationally sound YouTube content under controlled circumstances within the classroom. In this brief paper, we will elaborate and show that such behavior is within the confines of current district policy.

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.

NCSS Position Statement on Media Literacy Media Literacy A Position Statement of National Council for the Social Studies © 2009 National Council for the Social Studies. All rights reserved This position statement was prepared by a task force of the Technology Community of National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS), and was approved by the NCSS Board of Directors in February 2009. "In the twenty-first century, participatory media education and civic education are inextricable" (Rheingold, 2008, p. 103) This position statement focuses on the critical role of media literacy in the social studies curriculum. The statement addresses the following questions. First, why and how has media literacy taken on a significantly more important role in preparing citizens for democratic life? Second, how is media literacy defined, and what are some of its essential concepts? Finally, what is required to teach media literacy and what are some examples of classroom activities?

Reschooling Society and the Promise of ee-Learning: An Interview with Steve Eskow Chad Trevitte and Steve Eskow more » « Synopsis » Article » Discuss » E-Mail » Print:HTML » Print:PDF » Related Articles » Also In This Issue In this article, Chad Trevitte interviews Innovate guest editor Steve Eskow about the concept of ee-learning and the promise it holds for revitalizing higher education. Eskow defines ee-learning as a combination of the electronic technologies employed in online learning ("e-learning 1") and a pedagogy of experiential learning rooted in real-life settings in the world outside the university classroom ("e-learning 2"). As he discusses ee-learning in the context of previous philosophies of educational reform, Eskow argues that this mode of pedagogical practice seeks to bridge the gap between theory-based instruction on the one hand and practical application on the other. Eskow also addresses the ways in which ee-learning offers an alternative to the traditional view of the university as a self-enclosed space of learning, while still supporting the development of conceptual and propositional knowledge that educators typically value in the setting of the campus classroom. By allowing students to pursue their work in specific, authentic, contextualized settings while consulting with instructors and peers online, ee-learning offers a pedagogical approach that aligns knowledge and experience in a reciprocal, mutually enhancing fashion.

donald schon (schön): learning, reflection and change Donald Schon made a remarkable contribution to our understanding of the theory and practice of learning. His innovative thinking around notions such as 'the learning society', 'double-loop learning' and 'reflection-in-action' has become part of the language of education. We explore his work and some of the key themes that emerge. What assessment can we make now?

CSALT What is CSALT? CSALT is the Centre for Studies in Advanced Learning Technology. Established in 1992 the Centre for Studies in Advanced Learning Technology (CSALT) at Lancaster University is one of Europe's leading academic research groups in the field of technology enhanced learning (TEL) applied to adult education and training. The Centre carries out basic and applied research with an emphasis on the development of theory that can be used in real settings. Its members are also closely involved in the education and professional development of workers in the e-learning industry, and in consultancy. Our research has a strong focus on adult education especially in higher education and industrial contexts. Our interest is not in the technology per se, but in the social, psychological and organisational issues which are thrown into sharp relief during the design and introduction of new technology-enhanced learning environments. CSALT: * is focused on research into networked learning and the design of advanced learning technology(ALT), * is made up of staff with expertise in eg, online tutoring, computer supported collaborative learning, cognitive psychology, design of learning technology and simulation based training, * runs an innovative Doctoral distance learning programme on the design and use of technology enhanced learning * develops course designs that support e-groups and communities, * is based in the RAE grade 5 Department of Educational Research at Lancaster University, UK. This site reflects primarily the interests of CSALT in the Department of Educational Research. Other members of the university wide CSALT are part of the Department of Management Learning, in particular the Networked Management Learning research group and the Learning Technology Group.