Group items tagged

Future of education

A 2-min vignette from Steve Wheeler on Future learning environments: professional, powerful and personal.

"Pupils in Wales could soon get advice on avoiding the pitfalls of using social media and prevent damaging their future career prospects. A pilot scheme will give tips on avoiding posting compromising or embarrassing photos on sites such as Facebook or Twitter. It will include advice on protecting personal information and staying safe."

People are trading their privacy for influence! This irreversible global trend is shaping a communication battleground that will impact on every aspect of our future. The concept of relinquishing privacy is a scary proposition for many people, generally in loose correlation to their age. Similarly the idea of a profound change in societal influence is generating resistance and fear in traditional power centres and institutional mediators of meaning. Governments, corporations, media empires and a host of heritage institutions and their practices will change dramatically as contemporary forces shift the nature of influence.

"Teachers who resist using social media in the classroom are stripping their students of an essential component of their future success. Avoiding - or worse, banning - social media platforms for students prohibits them from being successful professionals in fields like accounting, chemistry, the arts and more"

"You don't have to be running for president to care about your online reputation. Almost everything you do online is easy to track, especially when you're using social media sites. This infographic shows you how to manage your "e-reputation," perhaps saving you some embarrassment, or even your career. Gathered by digital marketing firm KBSD, it's a treasure trove of tips, techniques and information about what companies and individuals are looking for inside your personal profiles and social information, and what you can do to show off your best side to those who might want to find out unflattering things about you. It's not too late to protect yourself and polish up your online image. So now that you've grown up (you have grown up, haven't you?), this would be a good time to do a bit of backtracking, cleaning up those mistakes you made in the past as much as you can, and at the same time, keeping an eye on your online behavior so there won't be anything to hide in the future."

Recently, two teenage girls in Gainesville, Florida made a video (note: NSFW) in which they spewed a truckload of racist comments. They posted the video on YouTube and subsequently ruined their lives. It took all of fourteen minutes. (Actually, probably twenty, if you account for the time it took to upload the video.) When the video went viral, these girls' lives changed radically -- and not for the better. They have received numerous death threats, have been forced to drop out of the high school they'd been attending, and have become the latest poster children for social media stupidity. (As of this writing, at least one of the girls has publicly apologized for her remarks.) These are just the immediate repercussions. What consequences they will face in the future remains to be seen. But one thing is certain: it will be a long time before these girls can escape the shadow cast by this regrettable and truly disastrous #socialmediafail.

"In the emerging decade, ideas will migrate across multiple social media platforms: podcasts, digital video, virtual worlds, microblogs, wikis, social networking, tagging, etc. The amplified, transliterate organization will have the capacity to communicate across these platforms. "

""Ivanhoe Grammar School is to be congratulated on this Cyber Safety website initiative. Parents in the Ivanhoe Grammar School Community should take great comfort in knowing that the school is working assiduously to equip students with the capacity to survive and thrive in cyberspace which will be increasingly an important part of their lives, now and in the future.""

It's impressive, that's for sure. It's interesting that is not prominently linked on the school website.

A blog post discussing Internet access in Australian schools.

Tina Barseghian is a helpful writer. She combines well-expressed observations with links and references to a range of sources and examples on digital delivery, collaborative learning, interest-driven learning and Web 2.0 skills and their effects on the classroom.

Can formal education remain relevant in the long term? That's one of six critical challenges facing schools identified in a new report examining the impact of technology on education.