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Pros and Cons Debated

But the past couple of weeks there’s been a rolling stone gathering lots of moss- and that stone is Scoop.it.

Well, I haven’t seen much happen with Scoop.it and educators for the past few months, but then something big happened: Scoop.it launched Scoop.it for Education.

I know many educators are fond of Paper.li, another link/newspaper tool, but I’ve never found  that paper-like experience to be of much value, because it’s so… bland.

motivation and control. One seems to need the other, apparently. Keep the students motivated and you are a great teacher in control of the learning process. But we miss the point. Motivation has a short-term effect. New things will be old again. If we equal motivation with learning we will cling too much to it and direct our best efforts (and school budget) to gaining back control. A useless cycle that can lead us to consider extremely double-edged ideas like paying students to keep them learning.

We need autonomous, self-motivated students in love with the process of how humanity has learnt.

There is a underlying idea in the framing of our questions that needs unlearning. The belief that there are "levels", layers of complexity, hierarchies that we can detect and... well, control. But wait! Isn't that the very old way we want to truly change with new technologies?

Not everybody has to teach with technology, but it does need to be deeply embedded throughout the ecosystem we create on campus - and not because "that's what students want" or "that's where the students are."  The surprising-to-most-people-fact is that students would prefer less technology in the classroom (especially *participatory* technologies that ask them to do something other than sit back and memorize material for a regurgitation exercise).  I use wikis, blogs, twitter and other social media in the classroom not because our students use them, but because I am afraid that social media might be using them – that they are using social media blindly, without recognition of the new challenges and opportunities they might create.  I use social media not only as an effective teaching tool that encourages participation, but also as a way to broaden the media literacy of our students.  In this regard, we still have a great deal of work to do.  We need to embed new media literacy more deeply into the curriculum so that it isn't just this "one crazy Anthropology class" (as I have heard my class fondly referred to by students) that showed them how they can effectively use these tools in ways they had not yet imagined, while also allowing them to see a little more clearly how these tools are using them, altering their habits, sensibilities, and values as well as the larger structural contexts in which they live.

Whatever tool professors can find to conjure that—curiosity and a sense of amazing possibilities—is what they should use, he says. Like any good lecture, his point may be more inspirational than instructive. "Students and faculty have to have this sense that they can truly connect with each other," he concludes. "Only through that sense of connection do you have this sense of community."

The University Channel Web site will shut down on November 3

Princeton (and other universities) can upload these videos onto their channel on YouTube (regular and .edu), which would actually make them available to a wider audience. They can also leverage their other social media channels (e.g., Twitter, Facebook and even their website) to promote the videos periodically. Rather than viewing this as a loss, I see this as a pragmatic, digital-era cost-saving measure that can also increase the opportunities to share this valuable content.

Articles like this aren't very helpful unless they provide readers key data, such as the yearly budget for running this sort of operation, and the traffic the service generated. Other information, such as why there are budget problems would be helpful.If there was little interest in this service, then paying for servers and bandwidth makes little sense. On the other hand, if there was a lot of interest, then finding alternative funding would seem to be something that Admins should be requested to do.Youtube is getting about 5B hits a month, so somebody is watching video out there.

The data suggest that 80% of professors, with little variance by age, have at least one account with either Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Skype, LinkedIn, MySpace, Flickr, Slideshare or Google Wave. Nearly 60% kept accounts with more than one, and a quarter used at least four. A majority, 52%, said they used at least one of them as a teaching tool.