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Over the years, MIT students have created an array of clubs, workshops and competitions to foster entrepreneurship and help those who aim to start businesses. Increasingly, though, entrepreneurship is not just an extracurricular activity but - in many cases - an integral part of students' academic work. In other cases, student research ends up becoming the core of a spinoff company.

The evolving world of the Internet - blogs, podcasts, wikis, social networks - offers instructors and students radically new ways to research, communicate, and learn. Integrating these Internet tools into the college classroom, however, is not an easy task. Therefore, the purpose of this article is to examine the role of social networking in education and demonstrate how social network sites (SNS) can be used in a college classroom setting. To do this, existing research relating to SNS and education is discussed, and the primary advantages and disadvantages of using SNS in the classroom are explored. Most importantly, specific instructions and guidelines to follow when implementing SNS (i.e., Facebook) within the college classroom are provided. Specifically, we show that multiple types of Facebook course integration options are available to instructors. It is concluded that SNS, such as Facebook, can be appropriately and effectively used in an academic setting if proper guidelines are established and implemented.

Web search can be a remarkable tool for students, and a bit of instruction in how to search for academic sources will help your students become critical thinkers and independent learners. With the materials on this site, you can help your students become skilled searchers- whether they're just starting out with search, or ready for more advanced training.

For Wall Street Occupiers or other decriers of the "social injustice" of college tuition, here's a curveball bound to scramble your worldview: a totally free college education regardless of your academic performance or background.  The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.) will announce on Monday that they intend to launch an online learning initiative called M.I.T.x,which will offer the online teaching of M.I.T. courses free of charge to anyone in the world.

The Social Computing Symposium 2012 focuses on the changing nature of "the public," and is held on the campus of New York University in the Interactive Telecommunication Program space on January 12-13. Since 2004, Microsoft Research (MSR) has sponsored an annual symposium on social computing that has brought together academic and industry researchers, social startups, writers, and influential commentators in order to open new lines of communication among previously disconnected groups.

app for iPad and academic uses

The Ri Channel is a new online project by the Royal Institution showcasing the very best science videos from the Ri and around the web. Alongside highlights from recent Ri events, the Channel features re-digitised footage from the Ri archive and a range of high-quality videos from filmmakers and scientific institutions across the UK and beyond. The project continues the Royal Institution's charitable mission to "connect people to the world of science".

Wikipedia stands as an undeniable success in online participation and collaboration. However, previous attempts at studying collaboration within Wikipedia have focused on simple metrics like rigor (i.e., the number of revisions in an article's revision history) and diversity (i.e., the number of authors that have contributed to a given article) or have made generalizations about collaboration within Wikipedia based upon the content validity of a few select articles. By looking more closely at metrics associated with each extant Wikipedia article (N=3,427,236) along with all revisions (N=225,226,370), this study attempts to understand what collaboration within Wikipedia actually looks like under the surface. Findings suggest that typical Wikipedia articles are not rigorous, in a collaborative sense, and do not reflect much diversity in the construction of content and macro-structural writing, leading to the conclusion that most articles in Wikipedia are not reflective of the collaborative efforts of the community but, rather, represent the work of relatively few contributors.

You can learn a lot about the world from Wikipedia, sometimes without reading the articles. Kalev Leetaru, a researcher at the University of Illinois, has been looking at the capacious volunteer-written encyclopedia as a Big Data resource, concentrating on the connections between cities around the globe over time. To understand these connections, he focuses on the type of language used to talk about a particular place, to see whether the writers have a generally positive or negative sentiment toward the place at that time.

The Oxford Internet Institute is a research department of the University of Oxford, focusing on the social implications of the Internet and other advanced ICTs. Our multidisciplinary research faculty include political scientists, sociologists, lawyers, and economists who are engaged in a variety of research projects covering the themes of: Everyday Life, Governance and Democracy, Network Economy, Science and Learning and Shaping the Internet. One of our key missions is to stimulate and inform debate about the Internet, and to shape policy and practice around its (re)invention and use.