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"The UK's first massive open online course platform will focus on promoting student discussion and debate in an effort to stand out from the Mooc crowd, according to Simon Nelson, its chief executive. FutureLearn will offer "something fresh, something different", he told Times Higher Education, including being optimised for use on smartphones."

"The headquarters of what has rapidly become the largest school in the world, at 10 million students strong, is stuffed into a few large communal rooms in a decaying 1960s office building hard by the commuter rail tracks in Mountain View, Calif. Despite the cramped, dowdy circumstances, youthful optimism at the Khan Academy abounds. At the weekly organization-wide meeting, discussion about translating their offerings into dozens of languages is sandwiched between a video of staffers doing weird dances with their hands and plans for upcoming camping and ski trips."

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.

"Everyone agrees the United States needs to improve its education system dramatically, but how? One of the hottest trends in education reform lately is looking at the stunning success of the West's reigning education superpower, Finland. Trouble is, when it comes to the lessons that Finnish schools have to offer, most of the discussion seems to be missing the point."

The iJIM journal aims to focus on the exchange of relevant trends and research results as well as the presentation of practical experiences gained while developing and testing elements of interactive mobile technologies. The objective of the journal is to publish and discuss fundamentals, applications and experiences in the field of interactive mobile technologies in learning and teaching as well as in industrial and other applications. iJIM is an Open Access Journal. Readers don't have to pay any fee. Only registration is necessary.

The Exploratree web resource has been developed by Futurelab and emerged out of our work on the Enquiring Minds project. It provides a series of ready-made interactive 'thinking guides' or 'frameworks' which can support students' projects and research. Thinking guides support the thinking or working through of an issue, topic or question and help to shape, define and focus an idea and also support the planning required to investigate it further. Exploratree guides can be used as a basis for whole class discussion, or emailed to individuals or groups to complete. They can also be used as a presentation tool to share your findings and thinking with others. As well as providing a set of ready to use thinking guides, which are completely customisable and shareable, Exploratree also enables teachers and students to create their own simply and easily.

Welcome! This course is going to be fun and enriching for those who choose to get involved in doing classwork in new ways. We're going to experiment.  The success of our experiment will depend on our work together as a learning community - in class and online. (Please click and read each link on this page - and ask yourself if you are ready to continue at this level of commitment through the rest of the quarter). Each one of us will be required to work differently than we usually do. Most courses focus on the delivery by a teacher of a specific body of knowledge to students, who are held accountable as individuals for retaining and comprehending that knowledge. In this learning community, we're going to be inquiring and reflecting more than delivering and memorizing, and we're going to be thinking, discussing, learning as a group as well as learning individually -- we're going to be both cooperative (working together on projects) and collaborative (co-responsible for each other's learning). That part alone is going to require more work on your part than you might think.

"If any institution is equipped to handle questions of strategy, it is Harvard Business School, whose professors have coined so much of the strategic lexicon used in classrooms and boardrooms that it's hard to discuss the topic without recourse to their concepts: Competitive advantage. Disruptive innovation. The value chain."