Group items tagged

"If compared to the majority of businesses out there, universities and colleges have an advantage when it comes to social media: the student community. For the majority of students, the years spent at university is usually one of the most important and remarkable times. This makes it a good start point for colleges in social media - when you have a happy community of consumers who like what you have to offer, things are much easier."

"I have been asked recently to write an article, somewhat along the lines of this one but longer, and with a somewhat different angle, asking a little bit different questions: What makes a science blog? Who were the first science bloggers and how long ago? How many science blogs are there? How does one differentiate between science blogs and pseudo-science, non-science and nonsense blogs? The goal of the article is to try to delineate what is and what isn't a science blog, what are the overlaps between the Venn diagram of science blogging and some other circles, and what out of all that material should be archived and preserved forever under the heading of "Science Blogging"."

We live in a complex world with diverse people, firms, and governments whose behaviors aggregate to produce novel, unexpected phenomena. We see political uprisings, market crashes, and a never ending array of social trends. How do we make sense of it?

"Reid Hoffman and Matt Cohler, two of Silicon Valley's social-networking pioneers, are throwing their hats into the education ring. The entrepreneurs-turned-venture capitalists today led a $15 million investment in Edmodo, a free learning site for teachers and students that claims almost 5 million registered users. The cash pile, from Greylock Partners and Benchmark Capital, gives the management team the runway to hire developers and add products without doing the one thing they prefer not to talk about: making money."

"'MITx' will offer courses online and make online learning tools freely available."

"The topic about whether or not it's appropriate for a student and a teacher to be friends on Facebook has been in the news a lot lately. As a matter of fact, the state of Missouri recently passed a law that makes it illegal for teachers and students to be connected on any social media site. As a parent, I can certainly understand the concern with that; however, I'd like to talk about a different aspect of students and social media today."

"A tiny number of ideas can go a long way, as we've seen. And the Internet makes that more and more likely. What's happening is that we might, in fact, be at a time in our history where we're being domesticated by these great big societal things, such as Facebook and the Internet. We're being domesticated by them, because fewer and fewer and fewer of us have to be innovators to get by. And so, in the cold calculus of evolution by natural selection, at no greater time in history than ever before, copiers are probably doing better than innovators. Because innovation is extraordinarily hard. My worry is that we could be moving in that direction, towards becoming more and more sort of docile copiers. MARK D. PAGEL is a Fellow of the Royal Society and Professor of Evolutionary Biology; Head of the Evolution Laboratory at the University of Reading; Author Oxford Encyclopaedia of Evolution; co-author of The Comparative Method in Evolutionary Biology. His forthcoming book is Wired for Culture: Origins of the Human Social Mind."

"Whether it's via the administration, the professors, or the students, serious investments in edtech are coming to major universities. Which startups are going to be called upon to help make the transition?"

"It appears that the effect of physical temperature is not just on how we see others, it affects our own behavior as well," Dr. Bargh said. "Physical warmth can make us see others as warmer people, but also cause us to be warmer - more generous and trusting - as well."

Visualizing.org is a community of creative people working to make sense of complex issues through data and design… and it's a shared space and free resource to help you achieve this goal.

Although all of our scale items collectively attempt to measure new media literacy levels, and the overall reliability of the scale was high (Chronbach's alpha=.903), we were interested in identifying the specific subcomponents that make up this concept. Our initial research question was whether the subscales of this survey instrument map well onto Jenkins' 12 NMLs. Particularly, we were interested in seeing if, as predicted, the scale would break down into components that were similar to those identified by Jenkins. 

Over the past decade or so, the Internet has become a huge source of information and education, especially for those who might be short on time, money or other resources. And it's not just crowdsourced data collections like Wikipedia or single-topic blogs that encourage individual learning; huge corporations and nonprofits are making online education and virtual classrooms a very formal affair these days.

I love the flip. I do. And I realize by saying this I'm making a controversial statement. I believe if used judiciously, in the right context, the flip can free up valuable class time and provide the background knowledge that is fundamental for students to then go forward and wrestle with higher order thinking.

Boaz Weinstein's opening move on Wall Street came as a result of chess.