Group items tagged

A quick read about the nature of presence within online learning and the usefulness of social media platforms therein.

There are some great suggestions and examples of how to use social media to increase the "social presence" element of the online classroom.

Interesting little query.

Following up on Brent's post on Justine Sacco, here is a feature story one of my students wrote last semester on public shaming at Emory. You also can go to her podcast which you might find interesting despite its length and annoying undertone of typing.

I'm sharing this slideshow from a presentation I gave last year on Facilitating Metacognition in Asynchronous Online Discussions because 1) the topic is relevant to our discussion this week, and 2) SlideShare is one of our Mashup options in Blackboard. I tested it this week and it shows up well, so wanted to demonstrate for any faculty interested. The analytics are a nice additional feature. FYI for those experimenting with social media ideas with your learners, I have also embedded SlideShare links into Tweets, and was pleasantly surprised to discover that you can view an entire slideshow in a tweet.

"Technology integration is the use of technology resources -- computers, mobile devices like smartphones and tablets, digital cameras, social media platforms and networks, software applications, the Internet, etc. -- in daily classroom practices, and in the management of a school." I found this article helpful largely because it just reiterated that we need to set educational goals and then choose technology which is helpful, not the other way round.

This article provides an overview of the benefits of a "backchannel" (such as Twitter and todaysmeet.com). It also explains ways to go about implementing Twitter into the classroom. Finally, the article touches on digital literacy (also web literacy skills). This article will be particularly useful for M4 and beyond.

This 2002 essay by Wilson and Peterson may be a bit dated, but it is one of the few broadly reflective essays I found on the anthropology of online communities. It is not a "how to" for online teaching, but I think an occasionally more critical, reflective piece can be very useful both for understanding our place in broader social processes related to online learning and in piercing through some of the enthusiastic corporate-talk through which these technologies are presented by our universities. I have included the abstract below. The URL is to the JSTOR site, which you probably need to access through your Emory account. I was not sure how to add a link here that would get you in directly, and that is something I need to follow up on with Leah. Abstract: Information and communication technologies based on the Internet have enabled the emergence of new sorts of communities and communicative practices-phenomena worthy of the attention of anthropological researchers. De- spite early assessments of the revolutionary nature of the Internet and the enormous transformations it would bring about, the changes have been less dramatic and more embedded in existing practices and power relations of everyday life. This review ex- plores researchers' questions, approaches, and insights within anthropology and some relevant related fields, and it seeks to identify promising new directions for study. The general conclusion is that the technologies comprising the Internet, and all the text and media that exist within it, are in themselves cultural products. Anthropology is thus well suited to the further investigation of these new, and not so new, phenomena.

This is about more than than her specific issue. It shows the many dangers of thoughtless texting and the potential repercussions.

I watched this unfold as it happened-such a cautionary tale, not to mention an exercise in slow-motion cringing. I like what this article has to say about the online "shaming" culture, which sometimes seems to be operating under its own inertia at this point.