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"A growing chorus of voices argue that the internet is making us dumber. Web-connected laptops, smartphones and videogame consoles have all been cast as distracting brain mushers. But there's reason to believe some of the newest devices might not erode our minds. In fact, some scientists think they could even make us smarter."

Technology alone does not guarantee successful online learning or collaboration among faculty and students. However, when you leverage it properly, technology can offer huge possibilities for improving communication and learning. This document identifies a collection of best practices for using Adobe Acrobat Connect Pro. You'll see some innovative ways to use Connect Pro in education and explore a process for successful online teaching and collaboration.

First in series of articles about the changes to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. "The exemption on the cracking of [Content Scrambling Systems] now extends to all college and university instructors, as well as students in film and media studies courses, and the permitted "educational uses" now include critical commentary and documentary production, as well as the exceptionally broad category of "non-commercial videos."

More information about the DVDs "Letting Us Rip: Our New Right to Fair Use of DVDs" http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Letting-Us-Rip-Our-New-Right/25797/

Using YouTube videos with students can be really great, but finding a video with the exact language you want and at a suitable length with too many other distractions around can be really difficult. That's why SafeShare.TV is so useful.

"Facebook isn't just a great way for you to find old friends or learn about what's happening this weekend, it is also an incredible learning tool. Teachers can utilize Facebook for class projects, for enhancing communication, and for engaging students in a manner that might not be entirely possible in traditional classroom settings. Read on to learn how you can be using Facebook in your classroom, no matter if you are a professor, student, working online, or showing up in person for class."

The article intends to simplify the different aspects of podcasting. The article covers types of podcasts; the pedagogical benefits of podcasting; the connection between theory and podcasting; answers to questions, queries, and apprehensions. Before trying out a new tool, it is important to understand why we do things the way we do. A crucial part of using any tool or technology is to understand, test, and determine the pedagogical appropriateness of it for specific context. Through the article, the author has tried to suggest some of the uses of podcasting along with the pedagogical appropriateness in different scenarios. At the end, the author has tried to (through pictorial representation) describe the podcasting community and the tasks performed by the community members. Also, through a pictorial representation, the author has provided a gist of the podcasting creation process as a producer and as a consumer.

Wiki on Diigo and why this platform should be used in higher education. Has a nice video, powerpoint presentation and how to use it in your classroom..

A site built for librarians, but has several tools that can be useful for instructors, such as a Public Domain Slider, a Section 108 Spinner, Exceptions for Instructors, and a Fair Use Evaluator.

An article publish in the Journal of Information Systems Education on how the use of Twitter in an online class can enhance social presence

"How Technology Wires the Learning Brain February 23, 2011 | 9:45 AM | By Tina Barseghian FILED UNDER: Learning Methods, Research, Neuroscience, text, video games * 9 Comments * * Share447 * Email Post * Link to this post Getty Kids between the ages of 8 and 18 spend 11.5 hours a day using technology - whether that's computers, television, mobile phones, or video games - and usually more than one at a time. That's a big chunk of their 15 or 16 waking hours. But does that spell doom for the next generation? Not necessarily, according to Dr. Gary Small, a neuroscientist and professor at UCLA, who spoke at the Learning & the Brain Conference last week."

"NEW forms of media have always caused moral panics: the printing press, newspapers, paperbacks and television were all once denounced as threats to their consumers' brainpower and moral fiber. So too with electronic technologies. PowerPoint, we're told, is reducing discourse to bullet points. Search engines lower our intelligence, encouraging us to skim on the surface of knowledge rather than dive to its depths. Twitter is shrinking our attention spans. But such panics often fail basic reality checks. When comic books were accused of turning juveniles into delinquents in the 1950s, crime was falling to record lows, just as the denunciations of video games in the 1990s coincided with the great American crime decline. The decades of television, transistor radios and rock videos were also decades in which I.Q. scores rose continuously."

While mostly focused on K-12, this article still provides some good info on Twitter use in education.

"For many people - particularly anyone over the age of 30 - the idea of describing your blow-by-blow activities in such detail is absurd. Why would you subject your friends to your daily minutiae?" This article helps those of us over 30 who have the same opinion.

A report calls for presidential initiative, research and development, and investment to boost the use of handheld digital tools in K-12.

Crowdsourcing tool. Could be used for muddiest points activity in preparation for class discussion, among other things. All students would need a Google account, though.

Collaborative tagging describes the process by which many users add metadata in the form of keywords to shared content. Recently, collaborative tagging has grown in popularity on the web, on sites that allow users to tag bookmarks, photographs and other content. In this paper we analyze the structure of collaborative tagging systems as well as their dynamical aspects. Specifically, we discovered regularities in user activity, tag frequencies, kinds of tags used, bursts of popularity in bookmarking and a remarkable stability in the relative proportions of tags within a given url. We also present a dynamical model of collaborative tagging that predicts these stable patterns and relates them to imitation and shared knowledge.

There is nothing more motivating (and exciting) as digital creativity in the classroom. How to integrate Flip Video into classroom