Group items tagged

witter gives us many ways to find relevant conversations. There are a range of searches, lists, groups, hashtags and apps to help us navigate to the people and the comments that need our attention. For most brands, the simple ‘following’ mechanism (great for personal users) is just too clumsy a tool to have much meaning or utility in itself, so more nuanced forms of listening have to take place. To judge an account by a ‘following’ number is to draw conclusions about the ways a person or brand uses Twitter to listen.

The problem, of course, is that those students represent the precise group MOOCs are meant to serve. “MOOCs were supposed to be the device that would bring higher education to the masses,” Jonathan Rees noted. “However, the masses at San Jose State don’t appear to be ready for the commodified, impersonal higher education that MOOCs offer.” Thrun’s cavalier disregard for the SJSU students reveals his true vision of the target audience for MOOCs: students from the posh suburbs, with 10 tablets apiece and no challenges whatsoever—that is, the exact people who already have access to expensive higher education. It is more than galling that Thrun blames students for the failure of a medium that was invented to serve them, instead of blaming the medium that, in the storied history of the “correspondence” course (“TV/VCR repair”!), has never worked. For him, MOOCs don’t fail to educate the less privileged because the massive online model is itself a poor tool. No, apparently students fail MOOCs because those students have the gall to be poor, so let’s give up on them and move on to the corporate world, where we don’t have to be accountable to the hoi polloi anymore, or even have to look at them, because gross.

SG_Debug && SG_Debug.pagedebug && window.console && console.log && console.log('[' + (new Date()-SG_Debug.initialTime)/1000 + ']' + ' Bottom of header.jsp'); SlateEducationGetting schooled.Nov. 19 2013 11:43 AM The King of MOOCs Abdicates the Throne 7.3k 1.2k 101 Sebastian Thrun and Udacity’s “pivot” toward corporate training. By Rebecca Schuman &nbsp; Sebastian Thrun speaks during the Digital Life Design conference on Jan. 23, 2012, in Munich. Photo by Johannes Simon/Getty Images requirejs(["jquery"], function($) { if ($(window).width() < 640) { $(".slate_image figure").width("100%"); } }); Sebastian Thrun, godfather of the massive open online course, has quietly spread a plastic tarp on the floor, nudged his most famous educational invention into the center, and is about to pull the trigger. Thrun—former Stanford superprofessor, Silicon Valley demigod, and now CEO of online-course purveyor Udacity—just admitted to Fast Company’s openly smitten Max Chafkin that his company’s courses are often a “lousy product.” Rebecca Schuman Rebecca Schuman is an education columnist for Slate. Follow This is quite a “pivot” from the Sebastian Thrun, who less than two years ago crowed to Wired that the unstemmable tide of free online education would leave a mere 10 purveyors of higher learning in its wake, one of which would be Udacity. However, on the heels of the embarrassing failure of a loudly hyped partnership with San Jose State University, the “lousiness” of the product seems to have become apparent. The failures of massive online education come as no shock to those of us who actually educate students by being in the same room wit

nd why the answer is not the MOOC, but the tiny, for-credit, in-person seminar that has neither a sexy acronym nor a potential for huge corporate partnerships.

How you gain followers

How you engage with followers – will you be producing content which can spark discussion, or will you be curating content? You should consider too how many times you post a promotional post as opposed to an educational/fun one. We’re so accustomed to marketing messages now that these go right over the heads of our followers if they’re posted too often, so do bear this in mind.

What tools you’ll use to measure engagement and track customers

Next to the clicks on the links I share in social media, shares (or retweets) of my updates is the second most important metric I monitor (depending on what I am working on, it can be the most important metric). Isn’t that what we are all looking for? Shares by others give my posts and content an additional audience. Posts getting viral (meaning an endless number of people share our post) is the ultimate success in social media – or isn’t it?

One of the basic metrics to show success of a Blog, a Tweet or a Facebook post is the number of retweets or shares the post gets. If you want to grow in social media, you have to get yourself and your content in front of a larger audience. One legitimate way to achieve this success is to get your content shared by third parties. Otherwise you will always and forever be talking to yourself and already existing friends and family.