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n recent years mobile communication has emerged as a new channel for political discourse among close friends and family members. While some celebrate new possibilities for political life, others are concerned that intensive use of the technology can lead to small, insular networks of like-minded individuals with harmful effects on civil society. Drawing from a representative sample of adults in the U.S., this study examined how mobile-mediated discourse with close ties interacts with social network characteristics to predict levels of political participation and political openness. Findings revealed that use of the technology for discussing politics and public affairs with close network ties is positively associated with both political participation and openness, but that these relationships are moderated by the size and heterogeneity of one's network. Notably, levels of participation and openness decline with increased use of the technology in small networks of like-minded individuals. However, these trends are reversed under certain network conditions, showing the role of mobile communication in civil society is highly dependent upon the social context of its use.

What This Blog is About In one phrase: Building Engaging Learning Experiences through Instructional Design and E-Learning I'm an instructional designer developing online learning, so that's primarily what I write about. * Instructional Design: This is what I do all day, and I'm always trying to learn how to do it better. * Higher Ed: The courses I create are graduate courses, so I'm interested in higher education. * K-12 Education: The participants in those courses are mostly K-12 educators, so I'm interested in what's important to my audience too. * Corporate E-Learning: Even though I'm in education, I know I can learn a lot from corporate e-learning. Besides, I'm employed by a for-profit company. * Lifelong Learning: It didn't start out to be a goal for my blog, but I've discovered that these tools help my own lifelong learning. I write about my discoveries: what works, what doesn't, what I'm thinking. * Technology: I write about technology, especially as it overlaps with any of the above areas. * Bookmarks: The Daily Bookmarks Posts are resources I find interesting or useful. You can view and search the complete list of bookmarks on Diigo or del.icio.us. On my Post Series and Recurring Themes page, I've collected some popular topics. This includes my liveblogged posts from the TCC 2008 conference and my series on instructional design careers. The top posts in the sidebar to the right are another great place to start reading.

In a 1999 presentation for the Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies, Professor Frank Chalk noted five circumstances that would allow the maximum intensity of a media-driven response to a crisis: 1. the introduction of a new medium of communication, such as radio [or Twitter]; 2. the use of a completely new style of communication; 3. the wide-spread perception that a crisis exists; 4. a public with little knowledge of the situation from other sources of information, and 5. a deep-seated habit of obeying authority among the target audience. All of these circumstances pertain to the promulgation of the genocide in Rwanda in 1994 and many of them are found in other cases of genocide and genocidal killings, as well. It's easy to see how well this model applies to the Iranian situation, too. This shouldn't be read as an indictment of social networking technologies in general, or of Twitter in particular. As I said at the outset, I'm thrilled at how critical this technology has been to the viability and potential success of the pro-democracy demonstrations. As the cat-and-mouse game around proxy servers further suggests, the only way for a state to entirely cut off the use of these kinds of tools is to kill its own information networks, blinding itself and effectively removing itself from the global economy. What I'm arguing, however, is that we shouldn't see the positive political successes of emerging social tools as being the sole model. We should be aware that, as these tools proliferate, they will inevitably be used for far more deadly goals.

This presentation highlights academia's reluctance to embrace new technology.

This presentation highlights academia's reluctance to embrace new technology. It is presented in a funny but straightforward presentation.

This case study describes the design and implementation of a foundations of educational technology course with the support of a web-based application known as Drupal. Drupal is a powerful free and open source web application framework in which one can use wikis, blogs, groups, and other tools to support the classroom learning experiences of students. In this course, distance masters students used these tools to build their own wiki-based knowledge base about the field of educational technology.

Rheingold recounts how the development of communication technology has removed the power top transmit messages from a tiny elite, and had been a force for democratization. Following Benkler's idea of peer production he explains how the diffusion of many-to-many communication technologies enables new forms of collective action.

The nature of the academic lecture has changed with the introduction of wi-fi and cellular technologies. Interacting with personal screens during a lecture or other live event has become commonplace and, as a result, the economy of attention that defines these situations has changed. Is it possible to pay attention when sending a text message or surfing the web? For that matter, does distraction always detract from the learning that takes place in these environments? In this article, we ask questions concerning the texture and shape of this emerging economy of attention. We do not take a position on the efficiency of new technologies for delivering educational content or their efficacy of competing for users' time and attention. Instead, we argue that the emerging social media provide new methods for choreographing attention in line with the performative conventions of any given situation. Rather than banning laptops and phones from the lecture hall and the classroom, we aim to ask what precisely they have on offer for these settings understood as performative sites, as well as for a culture that equates individual attentional behavior with intellectual and moral aptitude.

This paper explores the potential of artificial intelligent (AI) systems in the university's core functions of teaching, learning and knowledge nexus, against the background of rapid technological change, globalisation and challenges facing universities to respond to societies' needs in the knowledge age. As knowledge and innovation will drive competitive economic advantage in increasingly Internet defined infrastructures, a new university paradigm is needed where telecommunications and computers replace roads, buildings and transport technology that underpinned the industrial university that operated in the industrial age. As the Internet a global communication tool continues to impact on all human activities and enterprise changing the way we shop, bank, do business, entertain ourselves, communicate and think, it is radically changing how, when and what we learn. This paper introduces the idea of a HyperClass based on HyperReality, an advanced form of distributed virtual reality where physical reality and virtual reality, and human intelligence and artificial intelligence intermesh and interact to provide anyone, anywhere, anytime learning, in which teaching could be done by Just in Time Artificially Intelligent Tutors (JITAITs) that will pop up when needed, whilst students use avatars -online simulacra of themselves - to interact as telepresences in classes from different countries and locations.

Since then, the idea of the 'digital native' has gained a lot of traction and, like many memes, has evolved into a set of assumptions about what makes one person a digital native and another person a digital immigrant. I have heard the term used in all sorts of contexts, from business to media, and often it's used in a discussions about how "We must hire more digital natives", (where "we" is the company or organisation that the speaker represents), "Digital natives will change everything", or "Digital natives will expect us to use social software".\n\nBut what is a digital native? How can we tell one when we see one? For many, the assumptions about what makes a person a digital native revolve around age: The "net generation" are all digital natives because they have grown up with technology embedded so firmly in their lives that they barely recognise it as tech.\n\nThis assumption, that a given generation is automatically imbued with a natural understanding of technology in general and the web in particular, is wrong. I have spoken to many an undergraduate class, as has Kevin, made up primarily of people who did not have an interest in the web at all, who distrust it, feel it has no place in their work (and sometimes personal) lives. There is a tendency amongst each generation to believe that the generations that come afterwards are in some way fundamentally different, and it seems to be a natural part of being human to dissociate oneself from younger generations. Maybe that is why we name each generation, from Baby Boomers to Gen X to the Net Generation, so that we can talk about them as if they are 'other' to us. Is not 'digital natives' just another way to achieve that?

Something has been happening lately in education, and the implications are a bit unsettling. People are beginning to ask a cogent question, but I fear it's being framed for the wrong reason. I'm hearing more and more important decision makers asking, "Why are we using technology?"\n\nThe question itself isn't inherently problematic. In fact, it's quite an excellent question that should be asked every time we create a student learning experience, but it should be asked as a pedagogical inquisition rather than the way it's being framed in too many districts as of late.\n

The key features of 21st Century Pedagogy are:\n\n * building technological, information and media fluencies[Ian Jukes]\n * Developing thinking skills\n * making use of project based learning\n * using problem solving as a teaching tool\n * using 21st C assessments with timely, appropriate and detailed feedback and reflection\n * It is collaborative in nature and uses enabling and empowering technologies\n * It fosters Contextual learning bridging the disciplines and curriculum areas\n

What This Blog is About In one phrase: Building Engaging Learning Experiences through Instructional Design and E-Learning I'm an instructional designer developing online learning, so that's primarily what I write about. * Instructional Design: This is what I do all day, and I'm always trying to learn how to do it better. * Higher Ed: The courses I create are graduate courses, so I'm interested in higher education. * K-12 Education: The participants in those courses are mostly K-12 educators, so I'm interested in what's important to my audience too. * Corporate E-Learning: Even though I'm in education, I know I can learn a lot from corporate e-learning. Besides, I'm employed by a for-profit company. * Lifelong Learning: It didn't start out to be a goal for my blog, but I've discovered that these tools help my own lifelong learning. I write about my discoveries: what works, what doesn't, what I'm thinking. * Technology: I write about technology, especially as it overlaps with any of the above areas. * Bookmarks: The Daily Bookmarks Posts are resources I find interesting or useful. You can view and search the complete list of bookmarks on Diigo or del.icio.us. On my Post Series and Recurring Themes page, I've collected some popular topics. This includes my liveblogged posts from the TCC 2008 conference and my series on instructional design careers. The top posts in the sidebar to the right are another great place to start reading.

Tools and technologies

Tools and technologies for those who are a bit more techno-savvy

Provides an interactive technology integration matrix for K-12 students. Some processes can be applied to college-level students.

Gates: U.S. ed has no choice but to improve Microsoft co-founder said education is the field that has changed the least with technology

Do you shoot video with your cell phone, digital camera, or other handheld device? Then the chances are good that you have shaky, dark, noisy, pixilated, or blurry videos. Less-than-ideal videos that obscure your life's best, captured moments. But those moments don't have to be lost to common video problems any more. vReveal has the advanced enhancement technology and "one click" touch-up tools that make it easy to dramatically improve the quality of flawed videos

Most mobile devices in Africa only have voice and SMS capabilities, and so we are focusing our technological efforts in that continent on SMS. Today, we are announcing Google SMS, a suite of mobile applications which will allow people to access information, via SMS, on a diverse number of topics including health and agriculture tips, news, local weather, sports, and more. The suite also includes Google Trader, a SMS-based "marketplace" application that helps buyers and sellers find each other. People can find, "sell" or "buy" any type of product or service, from used cars and mobile phones to crops, livestock and jobs. We are particularly excited about Google SMS Tips, an SMS-based query-and-answer service that enables a mobile phone user to have a web search-like experience. You enter a free form text query, and Google's algorithms restructure the query to identify keywords, search a database to identify relevant answers, and return the most relevant answer.

Christine Peterson, VP of the Foresight Institute, coined the term "open source" in the late 1990s. She now proposes that this concept of peer-based collaboration and sharing can be applied to another emerging technology - sensors. See Also * h+ Magazine Current Issue * Search (and Destroy) Engines * Not So Quiet on the Cyber Front * Hacking The Economy "The intent of the project is to take advantage of advances in sensing to improve both security and the environment, while preserving - even strengthening - privacy, freedom, and civil liberties," says Peterson in a recent press release. h+ Magazine spoke with Ms. Peterson about this open-source style project, known as the Open Source Sensing initiative.

Like many, I have been inspired and excited by the spectacular case studies. Yet when I interview children, or in my survey, I was far more struck by how many use the internet in a far more mundane manner, underusing its potential hugely, and often unexcited by what it could do. It was this that led me to urge that we see children's literacy in the context of technological affordances and legibilities. But it also shows to me the value of combining and contrasting insights from qualitative and quantitative work. The spectacular cases, of course, point out what could be the future for many children. The mundane realities, however, force the question - whose fault is it that many children don't use the internet in ways that we, or they, consider very exciting or demanding? It also forces the question, what can be done, something I attend to throughout the book, as I'm keen that we don't fall back into a disappointment that blames children themselves.

StudyNet - University of Hertfordshire's Learning Environment