This looks good -- clickable links, favicons, maybe graphics -- my account is howardrheingold\n\nMindomo is a versatile Web-based mind mapping tool, delivering the capabilities of desktop mind mapping software in a Web browser - with no complex software to install or maintain.\n\nCreate, edit mind maps, and share them with your colleagues or your friends.

Professors are beginning to use Twitter at academic conferences to share proceedings with absent colleagues and to create an online "backchannel" for attendees, but the tool can also be distracting and detract from face-to-face communication at events.\n\nThose were the basic findings of a survey of academics at five recent conferences, in research presented this month at the annual EduMedia Conference in Salzburg, Austria. The paper is titled "How People Are Using Twitter During Conferences."

Citizen Journalism has put democracy back in people's hands. An army of individuals with mobile phones, portable cameras, and blogs is rapidly replacing traditional media as a reliable and wide-ranging source of information. In this milestone report, Chris Willis and Shayne Bowman were among the first to try to explain what citizen journalism really is and why this bottom-up distribution approach could be the future of news.

TinyChat, the simple, free web-based chat room we wrote about here, is now adding video conferencing and screen sharing to its list of features.\n\nOnce you create a chat room on TinyChat's site, TinyChat will generate a unique URL that you can share with whoever you choose to invite to the virtual chat room. When users click on the link, they will enter the interface and will be able to input messages, change their usernames and enable video and audio conferencing. Powered by Adobe Flash, the video conferencing feature allows up to 12 different users in the chat room

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.

Howard Rheingold, who teaches at the University of California-Berkeley and Stanford University, was an early adopter of Twitter and often turns to it for teaching advice. He explains to his digital journalism students how to use the site to establish a network of sources and, using tweets, how to entice those sources to follow them in return. In his social media course, he has his students employ Twitter for what he describes as "student-to-teacher-to-student ambient office hours."

\nWelcome!\n\nWelcome to the new BC gateway to Open Educational Resources.\n\nHere you will find FREE TO USE learning resources that you can use to supplement your own course materials or learning. Some of these are from BC-based projects while others are from Open Educational Resource projects from around the world.

\n \nProtected\ntitle.jpg\nTable of Contents\nWelcome to the 21st Century\nStarter Sheets\nBloom's Taxonomy\nLearning styles and ICT\nICT integration and Management\nManaging Complex Change\nWeb 2.0 and other tools\nEducational Origami is a blog , and a wiki, about the integration of ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) into the classroom,

The purpose of this essay is to introduce the instructor to critical thinking and to suggest means of applying it in the classroom. As such, it is not a teaching document; it does not pause and repeat nor stimulate learning with examples and exercises. Rather, its purpose is to provide an overview of the field and to suggest a common terminology. A list of references is provided for those desiring more detailed study.

Course description for JOMC 449 - Virtual Communities, Smart Mobs, Citizen Journalism and Participatory Culture\nFall 2009 MW 3:30 - 4:45\nUNC Chapel Hill\nInstructor: Paul Jones\n\nYes, I am goofing quite a bit throughout, but the content is serious as the course will be.

Party planners know that scrunching a bunch of people into a small space will result in plenty of mingling and discourse.\n\nA new study suggests this was as true for our ancestors as it is for us today, and that ancient social networking led to a renaissance of new ideas that helped make us human.\n\nThe research, which is published in the June 5 issue of the journal Science, suggests that tens of thousands of years ago, as human population density increased so did the transmission of ideas and skills. The result: the emergence of more and more clever innovations.\n\n

How to Teach a Child to Argue\n \nWhy would any sane parent teach his kids to talk back? Because, this father found, it actually increased family harmony.\n

Did Biz Stone, Evan Williams, Jack Dorsey or even Mark Zuckerberg ever portend that their means of connecting among social circles would be the news du jour in many newsrooms across the country? Social networking sites are some of the newest tools for reporters to use in news gathering, networking and promoting their work. But many newsrooms are fuzzy on the usage.

A new service launched today called TweetNewz which allows you to bring your news, rss feeds, and even your google reader subscriptions to your desktop as a news ticker, share with others, and find out what others are saying.

This study discusses several central roles that the Internet and mobile phones play in college students' daily lives. Focus group interviews at a U.S. and a Norwegian university generated a wide variety of concerns and experiences. Three themes stand out - social connectivity, multitasking, and social control. The informants were seemingly involved in constant conversations with their friends and families. Also, there was a high degree of multi-tasking, involving several activities or media at the same time. E-mail and instant messaging supported near-continuous contact. Their constant multi-tasking could reflect a feeling that they need to be busy, but also an acquired proficiency to handle multiple simultaneous media tasks. For many of our interviewees the mobile phone was used for daily conversations and text messages as much as could be afforded. New media seem to be an integrated part of these people's lives. The thought of being without their mobile phones created feelings of anxiety for some, and their use of these media for maintaining connectivity constituted some new forms of control, even of themselves.

I located a couple of interesting examples of people using networks as a grassroots tool to help stakeholders develop analysis of the power networks they are embedded in as a strategy tool. Also great to see such a low-tech solution.\n\nThe NetMap toolkit developed for IFPRI by Eva Schiffer makes use of boardgame-like tokens which can be used to represent the various actors, their relative power, positioning, and modes of power. Relationships (drawn as lines on paper) and positioning are determined by participants as part of the discussion. The resulting maps are recorded by the researcher. (Why do I waste my time writing software? ;-)

In an era where we have nearly unlimited amounts of information, one of the key issues is how to separate the good from the bad, the reliable from the unreliable, the trustworthy from the untrustworthy, the useful from the irrelevant. Unless we get this right, the emerging diverse media ecosystem won't work well, if at all.\n\nI've long believed that we'll need to find ways to combine popularity - a valuable metric in itself - with reputation. This sounds easier than it is, because reputation is an enormously complex problem. But whoever gets this right is going to be a huge winner in the marketplace.

New York University professor and PressThink blogger Jay Rosen answered questions and gave advice about how to teach blogging in this week's Poynter educators chat.

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?

The rise of online media has helped raise a new generation of college students who write far more, and in more-diverse forms, than their predecessors did. But the implications of the shift are hotly debated, both for the future of students' writing and for the college curriculum.\n\nSome scholars say that this new writing is more engaged and more connected to an audience, and that colleges should encourage students to bring lessons from that writing into the classroom. Others argue that tweets and blog posts enforce bad writing habits and have little relevance to the kind of sustained, focused argument that academic work demands.\n\nA new generation of longitudinal studies, which track large numbers of students over several years, is attempting to settle this argument. The "Stanford Study of Writing," a five-year study of the writing lives of Stanford students - including Mr. Otuteye - is probably the most extensive to date.