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Vanessa Vaile

Education and the social Web: Connective learning and the commercial imperative - 0 views

  • I argue that commercial social networks are much less about circulating knowledge than they are about connecting users (“eyeballs”) with advertisers
  • not the autonomous individual learner, but collective corporate interests that occupy the centre of these network
  • business model restricts their information design in ways that detract from learner control and educational use
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  • Just as commercialism has rendered television beyond the reach of education, commercial pressures threaten to seriously limit the potential of the social Web for education and learning.
  • Web 2.0 and online social networking have been the subject of sustained and lively interest among practitioners and promoters of educational technology
  • what is seen as the radical potential of these services
  • Social networking is so central to these new versions of education that a new “connectivist” theory of learning has come to be closely associated with them
  • a theory in which “knowing” itself is seen to be “defined by connections” making “learning primarily a network forming process”
  • described in terms of the liberation of learners from traditional constraints, as allowing them go beyond the classroom, to network “with peers worldwide,” and ultimately, to “take control of their own learning”
  • These visions are above all associated with the “personal learning environment
  • The personal learning environment is envisioned as a set of applications and services — to a large extent, logos and brands — organized around a single user, according to his or her learning and informational preferences and needs.
  • Through these services, the user is to be connected with teachers, mentors and other learners
  • some advocates of these approaches to learning have been raising concerns about the commercial nature of many of these services.
  • “You are not Facebook’s customer. You are the product that they sell to their real customers — advertisers. Forget this at your peril”
  • “This simple reality underlies almost all considerations having to do with these tools,
  • To use these tools is to reinforce, however indirectly, the ‘advertised life,’
  • The question is whether there is a role for higher education to promote ‘safe spaces’ free of this influence.”
  • the business model of commercial social networks is based on advertising, assisted by the data collection, as well as powerful tracking and analysis capabilities.
  • powerful surveillance functions
  • theories of media ideology and hegemony developed some time ago by Raymond Williams and Todd Gitlin
  • constraints presented by commercialized forms and contents rendered educational television a failure decades ago
  • similar structural issues threaten to sharply limit the potential of much newer social media for education and learning
  • Facebook, Google and other Web 2.0 and social networking services are making enormous sums right now from the users and advertisers they attract, and they are in aggressive competition to do this more efficiently
  • The absence of references to advertising (and also to tracking and analysis) in many discussions of the personal learning environments is surprising given the proliferation of logos and brands of commercial services
  • Because advertising is the raison d’être of services like Google and Facebook, it also provides the basis for the design, organization and maintenance of all of these other services and functions.
  • This way of understanding advertising and Web 2.0 draws on critiques of television (and the role of advertising in it) that were articulated decades ago.
  • the goal of these media organizations, he says, is to sell a product, and the product that “the networks sell is the attention of audiences; their primary market is the advertisers themselves”
  • One thing that is different today is that there is no one monolithic audience that forms a generic product to sell to advertisers.
  • An obvious objection to be raised at this point is that Facebook or Google, unlike television, do not have significant control over the content that is used to assemble audiences for advertisers
  • users have a clear choice regarding the kinds of content that they wish to view and disseminate
  • complex and subtle but very effective ways in which advertisers’ interests shape online social contexts.
  • Raymond Williams’ 1974 critique, Television: Technology and cultural form.
  • Williams’ text requires only minor revision to speak to the situation of commercial Web services today:
  • whether there is a role for higher education to promote ‘safe spaces’ free of this influence.”
  • Williams is making the point that the relationship between content and advertising is subtle and insidious, and that it is slightly different in the case of content “made for TV” than for its non–commercial counterpart.
  • “a dominant cultural form;”
  • what is important for the similarly non–commercial content of the social Web is informational design, architecture, and algorithm.
  • operation in otherwise non–commercial programming is registered in terms of sequence, rhythm and flow
  • Users of Facebook are sure to have been struck by the numerous and varied ways in which it cultivates gregarity and interaction, the way in which it relentlessly structures and supports sociality and connection
  • It is common to observe that the term “friend” itself is emptied of meaning by this incessant use and quantification;
  • Facebook exemplifies a way of generating and circulating information that encourages the expansion of interconnections between users
  • The controversy arises from the possible addition of a corresponding “Dislike” button.
  • lowers the psychological barrier to connecting with commercial entities
  • Gregarious behaviour is rewarded on Facebook
  • approval of a resource will draw ever more attention to it.
  • To provide the option of expressing dislike for a brand like Coca–Cola or to disapprove of a newspaper report or an article like this one is contrary to Facebook’s business interests
  • The dynamics here are rather reminiscent of what television of a bygone era had to offer: In both cases, you can either watch (i.e., “Like”) the products and lifestyles being showcased, or simply walk away.
  • “Like buttons” similar to many other connective features of social networks, “are about connection; Dislike buttons are about division.”
  • Similarly, other services will also systematically exclude possibilities for the expression of dissent and difference.
  • Despite the current prominence of social–psychological and connectivist theories, it is easy to make the case that learning is just as much about division as it is about connection.
  • In fact, the consistent pattern of suppressing division, negativity and interpersonal dissent that is central to the business model of social networking services runs counter to some of the most common models and recommendations for online student interaction and engagement.
  • Opportunities for social selectivity, discretion, privacy and detachment are an important precondition for the acts of disclosure and mutual critique, falsification and validation central to these models
  • selectivity and discretion — the “safe spaces” hoped for by Lamb and Groom — are rendered structurally impossible in convivial, commercially–contoured environments
  • Knowledge is not exclusively embodied in ever growing networks of connection and affiliation, and it does not just occur through building and traversing these proliferating nodes and links
  • Education is clearly a social process, but it is probably much closer to an ongoing discussion or debate than an extended feast or celebration with an ever-expanding network of friends.
  • advertising, tracking and analysis functions of commercial social media present, as Raymond Williams says, “a formula of communication, an intrinsic setting of priorities”
  • It only remains to be seen whether this dynamic renders commercial social networking services as fully unsupportive of educational ends as commercial television has long been.
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    In recent years, new socially‏oriented Web technologies have been portrayed as placing the learner at the centre of networks of knowledge and expertise, potentially leading to new forms of learning and education. In this paper, I argue that commercial social networks are much less about circulating knowledge than they are about connecting users ("eyeballs") with advertisers; it is not the autonomous individual learner, but collective corporate interests that occupy the centre of these networks. Looking first at Facebook, Twitter, Digg and similar services, I argue their business model restricts their information design in ways that detract from learner control and educational use. I also argue more generally that the predominant "culture" and corresponding types of content on services like those provided Google similarly privileges advertising interests at the expense of users. Just as commercialism has rendered television beyond the reach of education, commercial pressures threaten to seriously limit the potential of the social Web for education and learning.
Vanessa Vaile

The Ning Thing.docx - 0 views

  • good source for information on Ning: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ning_(website)
  • Ning was a free-form platform for the development and hosting of open-source social applications
  • Ning pricing structure is three-tiered, as explained here: http://blog.ning.com/2010/05/introducing-ning-pro-ning-plus-and-ning-mini.html
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  • ompelling affordances for group collaboration
  • Participants can sign up or sign in and set up profiles for any particular Ning, parts of which carry over to other Nings, achieving familiarity with minimal repetition of data entry
  • crucial components of many educators’ PLNs
  • Nings have c
  • Webheads in Action used to enroll participants in its free bi-annual WiAOC international online conferences in a Moodle, but for the last one, moved the community over to a Ning (http://webheadsinaction.ning.com/). This Ning now has over 350 members.
  • Because Nings were free and robust for collaboration, they were an ideal tool for educators seeking to jump-start communities on little or no funding.
  • Alec Couros sees this kind of thing happening more and more in the crystal ball future and suggests that schools and educators would be better off investing in self-hosting using FOSS, free and open source software (Couros, 2010).
  • general consternation
  • a number of issues
  • One is for how long Internet users can expect free services
  • other side of the coin is the nature of teaching, where hard-pressed teachers with little time and less budget tend to cobble together whatever resources they can muster
  • Monetization is rarely a consideration for teachers and educational technology specialists
  • , whose main aim is to find platforms that will support learning through sharing.
  • The immediate concern following an announcement such at the one issued by Ning April 16 is simply preservation of content stored at the free site
  • sponsorship is available only for “Ning Networks focused on North American K-12 and Higher-Ed ... including Ning Networks that facilitate learning in a classroom, best practices, educator-to-educator collaboration, or parental support,”
  • Pearson, who have offered to sponsor Nings for educators at the Mini level, the lowest level of Ning
  • almost all continents on the planet are excluded from the deal
  • Kevin Hodgson has been writing some interesting posts about the Ning thing.
  • the only reliable alternative to Ning is to host your community yourself, or at a trusted institution
  • http://tinyurl.com/alternatives2ning).  This document remains the most comprehensive source of advice on what to do about replacing Ning that exists anywhere on the Internet
  • Alec Couros (2010) decided to crowdsource some answers
  • back up your Ning
  • there are a number of sites offering Ning-like look and feel which will (attempt to) import your content, or some of your content, from Ning
  • Grou.ps
  • Grouply
  • designed to work as a social-network portal for Yahoo and Google Groups.
  • see: http://webheads.grouply.com/
  • A tool that works well for capturing blog content is Posterous
  • Spruz
  • Wackwall
  • Good and Bazzano (2010) have a good rundown of many of the options listed here
  • another free site that lets you set up a Portal with features similar to those of Ning.
  • another social networking portal which will do much the same thing
  • Other sites encourage you to restart your community afresh
  • Stevens, V. (2010). The Ning thing. TESL-EJ, Volume 14, Number 1. Retrieved on today’s date from http://www.tesl-ej.org/wordpress/issues/volume14/ej53/ej53int/.
  • Posterous Targets Ning
  • Siemens, G. (2004). Connectivism: A Learning theory for the digital age. Elearnspace. Retrieved June 27, 2010 from http://www.elearnspace.org/Articles/connectivism.htm.
  • Good, R. and Bazzano, D. (2010). Ning Alternatives: Guide To The Best Social Networking Platforms And Online Group Services. MasterNewMedia May 3rd, 2010. Retrieved June 27, 2010 from http://www.masternewmedia.org/ning-alternatives-guide-to-the-best-social-networking-platforms-and-online-group-services/.
  • If you wish to write anonymously on a Ning thing document, you can do so at Alec Couros’s crowdsourced Google Doc here: http://tinyurl.com/alternatives2ning
  • Multiliteracies
Vanessa Vaile

Opinion: Internet and Education -- Back to the Future - AOL News - 0 views

  • The education industry, like so many others, is busy being transformed by the Internet.
  • he best possible system of education actually existed thousands of years ago. And what the Internet can help us do is go back to it, with one important modern twist: scale.
  • individual relationship between an enlightened tutor and an eager student
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  • there simply aren't enough expert teachers with enough time to bring every child along
  • If the 21th century is to be a time of progress, education must continue to expand. This makes it even more difficult to provide individual instruction for all the world's students.
  • That's the promise of the Internet, which excels above all else at scale: scale of information, social interactions, geographic reach.
  • The acid test I apply to every new initiative is: to what extent does it bring us closer to the old system of individualized, personal, expert instruction, except with scale?
  • Online tutoring is an example of a promising Internet-driven innovation. Companies like TutorVista and Smarthinking let hundreds of thousands of students get on-demand personal help in their homes at a reasonable cost.
  • online systems that can "diagnose" individual students' strengths and weaknesses and dynamically generate a tailored curriculum.
  • Other innovations lie somewhere in between the two
  • It's important to remember that many of the most important education innovations lie outside the Internet.
  • But the Internet will also disrupt. Textbooks, for example, can't continue in their present form
  • two principles: first, invest in Internet innovations that bring us closer to the vision of universal, personalized instruction; and second, champion those designed to complement, rather than replace, traditional academic institutions.
TESOL CALL-IS

educational-origami - home - 0 views

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    "Educational Origami is a blog and a wiki, about 21st Century Teaching and Learning. "This wiki is not just about the integration of technology into the classroom, though this is certainly a critical area, it is about shifting our educational paradigm. The world is not as simple as saying teachers are digital immigrants and students digital natives. In fact, we know that exposure to technology changes the brains of those exposed to it. The longer and stronger the exposure and the more intense the emotions the use of the technology or its content evokes, the more profound the change. This technology is increasingly ubiquitous. We have to change how we teach, how we assess, what we teach, when we teach it, where we are teaching it, and with what." A most interesting site that tells us what the learner needs to know. [Thanks to Bee Dieu.]
Maria Rosario Di Mónaco

The Educator's PLN - The personal learning network for educators - 0 views

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    Personal learning network for educators
Maria Rosario Di Mónaco

Education Week: Cyber Students Taught the Value of Social Skills - 0 views

  • Socialization of students is education in itself,”
  • Many cyber schools regularly use social-networking tools in their online classes and are also moving to incorporate some face-to-face interaction into their classes
  • The ubiquitous use of tools such as Skype, a free Web-based videoconferencing service, and webcams let students see their peers and their teachers, even in cyberspace.
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  • Polling of parents often shows that socialization is a key concern
  • “The Big Think” as an alternative to Facebook, the popular social-networking site that causes angst for many brick-and-mortar schools over online bullying that can spill over from the site into school hallways. The Big Think is a closed social-networking site open only to K12 Inc., students and their parents
  • cyber students were rated significantly higher by both parents and students themselves in various areas of social skills, though teacher ratings for those students did not differ significantly from those for students in traditional public schools. Problem behaviors among online students, as rated by the parents, teachers, and students themselves, were either significantly lower or not significantly different when compared with national norms.
  • The quality of the online program is a factor in socialization, as is the type of student enrolling, she said
  • For a student already lacking in socialization in a traditional school setting, online education could be even more isolating. And for low-achieving students taking online classes, Ms. Minke said, families may not be as involved as they need to be to ensure their children are “academically progressing and to monitor their social development.”
  • From a larger, societal perspective, she said, online students may not be exposed to the diverse viewpoints or communities they might see in a regular school.
  • I’d worry that [online students] might not have the diversity of positive adult role models.”
  • Adding a layer of socialization to cyber school can make the difference in a student’s experience.
  • “This gives them the opportunity to collaborate on their work or mingle and become more invested in the educational process,
  • “We want to build a student-student relationship as well as a relationship with a teacher,”
TESOL CALL-IS

Wikidot in Education - Wikidot - Free and Pro Wiki Hosting - 0 views

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    "Are you a researcher, teacher or lecturer? With your Wiki For Education you can easily co-operate with your students." This looks like a full featured wiki that has good features for educators.
Vanessa Vaile

Blog U.: Reforming Higher Education: To What End? - University of Venus - Inside Higher Ed - 0 views

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    column by Lee Skellerup Bessette on problems of change in higher ed, educators vs accountability by analytics & design by algorithm
Vanessa Vaile

Personal Learning Environment (PLE) Project - 0 views

shared by Vanessa Vaile on 03 Jun 10 - Cached
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    The National Research Council of Canada's Institute for Information Technology (Learning and Collaborative Group) has started a research and development project exploring the Personal Learning Environment. The project researches how new technologies can be used in a personalized informal learning environment and focuses on two dimensions. The first dimension is the pedagogical: given the new affordances offered by web technologies, how can access to a wide variety of learning opportunities best be managed in an online environment? The second dimension is technical. Given a set of desired types of connections, what technologies can be assembled to best provide seamless access to a large variety of educational resources and services? Existing learning management technology (such as the Learning Management System) is centered on the institution that owns and operates it as enterprise software. With the increase of lifelong and student-centered learning, individuals are more frequently enrolling in learning opportunities from multiple institutions and have a need to manage their learning through an entire career. Thus there is a need for a type of application that is centered on the learner and would constitute the person's personal learning record, portfolio, business and educational contacts, communications and creativity tools, library and resource subscription management, and related services.
Vanessa Vaile

Join the Digital Debate Here - 0 views

  • We've heard lots of talk about the revolutionary nature of Web 2.0, the conversion of whole populations from passive receivers of information (and propaganda) into active citizens and critical consumers and content-creators. Skeptics don't buy it, at least not all of it.
  • "The Future of Education: Charting the Course of Teaching and Learning in a Networked World."
  • orum hosted by Steve Hargadon
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  • various discussions and controversies over the Digital Age
  • Host and guest can see the feedback unfold and respond during the chat. Then, Hargadon opens the discussion to everybody,
  • The project is an excellent specimen of the best kind of intellectual engagement, which wouldn't be possible without digital technology.
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    Mark Bauerlein, Brainstorm column- The Chronicle of Higher Education
jennifer verschoor

Share More! Wiki » Anthology/Diigo the Web for Education - From TeleGatherer ... - 0 views

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    "Diigo the Web for Education - From TeleGatherer to TelePlanter with Diigo"
TESOL CALL-IS

MAKE BELIEFS COMIX! Online Educational Comic Generator for Kids of All Ages - 1 views

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    Children create their own comic strip using characters provided from database. Not specifically for ESL/EFL, but is a nice writing activity, and can be in any of several European languages. William Zimmerman has created a page with his handouts from a workshop, "Creating Comic Strips Online to Encourage Writing, Reading and Storytelling," at the TESOL Denver 2009 conference, at http://www.makebeli efscomix. com/How-to- Play/Educators --EHS
Vanessa Vaile

Learning with 'e's: Physiology of a PLE - 0 views

  • functionality of PLEs - the physiology if you will - what is it that learners need from their PLEs?
  • the three main functionalities
  • functionality is exclusive to the personal web tools (PWTs)
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  • creation, organisation and sharing of content to a wider range of practices including analogue content, such as newspapers and magazines, realia (visits, real experiences, encounters, conversations) and other non-digital materials.
  • A fourth component, communication - which includes sharing, discussion and dialogue in both synchronous and asynchronous modes, can be represented as an overarching circle within the Venn diagram.
  • key functions of the PLE (Personal Web Tools component) can be managed through a number of tools, and learners each have their individual preferences, all of which ensures that each PLE will be unique to that individual learner.
  • many are interchangable for different tasks and purposes.
  • Note that the e-portfolio sits across all functionalities, and is the most likely tool to be provided by the institution
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    or what it does for users / learners (who probably won't be a uniform bunch) ... no doubt I expect different things from mine than the average TESOL workshopper or even generic educator. 
Vanessa Vaile

The Multiliteracy Project - 0 views

  • esponsibility to not only educate the minds, but also the hearts of my students
  • I want my students to look at knowledge in a connected and ethical way
  • personal self-understanding on an intellectual and emotional level
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  • higher level thinking skills
  • encourage students to attain greater self-understanding
  • The Multiliteracy Project is a national Canadian study exploring pedagogies or teaching practices that prepare children for the literacy challenges of our globalized, networked, culturally diverse world. Increasingly, we encounter knowledge in multiple forms - in print, in images, in video, in combinations of forms in digital contexts - and are asked to represent our knowledge in an equally complex manner.
  • ighlight two related aspects of the increasing complexity of texts
  • (a) the proliferation of multimodal ways of making meaning where the written word is increasingly part and parcel of visual, audio, and spatial patterns; (b) the increasing salience of cultural and linguistic diversity characterized by local diversity and global connectedness .
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    A research collaboration of students, educators and researchers
Vanessa Vaile

Twitter as a Personal Learning Network (PLN) | - 0 views

  • Personal Learning Networks are all the rage at the moment. As with a lot of “modern” things, they’re existed for a long time but have now got a snappy new name.
  • these people are, in Web 2.0-speak, friends.
  • A PLN can take advantage of lots of different services – Facebook is perhaps the best-known, Ning is also very popular
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  • David Carr, writing in the New York Times has written an excellent article describing the growing impact of Twitter and explaining why it is set to become part of the infrastructure of the Internet.
  • If you’re interested in what’s new in your field, then Twitter is a great place to start.
  • When it comes to finding a tool to get a job done Twitter is without equal – Prezi, Animoto, Wallwisher, Glogster Edu, Dropbox – I got the tip about all of them first on Twitter
  • If you’re looking to integrate the Internet into your teaching, then your first port of call on Twitter is #edtech.
  • real-time search of posts about educational technology
  • The hashtag (#) is used by Twitter as a filter and will take you directly to current posts about that topic
  • the jewel in Twitter’s crown for educators is #edchat.
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    from What's New in the World? Blog and Podcasts for ELT professionals
TESOL CALL-IS

Open for Learning: The CMS and the Open Learning Network | in education - 0 views

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    "Abstract: The course management system (CMS) reinforces the status quo and hinders substantial teaching and learning innovation in higher education. It does so by imposing artificial time limits on learner access to course content and other learners, privileging the role of the instructor at the expense of the learner, and limiting the power of the network effect in the learning process. The open learning network (OLN)-a hybrid of the CMS and the personal learning environment (PLE)-is proposed as an alternative learning technology environment with the potential to leverage the affordances of the Web to dramatically improve learning. Author Name(s): Jon Mott David Wiley"
Beatriz Lupiano

A Peek for a Week: Inside a Kiwi Junior Classroom - K12 Online Conference - 1 views

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    A New Zeland teacher shows how she uses technology in her class of 6-year-olds .Great video and great example of technology integrated in education!
Vanessa Vaile

Academics and Social Media: #mla09 and Twitter - ProfHacker - The Chronicle of Higher E... - 1 views

  • One category of informal gatherings this year was the “Tweetup” — a meeting of convention attendees who happened to be using the micro-blogging social media tool Twitter.
  • What makes this development significant is the (still, unfortunately) marginal and somewhat disreputable status of social media in academia:
  • via our own Twitter account, ProfHacker solicited answers to the following question: “How did Twitter affect (positively or negatively) your experience of #MLA09?”
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  • In the second, the commenter chose to address a different social media tool: the English Job Search Wiki.
  • one new internet phenomenon that does prove useful — for people on both the hiring and applying ends of the job market — is the English Job Search Wiki.
  • Now that I see the power of Twitter for communicating with MLA members, convention attendees, and other interested people, I will think about more ways the MLA can promote conversations that extend well beyond the walls of the cities in which we meet.
  • But buried within the sense that the 140-character form trivializes our work — a complaint about condensation that might not be so far removed from faulting poetry for its failure to present extended realist narratives — is an implied concern about who it is that sees us being trivial.
  • a key form of outreach
  • not just to our colleagues but to the broader intellectual public, and to those whom we need to support higher education
  • until we get over our fears of talking with the broader culture, in the forms that we share with them, we’ll never manage to convince them that what we do is important.
  • Because of the network I created for myself on Twitter, I was able to sit in a packed conference room, listening to a panel full of people I already knew (in a virtual space, who later became people I knew in meatspace) talk to a room full of people I already knew, about issues I understood were directly affecting those real people. Twitter made my conference experience much more real.
  • The year’s lesson in twittering at conferences, for me, is that context is all. We’re still figuring out how media that are at once synchronous and asynchronous, and audiences that are at once present and absent, fit into our comfortable conference-going habits.
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