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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.
Mariel Amez

The Monitor Hypothesis : Facebook and I - 0 views

  • Facebook is a social place and they should use it for social purposes. It's THEIR place, THEIR space, THEIR party
  • they need to have a place to vent their exasperation about education (how telling is that!) in desperate messages in which they complain how much studying sucks
TESOL CALL-IS

How to use Keek from R. Stannard's Teacher Training Videos - 0 views

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    A video on how to use Keek to make and share short video messages. Although limited to only 36 secs, this might be a good application for beginning learners, or for a quick pronunciation quiz (you will see who is taking that quiz!) You can also embed a finished recording in your blog or wiki, as well as sending it by email. A good way to have students create a short, practiced conversation. Also has smartphone apps for mobile recordings, RSS feed to follow, and links to Facebook, Yahoo, and Twitter.
TESOL CALL-IS

Life Feast: Draw and record your voice - 0 views

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    "Drawing and recording your voice is not an easy task. What I've discovered is that once you start drawing, and your focus shifts to the image, there are few barriers to speaking. "The tool I'd like to share today is EDUCREATIONS (http://www.educreastions.com). I haven't explored it to its full potential but what I've seen so far is good enough. The free tool allows you use your mouse or your finger (ipad) to draw stick figures while you record your voice. You can also upload an image and draw and record your voice at the same time. Once finished, look at the right side below the twitter and facebook buttons for the URL and the embed code which allows you publish the recording."
TESOL CALL-IS

Vocaroo | Online voice recorder - 2 views

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    Simple audio recording too. Click to start recording, and then send it to a student--or vice-versa. You can also embed the recording in your blog or podcast or wiki. You can link Vocaroo to your Twitter or Facebook account, sending it via your social network, or download the recording to archive as an MP3 file to show student improvement. Russell Stannard has an instructional tutorial at http://www.teachertrainingvideos.com/vocaroo1/index.html
Vanessa Vaile

News: Harnessing Social Media - Inside Higher Ed - 0 views

  • There was always more potentially relevant information out in the world than people could ever hope to know. But Twitter, Facebook, social bookmarking sites, and countless other content streams and conversation threads — constantly available in the era of wireless networks and mobile computing — have thrust many in academe into an endless, unwinnable race to keep up.
  • At a session on Friday here at the Sloan Consortium International Conference on Online Learning, called “Managing the Flow of Information,” a roomful of higher ed technologists commiserated about the information assault and discussed how to figure out what information to ignore without abnegating their obligation to stay current.
  • While some instructors might take the sight of students typing on keyboards and smartphones as a sign of chronic inattention, the authors of this study take it as the opposite.
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

Audioboo - 1 views

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    "We are a mobile & web platform that effortlessly allows you to record and upload audio for your friends, family or the rest of the world to hear." Can record from computer or iPhone/iPod. Great mobile recording for podcasting. Very easy to use. You can log in with your Twitter account, record or upload a file, send to friends and post to Facebook at the same time. Your file shows up with your profile next to it. Use is fully described by Russell Stannard at http://www.teachertrainingvideos.com/audioboo/index.html.
TESOL CALL-IS

Fotobabble - Talking Photos - 3 views

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    This would be a great project base for students. They take photos, upload them and then record a voice description. Has connect to Facebook option also.
Vanessa Vaile

How This Course Works | Critical Literacies Online Course Blog - 0 views

    • Vanessa Vaile
       
      critical literacies similar to multiliteracies but not as multi
  • This type of course is called a ‘connectivist’ course and is based on four major types of activity: 1. Aggregate
  • wide variety of things to read, watch or play with
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  • PICK AND CHOOSE content that looks interesting to you and is appropriate for you
  • 2. Remix Once you’ve read or watched or listened to some content, your next step is to keep track of that somewhere. How you do this will be up to you.
  • Here are some suggestions: - create a blog
  • - create an account with del.icio.us and create a new entry for each piece of content you access. You can access del.icio.us at http://del.icio.us
  • take part in a Moodle discussion.
  • - tweet about the item in Twitter. If you have a Twitter account, post something about the content you’ve accessed.
  • - anything else: you can use any other service on the internet – Flickr, Second Life, Yahoo Groups, Facebook, YouTube, anything! use your existing accounts if you want or create a new one especially for this course. The choice is completely yours.
  • 3. Repurpose
  • We don’t want you simply to repeat what other people have said. We want you to create something of your own. This is probably the hardest part of the process.
  • What materials? Why, the materials you have aggregated and remixed online.
  • What thoughts? What understanding? Well – that is the subject of this course. This whole course will be about how to read or watch, understand, and work with the content other people create, and how to create your own new understanding and knowledge out of them.
  • the critical literacies we will describe in this course are the TOOLS you will use to create your own content.
  • 4. Feed Forward
  • you don’t have to share. You can work completely in private, not showing anything to anybody. Sharing is and will always be YOUR CHOICE.
  • Critical Literacies 2010, the course about thinking
  • How this Course Works Critical Literacies is an unusual course. It does not consist of a body of content you are supposed to remember. Rather, the learning in the course results from the activities you undertake, and will be different for each person. In addition, this course is not conducted in a single place or environment. It is distributed across the web.
Vanessa Vaile

The Souls of the Machine: Clay Shirky's Internet Revolution - The Chronicle Review - Th... - 1 views

  • the goal is to study technology and society by making gadgets that challenge assumptions of how machines fit into daily life and get people interacting
  • as Web sites become more social, they will threaten the existence of all kinds of businesses and organizations, which might find themselves unnecessary once people can organize on their own with free online tools
  • Who needs an academic association, for instance, if a Facebook page, blog, and Internet mailing list can enable professionals to stay connected without paying dues?
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  • those who make playful social networks improve society more than all those now-unnecessary offline organizations.
Vanessa Vaile

Digital Office Hours - 0 views

  • Instant messaging (IM) services like AIM, Yahoo! Messenger, or Windows Live Messenger make it possible for you to chat in real-time with friends, colleagues, and students.
  • But do you really want to have all of these different tools open at once? Probably not. In order to cut down on applications or screens that you have open on your desktop, you can use an IM aggregrator.
  • Digsby allows you not only to manage all of your IM streams, but also works as an email manager for web-based mail and as an interface for social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook
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  • Google Talk chatback badges. The badge is a short snippet of HTML that I can plug into any of my course-related websites, and the result is that anyone who visits the website can click on the chatbox to start a conversation with me–(1) whether they have a Google Talk account or not or (2) whether or not they know my IM account name.
Vanessa Vaile

Getting Students to Do the Reading: Pre-Class Quizzes on Wordpress - ProfHacker.com - 1 views

  • learning as a two-step process: First there’s the transfer of information (from a source of knowledge, like an instructor, to the student), then there’s the assimilation of that information by the student
  • students need to have their first exposure to the course material happen some other way—like reading their textbook
  • in all fields, there’s still the challenge of motivating students to actually do the pre-class readings
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  • short, online reading quizzes consisting of open-ended questions that are due several hours before class starts to do the job.  Most of the quiz questions are meant to help students focus on and make some sense of key concepts
  • Students submit answers to these questions online before class, and I grade their quizzes on effort.
  • pre-class reading quizzes allow me to practice what is often called “just-in-time teaching.”
  • pre-class reading quiz questions as a clicker question during class,
  • how do I implement these quizzes?
  • local course management system, but I found the system to cumbersome
  • I find it much easier to post course documents to a WordPress blog, and I like that it makes my course more open to those not enrolled in it. 
  • I create a Facebook fan page for each of my courses
  • that pulls in the course blog content via RSS
  • So I now post my pre-class reading quizzes on my course blogs, tagged with a “PCRQ” for easy locating
  • default comments feature on WordPress to have students reply to them.  This meant that students could read each other’s answers, which, for these questions, only enhanced the learning experience
  • So I looked around for a way to have students comment on posts semi-privately—where I could see their comments but they couldn’t see each other’s comments.  I found a WordPress plug-in called, appropriately, Semi-Private Comments!  (Plug-ins—yet another reason I prefer WordPress to a course management system.) 
  • he main limitation is that it doesn’t help me grade those quizzes
Vanessa Vaile

Life Under An #Ashtag: Online Networking My Way Home From Europe | techPresident - 0 views

  • I don’t feel like a displaced person, but more like a ball being buoyed by an invisible network of friends and strangers, all connecting to me and with each other via the Internet.
  • Does it make sense to rely on one’s online social network in times of crisis?
  • But at every moment, whether I was hearing from friends or strangers, I was comforted knowing that people were looking out for me. And I got a lot of useful answers when I needed them.
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  • what failed this past week was not the Internet, but corporate and government agency websites. They’ve been rendered useless by this crisis because they operate under a no-fail rule: nothing can be posted on them unless cleared from above
  • By contrast, the networked public sphere of bloggers, friends and strangers grouping around hashtags and online social networks, has been doing what it always does: sharing information, offering support, highlighting problems and improvising solutions.
  • fluid, open and collaborative,
Vanessa Vaile

What Does Yahoo!'s Delicious Decision Mean for the Social Web? - Alexandra Samuel - Har... - 0 views

  • Given the source and Yahoo's decision to refrain from comment, the rumor is now widely taken as fact. And it's a fact that should trouble every user of the social web.
  • What do we users pay for the privilege of keeping our bookmarks online and accessible from any Internet-connected computer, 24/7? Not a thing. Not a cent, anyhow. But we're contributing in other ways. Every time I store a bookmark in Delicious, I'm giving the system another piece of information
  • You might call that point of common interest a relationship. And for many Delicious users, those relationships are a key benefit to using the bookmarking system
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  • Those relationships, as much as the bookmarks themselves, represent a common asset. Yahoo! doesn't own the relationships among its users, any more than a party host owns the relationships among her guests.
  • It's the bargain that underpins much of the social web. Twitter gives us 140 characters worth of storage and a killer API, and we fill it up with our latest thoughts and experiences. Foursquare gives us a nice way of converting GPS locations to actual intuitive locations, and we give it the scoop on where we hang out. Facebook gives us a way to connect with friends, and we tell it who we know and what we have to say to them. This bargain amounts to the world's most ambitious marriage of public and private value creation. On the one hand you've got private companies trying to monetize their social networks and web apps, generating at least enough revenue to keep the lights on. And on the other hand you've got individuals who voluntarily engage in the social production of common value:
  • It's that collectively created value that distinguishes today's social web from previous generations of on- and offline media.
  • the only imaginable reason to shut down instead of selling is to avoid offering a competitive advantage to another company, in a truly egregious example of placing competition ahead of customers.
  • countless blog posts about different ways to use Delicious
  • all those bookmarks! — add up to an investment
  • The investment of users like me is what makes Web 2.0 fundamentally different from Web 1.0,
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