to show her students how far a message can travel on Twitter. The way her message spread throughout Twitter provides a great example of how retweeting works, and why hashtags matter.
Unfortunately, the ability to quickly tap a button to add something to your reading list was so easy - perhaps too easy - that users ended up with long, unwieldy lists of saved content. Now ReadItLater is introducing a new Digest feature which helps you get caught up by automatically sorting and organizing articles for you.
Digest: Imposing Order on the Chaos of Unread Items
The term ‘Multiliteracies’ refers to two major aspects of language use today.
The first is the variability of meaning making in different cultural, social or domain-specific contexts.
the business of communication and representation of meaning today increasingly requires that learners are able figure out differences in patterns of meaning from one context to another.
The second aspect of language use today arises in part from the characteristics of the new information and communications media
extend the range of literacy pedagogy so that it does not unduly privilege alphabetical representations, but brings into the classroom multimodal representations, and particularly those typical of the new, digital media
paper on tagging, clouds, reflective learning
Abstract: Tags are popular for organising information in social software based on the personal views of the participants on the information. Tags provide valuable
attention meta-data on a person's interests because the participants actively relate resources to concepts by using tags. This paper analyses three designs for tag-clouds that are integrated in the ReScope framework for reflection support. ReScope provides a widget for visualising personal tag-clouds of the tags that were
used with social bookmarking services. The presented designs focus on processing and representing attention meta-data on the levels of recency, of collaboration, and of social connectedness from the perspective of situated learning. The present paper analyses how the designs are related to the underlying presumptions for supporting reflection using the different representations of attention meta-data.
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?”
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.
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
Very nice collection of screencasts to show how to use Skype for instructional purposes. (I think this is by Graham Stanley, though it is on Russel Stannard's site.)
Special edition podcast previous to their conference in mid-March 2010. Nancy White explains her views on e-communities and f2f communities around the central theme of whether communities for learning are possible and if so, how.
A pdf book with papers and articles describing pedagogic models and approaches to developing the VITAE e-portfolio
"Chapter 1: Teacher competence development - a European perspective,
Chapter 2: The VITAE Approach,
Chapter 3: Exploring Web 2.0 and Mentoring as Tools for Lifelong Learning,
Chapter 4: Guided course development on the basis of an e-learning patterns template,
Chapter 5: Fun and Games in professional development,
Chapter 6: The VITAE e-portfolio - a catalyst for enhanced learning,
Chapter 7: Community-based mentoring and innovating through Web 2.0,
Chapter 8: Web 2.0 - Learning Culture and Organisational Change,"
This paper examines user-generated metadata
as implemented and applied in two web services designed to share
and organize digital media to better understand grassroots
classification.
metadata has generally been
approached in two ways: professional creation and author
creation
creating
metadata, primarily in the form of catalog records, has
traditionally been the domain of dedicated professionals working
with complex, detailed rule sets and vocabularies
A second approach is for metadata to be created by
authors.
There are problems with this approach as well
This paper examines a third approach: user-created
metadata, where users of the documents and media create metadata
for their own individual use that is also shared throughout a
community.