Microblogging then allows us to not only enrich our most intimate social connections but also the less-intimate “weak ties”–the guy you met at a conference, the group of Australians you met at a hostel last summer in Europe, the girl who sat next to you in high school English–those people who, until the advent of microblogging, most of us would have lost touch with.
It is this extended, “meaningful” socialization with many people, made possible for the first time by Facebook’s inclusion of its Newsfeed feature into the interface, that catapulted the platform from online social activity website popular amongst students and backpackers into its current incarnation, “de facto public commons”.
alexandra m. pickett on 23 Jul 12"Given your critique of "online education," I find it ironic that learning designers and others who work day-in, day-out on online (and blended) learning spend much of our time saying similar things to our faculty partners and university stakeholders as you so eloquently articulated in the above quotes. The error that you make, and it is a fundamental error, is that you confuse what is going on at Stanford, Yale, Harvard, M.I.T. with edX and Coursera, with traditional online learning. You write as if you are critiquing online classes, but what you are really taking issue with are the new crop of massively open online courses (MOOCs). This error is not merely semantic. Confusing online learning with MOOCs disallows any meaningful analysis of the challenges and benefits of either format. Conflating online learning with MOOCs also closes the possibility of any substantive discussion of how institutions of higher education are responding to challenges around access, cost and quality. And perhaps most troubling, by conflating online learning with MOOCs you are mischaracterizing and devaluing the hard work of your fellow educators to bring the active learning principles, the principles that you yourself espouse, to new teaching modalities."
