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The difference between seeing Twitter as a waste of time or as a powerful new community amplifier depends entirely on how you look at it - on knowing how to look at it.

This is a selection of images taken with a 1.3 megapixel cell phone camera for a professional development media teaching course I'm taking. The object was to collect media of a specific location. We were assigned to Church street, which is the heart of Toronto's gay community and other urban locations.

The purpose of this project was to document a public location using only the technology we have access to. Since my good camera is out of commission, I used my cell phone (which has very limited image capability). Despite my "low tech" gear, I managed to get some decent pictures - mostly due to techniques (cropping and moving the camera to eliminate need for focus) and some minor tweeks in Irfanview, changing colour to B&W and pushing up the contrast. Most of our time was spent walking down Church street which is the heart of Toronto's gay community - thus all the LGBTQ content. We ended our walk in China town - unfortunately only two images (we were tired and it was cold!)

"As long as media literacy education was about television, it was perceived to be fluff," she said. "But when the Internet came along, kids didn't know how to cite sources online, and they were creating publicly visible content in their own homes without their parents' knowledge...which sparked serious safety concerns."\n\nIf Thoman and her colleagues' work over the past half century can be credited with establishing media literacy as an academic subject, it's possible that the digital media revolution will catalyze this subject's introduction into the mainstream curriculum.\n\nThat reality seemed closer when, in May, my former boss Sen. John Kerry, along with Senators Rockefeller and Snowe, introduced the "21st Century Skills Incentive Fund Act" into the Senate. The bill recognizes that, in order to prepare students for the modern workforce, education must go beyond core curricula and teach "critical thinking and problem solving skills, communication skills, creativity and innovation skills, collaboration skills, contextual learning skills, and information and media literacy skills."

in high school courses, 'media' is often taught by visual artists or English teachers. Very rarely by those who have worked in media, the web or technical capacities (as production based degrees are not counted towards core curriculum areas: history, english, math, computer science, french, phys ed, etc).

From keeping track of grades to sharing lesson plans, from helping students collaborate to communicating with parents, teachers now have a host of web-based tools at their disposal to help them stay organized and make their jobs easier.

For a growing group of educators, the online role-playing game World of Warcraft is a place to go to relax, network, and discover potential learning strategies-- and slay a few monsters if they get in the way.

Accepting his 2008 TED Prize, author Dave Eggers asks the TED community to personally, creatively engage with local public schools. With spellbinding eagerness, he talks about how his 826 Valencia tutoring center inspired others around the world to open

"A YouGov poll has suggested that computer games can damage children's ability to communicate, but Tom Chatfield argues that gaming imparts a range of new, vitally important skills"

"Below is a list of selected reading materials that are helpful to understanding the culture here at The Border House. This is not a comprehensive list of great anti-oppression blogs (of which there are many!), but a collection of mostly 101-geared articles and communities that should be helpful to people new to these topics."

the continual changes in materials essential to writing and reading alone could constitute a few dozen revolutions, at different places and times all over the world. Let's just say that what the things we read are made out of has always been very, very important.

"Here, she walks you through her PhD-level class on technology and media. Along the way, she distills a quarter century of academic work that goes far beyond pop culture's standard takes on how our world changes."

I found this video years ago and can't stop resharing it. Looking for inspiration? You'll find it here.

A great concept map that includes a number of the more elusive aspects of social media not typically addressed in the commercial (e.g., marketing, pr, business, startups, celebrity culture, corporate media) sphere.