Group items tagged

EDUC439/639 Social Networking Mathieu Plourde University of Delaware This class will focus first on personal information management practices, and will then expand to include connecting with the right people online, collaborating with them, and using social media and web 2.0 services in educational settings. Even if you don't currently teach, you'll be able to use the skills developed during the course to become a lifelong learner, and you'll be in a better position to convince colleagues and stakeholders of the value of social media and web 2.0 for teaching and learning in your unit.

"EXECUTIVE SUMMARY A new business landscape is emerging wherein a multitude of small entities will bring products and services to market using the infrastructure and platforms of large, concentrated players. The forces driving this are putting new and mounting pressures on organizations and individuals while also opening up new opportunities. But traditional postsecondary educational institutions are not supporting individuals in successfully navigating this not-too-distant future, nor are the educational institutions immune to these forces. Perhaps more than any other sector, postsecondary education is being affected by changing demand as the learning needs and preferences of the individual consumer rapidly evolve. Increasingly, individuals need both lifelong learning and accelerated, on-demand learning, largely as a response to the pressures of the broader evolving economic landscape. Rarely seen amid gross national statistics on the skills gap, employability, completion rates, and tuition hikes is a serious discussion of the unmet, and increasingly disparate, needs and expectations of individual learners. The costs to the individual are increasing, and the payoff is less certain. Students of all ages are more comfortable with technology and are less tied to traditional notions of the academy as fewer American adults between the ages of 18 and 22 achieve a four-year, full-time, campus-based degree.1 At the same time, technological advances reduce the lifespan of specific skills, and an increasingly globalized and automated workforce needs to continuously learn and retrain."

In this 2014.06.16 guest post and extensive follow-up comments about an evolving educational technology rubric, Thornbury draws upon second language acquisition literature to generate "a list of 'observations'" (¶3), upon which in turn to base general questions about the "fitness for purpose" (¶1) of various products and services available to facilitate and support language learning.