Group items tagged

Networked teachers began to use a number of types of tools and connected well beyond what was normal within a "typical" teacher network. Teachers are not just connected WITH these tools, they are connected THROUGH these tools to other humans. The most important part of PLNs, in my opinion, is how they can help us connect to other humans, to help us better understand the world, to negotiate knowledge and meaning, and of course, to help us to learn.

Information technologies are having a significant impact on how people work, play, gain information, and collaborate. Increasingly, those who use technology in ways that expand their global connections are more likely to advance, while those who do not will find themselves on the sidelines. With the growing availability of tools to connect learners and scholars all over the world - online collaborative workspaces, social networking tools, mobiles, voice-over-IP, and more - teaching and scholarship are transcending traditional borders more and more all the time. (Emphasis mine.)

As one of the people in the video says, "if you aren't connected people think you are negligent" and that bothers me, but it is a reality.

Students use technology in natural ways that allow them to do what they want: communicate with anyone they want, in the time and space that suits them best. Easily accessible and user-friendly, collaboration tools allow students to explore, share, engage, and connect with people and content in meaningful ways that help them learn. By relying on the familiar ways students use these tools, faculty can enable new forms of communication and engagement in the classroom, permitting extensions and variations of the informal interactions already occurring in classrooms and hallways, and creating new frontiers for collaboration across geographic boundaries.

Twitter may not function as a broadcast medium as much as it serves as a quick relay service for sharing ideas, thoughts and concerns with others who have similar interests, both locally and at great distances. These practices typically follow the formula, articulated by Barbara Ganley, that we "blog to reflect, Tweet to connect."

Teachers are learners. If they're not, they shouldn't be teachers. In a world where we can engage in our passions through the affordances of connective technologies online, we need to be thinking about how to personalize the learning of the adults in the room as well as the kids.

Open teaching is described as the facilitation of learning experiences that are open, transparent, collaborative, and social. Open teachers are advocates of a free and open knowledge society, and support their students in the critical consumption, production, connection, and synthesis of knowledge through the shared development of learning networks.

Scholars, advertisers and political activists see massive online social networks as a representation of social interactions that can be used to study the propagation of ideas, social bond dynamics and viral marketing, among others. But the linked structures of social networks do not reveal actual interactions among people. Scarcity of attention and the daily rhythms of life and work makes people default to interacting with those few that matter and that reciprocate their attention. A study of social interactions within Twitter reveals that the driver of usage is a sparse and hidden network of connections underlying the "declared" set of friends and followers.

Opening up the institution may seem like a counter-intuitive way of protecting it, but in an era where tremendous value is being created by informal and self-organized groups, sharing becomes the simplest and most powerful way of connecting with external learning opportunities.

As students continue to use Facebook to connect and communicate in increasing numbers, it has also become common for faculty members to consider the use of this social networking site to facilitate interaction in educational contexts. One of the perennial questions that arises is whether faculty should accept Facebook "friend requests" from students.

The analysis of the potential benefits in post-secondary settings also includes considerations of the obstacles to institutional adoption and challenges to successful implementation.

As the phrase suggests, it is the telling of stories using Web 2.0 tools, technologies, and strategies. Since the name is fairly recent (and not yet widely used), it may not bear out as the best term for this trend. Another name may emerge, one better suited to describing this narrative domain. However, the term seems to have met with quiet acknowledgment to date, so it may serve as a useful one going forward.

Citizen journalism refers to a wide range of activities in which everyday people contribute information or commentary about news events. With the birth of digital technologies, people now have unprecedented access to the tools of production and dissemination. Citizen journalism epitomizes the belief that the experiences of people personally involved with an issue present a different -- and often more complete -- picture of events than can be derived from the perspective of an outsider. Citizen journalism encompasses content ranging from user-submitted reviews on a Web site about movies to wiki-based news. It forces contributors to think objectively, asking probing questions and working to understand the context -- the kinds of activities that lead to deeper learning.

GROU.PS is a platform for social groups to get together. Use it for any purpose. Choose your template and pick all the modules that you want (wiki, blogs, photos, links etc).