Group items tagged

"Part of what makes emotional content so susceptible to spreading is that emotions themselves are contagious. Researchers have long known that people can "catch" the emotions of someone around them, so to speak, through direct exposure to that person's expressions and tones and gestures. They also believe this process of emotional contagion can occur indirectly--say, by receiving a forwarded video clip or article."

"Of the various professional development opportunities available, social media reigned supreme as the most popular way for educators to keep themselves up to speed on current issues in the education world. And while the report does note, "Most survey participants were pooled from social media websites, resulting in a sampling bias," other sources of information educators use to stay afloat extend beyond social media--Internet search, blogs, academic/education conferences, and news articles all topped 70% (see graph to the right)."

"People now buy songs, not albums. They read articles, not newspapers. So why not mix and match learning "modules" rather than lock into 12-week university courses? That question is a major theme of a 213-page report released on Monday by a committee at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology exploring how the 153-year-old engineering powerhouse should innovate to adapt to new technologies and new student expectations."

"Google Hangouts on Air and YouTube offer the benefit of recording your event while showing it in multiple places at the same time. In this article you'll discover how to stream your next Google Hangout on Air to YouTube."

This article presents the outcomes of a typological analysis of Web 2.0 learning technologies. A comprehensive review incorporating over two thousand links led to identification of 212 Web 2.0 technologies that were suitable for learning and teaching purposes. The typological analysis then resulted in 37 types of Web 2.0 technologies that were arranged into 14 clusters. The types of Web 2.0 learning technologies, their descriptions, pedagogical uses and example tools for each category are described, arranged according to the clusters. Results of this study imply that educators typically have a narrow conception of Web 2.0 technologies, and that there is a wide array of Web 2.0 tools as yet to be fully harnessed by learning designers and educational researchers.

"Screenshots never used to be that powerful. Sharing one was largely reserved for epic videogame wins or error messages. But now people routinely take screenshots of funny/outrageous comments on social media to share with friends. Twitter users post grabs of things they're reading. College students take notes by screenshotting articles and books on their phones, tablets, and laptops."

"People who love making stuff are also critical consumers of the very same stuff they create. Authors read. Chefs eat. Painters go to galleries. Engineers pay attention to the physics of the world around them. Academics read journal articles. "

"The idea is simple (although the software is so complex it took a year to build): before posting a comment in a forum or below an article, users must rate two randomly selected comments from others for quality of argument and civility (defined as an absence of personal attacks or abuse). Ratings are crunched to build up a picture of what users of any given site will tolerate, which is then useful for flagging potentially offensive material."

"Fortunately, a group of tireless researchers-who I've had the honor of collaborating with-has put a wooden stake through the dark heart of this demon. In the most recent addition of the scientific journal Educational Technology, Deepak Subramony, Michael Molenda, Anthony Betrus, and I (my contribution was small) produced four articles on the dangers of this misinformation and the genesis of it. After working separately over the years to debunk this bit of mythology, the four of us have come together in a joint effort to rally the troops-people like you, dedicated professionals who want to create the best outcomes for your learners."

"these days when we say "textbook" we seldom mean textbook. We mean course materials. As the Vox article makes clear, the book is not always (not usually?) the hideously expensive part of the deal - the online access codes and other ancillary materials are. Certainly, there are amazingly expensive books out there that get assigned in classes (I hear law books are hundreds of dollars, I know some economics books are, some science books, etc. Even in Literature, a relatively inexpensive field, big anthologies can be pricey). But often - and maybe even usually - when we complain about the cost of books, we're complaining about the cost of supplemental media, password-protected websites, and other items that may include text but are certainly not books. The term "Open Educational Resources" recognizes this. It's a strange habit of language that has kept us from parallelism, though: What OERs oppose is not textbooks, but CERs, Closed Educational Resources."

"A study released last week found that students who start college less well-prepared can struggle in online courses, and that in-person courses would be better for them academically. "

"Campus Technology just published an article of mine about my futures work and methods.  I introduce trend analysis, environmental scanning, scenarios, and science fiction, then tie it all together with practical tips for campus technology offices."

"As a former K-12 teacher and a current educator in higher education, I grappled with the idea of creating a Facebook account to communicate and become "friends" with my students. I was less concerned with using Twitter because of the difference between "following" and "friending." In my youth I was told by parents and teachers, "I'm not your friend." They said this to distinguish between the roles of friends and adults in the rearing of a child. An assumed level of respect was maintained between teacher-student and parent-teacher when such boundaries were made clear. Today's shift in learning environments to learner-centered classrooms thus raises these questions: Do educators now want to be friends with their students? Do students actually prefer not to be friends with their teachers?"

The course management system (CMS) reinforces the status quo and hinders substantial teaching and learning innovation in higher education. It does so by imposing artificial time limits on learner access to course content and other learners, privileging the role of the instructor at the expense of the learner, and limiting the power of the network effect in the learning process. The open learning network (OLN)-a hybrid of the CMS and the personal learning environment (PLE)-is proposed as an alternative learning technology environment with the potential to leverage the affordances of the Web to dramatically improve learning.

Discusses the MOOC at Stanford which we discussed in class, some of its pitfalls.

discusses some of the politics involved in MOOCS in higher ed.

"The rise of "freeconomics" is being driven by the underlying technologies that power the Web. Just as Moore's law dictates that a unit of processing power halves in price every 18 months, the price of bandwidth and storage is dropping even faster. Which is to say, the trend lines that determine the cost of doing business online all point the same way: to zero."