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"Teachers who have begun to challenge these assumptions engage in alternative practices that begin to help us articulate the commitments of connected teaching. These commitments and practices include: COLLABORATION: Connected teachers work collaboratively. CURIOSITY: Connected teachers bring an inquiry mindset to classroom practice. COURAGE: Connected teachers give up some of their control over the learning experience. CIVIC ENGAGEMENT: Connected teachers engage their students in public life. CARE: Connected teachers share their interests and learning with their students."

"Open Badges enable you to connect different types of learning to each other. The whole point of connected learning by definition -- by the name itself -- is to find a way to connect things. To do that, we need something that will carry that information across sectors. In the connected learning vision, I see badges as the connectors between different spheres. Badges play the role of a currency where learning can be captured, recognized, and then communicated across those lines."

"In a student-centric LMS, the core abstraction of the LMS is the student. In the diagram, I'm imagining a student with control of connections to other entities within the system. These could be instructors, or other students, or learning materials. To create a course, you invite students to connect with a common set of resources, one or more instructors, and the other students in the course. When the course is complete, the student can drop the connections she doesn't need any more - but keep the rest. As the educational experience proceeds, the student collects, under her control, the connections that remain meaningful and useful and drops the ones that are stale or irrelevant. Furthermore, these resources could be local and within the LMS, or they could be external to the LMS or to the student's current institution."

"They make introduction after introduction, in hopes the two professionals they connect are able to benefit one another. Why is this so powerful? The person doing the super-connecting builds their reputation as a powerful professional by focusing on giving - and in return receives the same kind of new introductions back."

"There are a lot of gadgets out there, right? Shiny new products with fun, useful, or amazing capabilities are being churned out at quite the clip. They're available for use in workplaces, schools, and at home, and the scope of what we can do with all these neat devices is only expanding. So, we know that students are connected - Very Connected. They have computers, smartphones, tablets, and a variety of devices in between. But just how connected are they? And what does this mean for teachers?"

An important thing to remember is that networks are about people, and making connections with people. If cultivate my PLN to support gaps in my formal education - I connect with people who can help me learn. I have a local PLN with professors and physicians that support my formal education, but I also have a connected network of academics and professionals around the world who share interests or are experts in areas where I need someone else's opinion. But for a PLN to truly work, there needs to be a give and take. You cannot expect to just cultivate information from others without giving something back - you need to share your expertise as well.

"United Classrooms is a service connecting classrooms across the world. The service allows teachers to create classroom profile pages. On their classroom profile pages teachers can post assignments, projects, messages for students, and announcements for parents and students. Teachers can monitor and manage all of the communications between students on the classroom profile page."

"NROC's Connected PD project launched in March 2011 in response to a collective Aha! among many of us at the time: educators need to embody connected learning in order to support students today. The NROC Network's uniquely diverse group of K20+ educators share a commitment to integrate high-quality, digital open educational resources into their curricula."

"Connectivism and Connective Knowledge Essays on meaning and learning networks May 19, 2012. Connectivism is the thesis that knowledge is distributed across a network of connections, and therefore that learning consists of the ability to construct and traverse those networks. The bulk of this work is devoted to tracing the implications of this thesis in learning. Yes, this could have been a shorter book - and perhaps one day I'll author a volume without the redundancies, false starts, detours and asides, and other miscellany. Such a volume would be sterile, however, and it feels more true to the actual enquiry to stay true to the original blog posts, essays and presentations that constitute this work."

"If friend requests, invitations to connect and potential Twitter stalkers are keeping you up at night, that needs to stop. Today. All you have to do is develop your own personal social media policy. Determine your own rules of engagement and apply them. And don't be scared to let people know how they can connect with you."

"Personal learning networks are a great way for educators to get connected with learning opportunities, access professional development resources, and to build camaraderie with other education professionals. Although PLNs have been around for years, in recent years social media has made it possible for these networks to grow exponentially. Now, it's possible to expand and connect your network around the world anytime, anywhere. But how exactly do you go about doing that? Check out our guide to growing your personal learning network with social media, full of more than 30 different tips, ideas, useful resources, and social media tools that can make it all possible."

" Educators also have personal learning networks (PLNs) enabling them to connect with other learners around the globe. If you're new to this world, personal learning networks are created by an individual learner, specific to the learner's needs extending relevant learning connections to like-interested people around the globe. PLNs provide individuals with learning and access to leaders and experts around the world bringing together communities, resources and information impossible to access solely from within school walls."

"The MOOC Local option looks like the future to me. Where a school has a "coach" who helps students when they need it, who can be that connection and even connect students within a school. Think how this could change what it means to be a teacher….."

"Generation C is not a demographic. It's everyone. They're connected, and they're in control."

"In collaboration with a wide range of educational organizations and educators, the Connected Educators project is increasing the quality, accessibility, and connectedness of existing and emerging online communities of practice."

Datastores will run in the background, so apps will still work just fine, even if they're not connected to Dropbox. But when they do connect they will sync up with the Dropbox data center, giving apps a way to synch up between your PC, your tablet and your phone. "All of this is to really to help create this fabric that ties your stuff together," says Houston. That means that a game like Angry Birds could now remember what level you were at when your Android phone ran out of power and you switched to your iPad.

The professional connections site LinkedIn is launching a new section of its social network Monday: University Pages targets younger users who want to connect with colleges. More than 200 schools now have profile pages, according to LinkedIn. As part of the new effort, the company also dropped its minimum age to 14 in the U.S. The new college profiles allow prospective students to see how many of a school's graduates are on LinkedIn, as well as a breakdown of the main fields in which they work. The pages also list the top employers of alumni.

Researchers at the University of Washington, Rajesh Rao and Andrea Stocco, have created a remote, non-invasive brain-to-brain interface that allowed Rao to move Stocco's finger remotely on a keyboard using his thoughts. "The Internet was a way to connect computers, and now it can be a way to connect brains,"

"Social collaboration is the reason our business is able to remain connected, agile and profitable in multiple markets. It does this by acting as an unbreakable thread which connects each and every person, 24/7, 365 days a year. The prevalence and value of our social interactions has resulted in all employees regarding the intranet as their 'home base'. Company HQ. The central point from which they start and finish their days, and coordinate their individual tasks. It's also the place where they build real relationships with colleagues in other locations and gain awareness of activities occurring in and around the business."

The dichotomy she describes is a lot like the conceptual move from merely connecting with other educators to collaborating on specific projects. The internet has greatly enhanced educators' capacity to connect with one another, something that only used to happen during professional development or at conferences. But taking that ability to the next level, using it to innovate and produce something new, would mean collaborating beyond districts or even national boundaries.