Group items tagged

"Google Maps is the most popular mobile app, used by 54% of the global smartphone population last month, according to a recent survey by GlobalWebIndex. However, the mobile apps for YouTube and Google+ were used by 35% and 30% of smartphone users respectively, which means that Google owns three of the four most widely used apps"

"Youth move between sites quickly. For example, Instagram is a current favorite among youth. Instagram is a photo-sharing site where users can post photos, "like" other people's photos and share them. Snapchat is also popular. This is a mobile service where users can take a photo, send it to someone else, and schedule it to delete within a few seconds. What is important to remember is that both are just services, and they share the same properties as many of their popular predecessors (such as MySpace, Facebook, and Chatroulette). There will always be new services that children move in and out of fluidly. Given the choice between trying to block children from a site and teaching them how to use it maturely, my hope is that parents do the latter. Especially as children are joining new services at increasingly young ages, how they use it becomes as important as what they use."

Why expose oneself to Internet trolls and conspiracy theorists? It doesn't "pay." It doesn't explicitly count for tenure or promotion. In fact, it puts one at risk of being labeled a popularizer or even being criticized by one's own colleagues as a less-than-serious scholar. But having opened the door to public engagement, I can't walk away now.

"So today we're back with another huge list of content curation tools that includes some old favorites (like Google Reader, that we somehow overlooked on our original list…shame on us!), new players that have surged in popularity since the last time we published a list like this (hello, Pinterest!) as well as some up and coming curation sites and platforms."

"Just the other day I was observing at a restaurant in Palo Alto that's popular for many business lunch meetings, that most, if not all, of those engaging with other humans were also equally engaged in their digital devices. I watched three different tables and in a time period of 15 minutes, every person at every one of those tables averaged checking their smartphones and responding to something at least three times."

"CourseTalk is what you might expect - an early stage Yelp for MOOCs - a place for students to share their experiences with these courses and a way to discover new courses they'd enjoy. Given that it's still nascent, the platform's design is simple and its user experience is straightforward: Visitors can use the general search bar which is front and center, or peruse through "Top Rated," "Popular" and "Upcoming" verticals, or search by category, like Business, Computer Science, etc."

"Would you be shocked if your teacher assigned you to play Minecraft at school? At a few area schools, teachers are doing just that. The Lego-like building game has become a popular tool for classroom lessons as well as life lessons."

"A good example of the difference between instructional packaging and instructional scaffolding was provided recently by Debbie Morrison in her post A tale of two of MOOCs: divided by pedagogy.  In a very useful table (reproduced below) she compares the approaches taken by the (very popular, connectivist) e-Learning and Digital Cultures MOOC with the (aborted, instructivist) Fundamentals of Online Education MOOC. (The first is a great example of instructional scaffolding.)"

"Postsecondary students in British Columbia may get a bit of a break when it comes time to buy their textbooks this fall. In the first move of its kind in Canada, the B.C. government said it will make available up to 20 free and open online textbooks for some of the most popular first- and second-year university and college courses. There's no guarantee that faculty will choose to assign the new textbooks, but proponents of the project are hoping that rigorous quality control measures and a little nudging from students will win them over. The textbooks also will be available to institutions, faculty and students across Canada to use at no charge."

Yes, I see that it is Canada, once again, leading the way.... :) If enough faculty adopt open online textbooks a new norm will be achieved! Of course, the quality must be equivalent....or, perhaps, better.

The state of Washington did it first. The Pacific North West leads the way.

Instructure today announced it has raised $30 million in Series D funding, which brings Instructure's lifetime funding total to $50 million. Bessemer Venture Partners (BVP) led the round with participation from existing investors. The funds will be used to accelerate adoption of Canvas, Instructure's popular learning management system (LMS), used by colleges, universities, K-12 school districts and the company's expanding role in the Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) movement. Instructure's current list of investors includes EPIC Ventures, OpenView Venture Partners and Tomorrow Venture

"The deadline for the demise of iGoogle, Google's start page, is getting closer (read how to export your igoogle feeds). While nothing will completely replace iGoogle, there are some alternatives out there. Before we get to the alternative sites we need to define what a Start Page is. For this article a start page is a website that enables you to have various websites, news feeds, and widgets in one place. Most start pages have links to news, popular email services, weather, videos, calendars, To Do lists, maps, sticky notes, TV listings and access to all your social media such as Facebook. "

"Each day, our NYC-based team produces one-minute video lessons covering every change to the world's most popular websites, mobile apps and online tools and we deliver those lessons in real-time."

"The relatively low completion rates of learners have been a central critique as MOOCs grow in popularity. This focus on completion rates, however, implies a monolithic view of disengagement that fails to acknowledge alternative forms of participation in MOOCs. Identifying subpopulations of learners based on their longitudinal engagement with the course allows MOOC designers to target interventions and develop adaptive course features. We develop a simple, scalable, and informative classification method that identifies four prototypical engagement trajectories: Completing learners, who complete the majority of the assessments offered in the class; Auditing learners, who do assessments infrequently (if at all) and engage instead by watching video lectures; Disengaging learners, who do assessments at the beginning of the course but then have a marked decrease in engagement, generally in the first third of the class; and Sampling learners, who enter and exit the course quickly, watching a minimal number of videos at some point during the course."

I reference first the article in the Chronicle of Higher Education on the bill being proposed in the California legislature to create a "faculty-free" New University of California online (read it and scream). And yet, this should surprise no one. We are living in a plutocracy. MOOCs are becoming popular as potential money savers for universities and money makers for "education" companies. One might think these two phenomena are unrelated. They're not.

In retrospect, 2012 may well be remembered as the year when Internet technology enabled the popularity of MOOCs-or massive open online courses-a form of disruptive or transformative education currently growing at a meteoric rate.

Today's web users are prolific creators of content, and they upload photographs, audio, and video to Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, and many others by the billions. While the initial emphasis of social media was placed on producing and uploading media to these popular sharing sites, as the notion of social media has evolved, it has ultimately become more about the conversations started and relationships formed surrounding this media. In this mini-course, educators will gain a better understanding of how social media platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter, can be leveraged for teaching and learning. Participants will specifically learn how to integrate social media into STEM curriculum to: (1) engage students in insightful discussions, (2) build thriving STEM-focused online communities, and (3) help students discover new areas for informal STEM learning.

"The Transportation Security Administration - better known as the TSA, or the folks who pat you down at the airport - has opened its own account on Instagram, the popular photo-sharing service. Yes, really."

"Yet sadly, despite all your efforts, you probably have fewer friends than most of your friends have. But don't despair - the same is true for almost all of us. Our friends are typically more popular than we are."

"The overarching theme now of Learnist and Lore (aside from the first letter of the names) is that these sites are designed to function just like the most popular social networks in the world … except they were built just for teachers and students. To me, that says that it's a very exciting time in edtech as companies are able to finally leverage the resources and data from the Facebooks and Blackboards of the world … then turning this into a very useful new tool that can be completely tailored to the education audience."

"A comprehensive and groundbreaking new report released Monday by the Pew Research Center's Internet and American Life Project has found that only four users of Facebook derive pleasure of any kind from the popular social networking website. According to the report, the remainder of the 950 million people registered with Facebook, despite using the site on a regular basis, take no joy in doing so, and in fact feel a profound sense of hopelessness and despair immediately upon logging in."