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Social presence remains the key to a successful learning experience, and understanding social presence, with its critical connection to learning and community building, allows us to better support faculty and students. Understanding a wide selection of tools, media, and reflective activities helps faculty assist students in taking responsibility for their own learning. Providing iterative feedback and mindful assessments helps faculty meet learning outcomes and guide student learning. Implementing change in small steps is the key to understanding which strategies work and which lead to frustration and discontent.

"So as you can see, a varied view about the presence of CTA's emerges from the comment, but most seem to agree that their presence was indeed required, and people would have actually preferred if they had been informed about the presence of the CTAs. As it turns out, there was a thread on the Coursera forums introducing the CTAs, but I think there is a problem with that. I have already voiced my view on Coursera's forums - they are not very user friendly and a thread like this can easily be missed there. Honestly speaking, I prefer the social spaces as compared to the forums on Coursera."

When we're making a snap judgement about a fact, the mere presence of an accompanying photograph makes us more likely to think it's true, even when the photo doesn't provide any evidence one way or the other. In the words of Eryn Newman and her colleagues, uninformative photographs "inflate truthiness".

"The starting line. Square one. The basics. First step. When it comes to planning an effective social media presence, most minds drift to the tool box. Should we be on Facebook? What about Twitter? Do we need a profile on LinkedIn? What about video? These are all great questions. But, they can't be answered effectively until you've gone through the process of figuring out what social media can do for you. You could skip the primer and just dive in, learn from your mistakes and successes. But your presence on social media will be more profitable in a shorter period of time if you just begin at the beginning."

"It's no longer enough to simply use words tell a story; mastering this blended art of sharing is critical to a brand's social media presence. "

"Many people ask me how I manage my social media accounts (and others make stuff up rather than figure out what I do). Here are the gory, inside-story details. Perhaps you may find some of my methods useful to help you get the most out of social media, too. I wrote this article for my friends at Hubspot in May, this is the June 2013 update."

"Fluidity, flexibility and responsiveness seem like important skills for students to develop as part of their learning. Apart from anything else, it's a great way to bring some additional life into lectures and encourage students to think about their online presence; something they inevitably will have, but which is usually separate from their learning."

""Relate" videos get the student to feel connected to the instructor. They seek to establish instructor presence. They also prompt students to reflect on their own prior experiences with the topic and reasons for taking the course. "Narrate" videos share stories, anecdotes, or case studies that illustrate a concept or put the learning in context. They tap into the power of narrative to make learning sticky. "Demonstrate" videos illustrate how to do something in a step-by-step way. They pull back the curtain on invisible phenomena or procedures. They visually demonstrate how students will complete assignments and apply learning in the real world. "Debate" videos are perhaps the most important if you want students to actually change the way they think. These videos explicitly surface and address the misconceptions that students have about a domain and showcase competing points of view."

"From the first week of school, the six year olds in my classroom begin to create an online presence in the form of a digital portfolio.  We use a blogging platform to do this, and include artifacts that show their progress in writing, reading, math, social studies and science."

This is what I LOVE about this article: "Students relish the feedback a comment gives, whether it is from a classmate, a parent, or someone they have never met. The audience becomes part of the student's learning." Now, I still have privacy concerns, but from reading her comments to others who were skeptical she says that she has not received inappriopriate comments in the 8 years she has been doing this. OK- Matt, my eyes are opening...a little bit. ;)

"Horror stories have been published about employers asking for job applicants' Facebook passwords. Recently, psychologists discovered that employers frown upon applicants without a Facebook presence. The lack of a profile raises many red flags: is this person anti-social? Was once tagged in too many party photos? Is he or she just pretentious?"

"Penn is strongly committed to open learning - a vital part of our mission to increase access, around the world, to the educational resources that can change people's lives. Our goals as early adopters of massively open online courses are to create and disseminate knowledge, drive teaching innovation, and expand Penn's global presence.  We invite you to learn more below about our Coursera courses and the outstanding Penn faculty members who teach them."

"It got me thinking about what types of experiences are best suited for real physical conference events.  Unless we get a chance to interact, ask questions, contribute to conversations, get hands on experience, and do things that require your actual physical presence, then perhaps those other things don't belong in a real physical conference.  I feel a bit cheated when I go to an event (and pay good money to do so) only to feel as though what I experienced could have been just as well communicated virtually through video or some other means.  I feel a bit the same when I go to a real physical conference and find that one of the "keynotes" is being beaming in via satellite on a big screen that we all just sit and watch.  I expect better than that."

"In an interview about the satellite hack with French news program 13 Heures, TV5Monde reporter David Delos unwittingly revealed at least one password for the station's social media presence. That's because he was filmed in front of a staffer's desk-which was smothered in sticky notes and taped index cards that were covered in account usernames and passwords."

"It may have been the (AI-recommended) Microsoft Kool-aid1, but it appears Google and Microsoft are edging their way into the LMS space. Their presence at a K-12 focused show suggests they are finding traction at the younger grades. But as their education offerings grow in sophistication, and their ecosystem advantages start to accelerate, I believe a more concerted push in the higher ed space is inevitable."

"What I'm arguing in the book is that it's not the presence of a laptop in a class that needs to be looked at and needs to be perhaps critiqued, but really the kind of digital culture that we're creating where we're not valuing conversation enough and not valuing relationships enough, and we tend to look at each other as apps in a more transactional way."

"There's already a lot of research into how we form impressions of people based on facial features alone. We see a picture of someone and almost immediately make an assessment of that person. As much as we know we shouldn't, we judge books by their covers."

"So what makes an online class feel less like it's taught by a bot and more like it's a human-centered experience? The following three principles and related strategies will help faculty keep humans front-and-center of their online courses:"

"Welcome to the University of Mary Washington's Domain of One's Own project. A Domain of One's Own provides domain names and Web space to members of the UMW community, encouraging individuals to explore the creation and development of their digital identities."