Group items tagged

"Teens are cooling on Facebook, a trend suggested by recent research and acknowledged, this week by Facebook itself. The shift was confirmed time and time again in e-mail and phone interviews with dozens of teens and their parents in CNN's reporting of this story. While the social-networking juggernaut continues to chug along among adults, boasting more than 1 billion active users, younger users are flocking to newer, and arguably hipper, networking tools."

"The Lego calendar is a wall mounted time planner that we invented for our studio. It's made entirely of Lego, but if you take a photo of it with a smartphone all of the events and timings will be magically synchronised to an online, digital calendar. It makes the most of the tangibility of physical objects, and the ubiquity of digital platforms, and it's also puts a smile on our faces when we use it!"

"In the beginning, there is basically no difference between making a choice that is 1% better or 1% worse. (In other words, it won't impact you very much today.) But as time goes on, these small improvements or declines compound and you suddenly find a very big gap between people who make slightly better decisions on a daily basis and those who don't. This is why small choices ("I'll take a burger and fries") don't make much of a difference at the time, but add up over the long-term."

"Hootsuite or Buffer? Buffer or Hootsuite? The question floats around social media circles and comes up time and time again. For me, it's like asking a gamer which is better, an Xbox 360 or a PlayStation 3? Each has its own traits and features, some people will align more with one or the other."

"We were happy to find no difference in the effectiveness, performance ratings,  or promotions for individuals and teams whose work requires collaboration with colleagues around the world versus Googlers who spend most of their day to day working with colleagues in the same office. Well-being standards were uniform across the board as well; Googlers or teams who work virtually find ways to prioritize a steady work-life balance by prioritizing important rituals like a healthy night's sleep and exercise just as non-distributed team members do. At the same time, we did hear from Googlers that working with colleagues across the globe can make it more difficult to establish connections-in many senses of the word. Coordinating schedules across time zones and booking a conference room for a video chat takes more logistical brain power than dropping by a coworkers desk for a meeting over coffee. The technology itself can also be limiting- glitchy video or faulty sound makes impromptu conversations that help teammates get to know, and trust each other, seem like more trouble than they're worth."

"Almost 25 years have passed since Chickering and Gamson offered seven principles for good instructional practices in undergraduate education. While the state of undergraduate education has evolved to some degree over that time, I think the seven principles still have a place in today's collegiate classroom. Originally written to communicate best practices for face-to-face instruction, the principles translate well to the online classroom and can help to provide guidance for those of us designing courses to be taught online."

...Just in time!! :)

"Good practice is made up of work, and thought, and mistakes, and time. Things that look easy in the hands of a skilled professional are often the end result of years of practice and experience: According to Peter Sims's Little Bets, Chris Rock spends as much as a year polishing a new joke in small venues, publicly failing more often than not.   Finding an interesting eLearning treatment for dry content often comes not from a stroke of brilliance but from years of learning to sift through stakeholder requests and experts' war stories and performance issues and case studies."

Shortly after the invention of the quantum computer chip, and the laying of fibre optic broadband to almost every house in the UK, it had been clear that the days of teaching as a profession were numbered. Teaching had been relegated to a minority profession in a matter of years. It had been simply a question of scale. A teacher, working for 45 years, could teach maybe 1,500 children. Some lessons would be better than others, some children would get more attention and do better than others, they'd occasionally need time off and so on. Simply put, human teachers were inconsistent, and not always great. So when the new educational bodies started recording the best lectures for every subject from around in the world, annotating them in 3D, and enhancing them with CG, what could the schools do to fight back?

"One of the most fun and useful things I've been doing lately is automating small processes I do all the time. It took me a while to work up the courage to dive into automation, as it always seemed like a really difficult, technical thing to do, which should be left to programmers."

"Do you merely link your article to Google Plus every time you write a blog post?  If so, you are missing a BIG opportunity to showcase your article. "

"As part of a university system that has delivered online courses, programs and degrees for a very long time, I am troubled by what appears to be the inseparable link between online education and massive online education-that is, that "massive" is THE way to deliver online programs.  Most online degree programs are not MOOP(rograms)s. "

Teachers in our district, especially freshmen teachers, have a ton on their plates this year. Between the new curriculum and teaching a classroom full of freshmen with laptops, our staff is swamped! That is exactly the reason why starting a PLN today is a good idea. A lot of people might feel that they don't have time to take on one more thing right now, but developing a PLN will actually make things easier for teachers in the long run.

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.

"The Internet affords children endless opportunities to get into serious trouble, downloading what they shouldn't download, looking at what they shouldn't be looking at, and getting ideas about what they shouldn't be getting ideas about. But the good news is that if your kids are like mine, they may be doing some or all of those things... but there's another use for the Internet that's attracting their time and attention. It's called teaching."

I really think I thought people just died if they didn't finish college. That kind of crazy superstition is how bubbles are made. For a time, we collectively seemed to believe that people might die if they didn't own their own houses. So we plowed money and faith into that conceit, and look what happened.

"this October, it is time to take a stand. I am pledging to refrain from discussing, speculating and analysing the trend for the remainder of this month. On my blog, on twitter, in conversation. It is no longer anything to do with those who are interested in education and technology. It is a monster, and I refuse to be a part of the forces that are feeding it."

"Whether you're an individual or a brand, it's important to adjust your content around the changing seasons and fickle trends. A good way to monitor the effectiveness of your pins and reach is by investing time in Pinterest analytics tools. To help, we've gathered six services that measure a wide range of Pinterest engagement metrics. How do you determine your Pinterest influence, either for your personal or branded account?"

"As more and more competitors for traditional media outlets emerge - whether they are corporations like The Huffington Post or teenagers in war-torn countries trying to do journalism on the fly, like the 14-year-old profiled in a recent New York Times story - there seems to be a growing obsession with defining what journalism is, and who deserves (or doesn't deserve) to be called a journalist. Is the man who live-blogged the Osama bin Laden assassination a journalist? Is National Public Radio's Andy Carvin, who has been using Twitter as a one-man newswire during the Arab Spring, a journalist?"

"The recent news that the Huffington Post surpassed the Washington Post and LA Times in online visitors affirmed what many media professionals already knew: There's real business in aggregation. Whether there are real profits as well remains to be seen."