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"The primary purpose of this wiki is to provide a place for students to fact-check, annotate, and provide context to the different news stories that show up in their Twitter and Facebook feeds. It's like a student-driven Snopes, but with a broader focus: we don't aim to just investigate myths, but to provide context and sanity to all the news - from the article about voter fraud to the health piece on a new cancer treatment."

"Social media has swallowed the news - threatening the funding of public-interest reporting and ushering in an era when everyone has their own facts. But the consequences go far beyond journalism"

"Recently I asked a student in my Digital Culture class what she hoped to get out of it. Other students have said they hope to get more proficient at blogging or becoming more informed about digital issues. But she surprised me. In fact, she seemed to push back a bit. Why should I learn yet another thing to do online when I already waste enough time there?"

"The fact is, irresponsible social media conduct could potentially ruin your education and negatively impact your career, not to mention hurt others in the process. (And we're not just talking kids, either.) But most of those consequences are preventable, often with just a little foresight."

"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."

"Finding copyright free (public domain) and free to use cartoons (open licensed) can be difficult and the reuse of cartoons in online resources without the necessary permissions is a tricky legal area depending on the facts and circumstances of the case. Here you will find a collection of free to use cartoons that have been licensed in terms of Creative Commons licenses - to visit each cartoonist's site, click on their cartoons shown below. Please do adhere to the terms of use specified by each author."

"More importantly, this results in 76.6% of US students regularly choosing not to buy the required books. Students say that aside from the high prices, they are frustrated by the fact that professors only put a few chapters of a required textbook on the mandatory reading list during a course."

New data from a long-term study by the Community College Research Center at Columbia University's Teachers College suggest that some of the students most often targeted in online learning's access mission are less likely than their peers to benefit from -- and may in fact be hurt by -- digital as opposed to face-to-face instruction.

"While we tend to glorify industrial-park incubators and think-tanks, the fact is that many of the innovative services we use today were created by entrepreneurs who had a fair chance to compete for web traffic. By enabling internet service providers to limit that access, we are essentially saying that only the privileged can continue to innovate. Meanwhile, small content creators, such as bloggers and grassroots educators, would face challenges from ISPs placing restrictions on information traveling over their networks."

"In my remarks today I'll try to discuss some of the reasons why engagement using digital texts and tools in our classrooms is difficult. One of the main impediments to this work is the fact that the Common Core State Standards make little room for integration of new literacies. My talk will focus on the nature of information on the Internet and its implications for how teachers think about reading comprehension, critical thinking, and learning in a digital information age. In short, we need to embrace all literacies. We will explore how the Internet poses new challenges for global learners that extend beyond traditional reading comprehension skills in order to encompass these new literacies as well as the higher level thinking skills associated with them."

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.

"If you think about it for a second, the fact that young people aren't especially reliable predictors of tech trends shouldn't come as a surprise. Sure, youth is associated with cultural flexibility, a willingness to try new things that isn't necessarily present in older folk. But there are other, less salutary hallmarks of youth, including capriciousness, immaturity, and a deference to peer pressure even at the cost of common sense. This is why high school is such fertile ground for fads. And it's why, in other cultural areas, we don't put much stock in teens' choices. No one who's older than 18, for instance, believes One Direction is the future of music."

"Twitter with its short and snappy messaging is very dependent on mobile usage and smart phones. The rise of the visual web is making Pinterest and Tumblr the fastest growing social networks on the planet. Google+ is no longer an afterthought and is embedded in Google's web assets including Gmail, local checkins and the mobile Android ecosystems."

"You are thinking from a professional perspective in that you will be connecting with other businesses, perhaps even the competition, as much as you will be with customers. It's likely that you will be engaging with people outside of your usual social circles and that's the key thing to remember. The fact that Google+ is still gathering a following is a testament to the potential influence it could have in the future."

"The schools most at risk are those without strong name recognition. While that might be unfair, it seems to be a fact of life. While Clayton Christensen has taken some heat from the projection that "in 15 years from now half of US universities may be in bankruptcy", the data from this survey lends some credibility to the concept."

"Although massive open online courses (MOOCs) are seen to be, and are in fact designed to be, stand-alone online courses, their introduction to the higher education landscape has expanded the space of possibilities for blended course designs (those that combine online and face-to-face learning experiences). Instead of replacing courses at higher education institutions, could MOOCs enhance those courses? This paper reports one such exploration, in which a Stanford University Machine Learning MOOC was integrated into a graduate course in machine learning at Vanderbilt University during the Fall 2012 semester. The blended course design, which leveraged a MOOC course and platform for lecturing, grading, and discussion, enabled the Vanderbilt instructor to lead an overload course in a topic much desired by students. The study shows that while students regarded some elements of the course positively, they had concerns about the coupling of online and in-class components of this particular blended course design. Analysis of student and instructor reflections on the course suggests dimensions for characterizing blended course designs that incorporate MOOCs, either in whole or in part. Given the reported challenges in this case study of integrating a MOOC in its entirety in an on-campus course, the paper advocates for more complex forms of blended learning in which course materials are drawn from multiple MOOCs, as well as from other online sources."

"According to the recently released 2013 Speak Up National Research Project findings, Flipped Learning-defined in the survey as using lecture videos as homework while using class time for more in-depth learning such as discussions, projects, experiments, and to provide personalized coaching to individual students-is surpassing all other digital trends, including mobile apps and technology…at least, that is, in K-12."

"From email to social media, there comes a time in everyone's life when we need to sit up and face the truth about our online selves. And the best way to make us all see the light is with graphs. Danish artists Mikael Wulff and Anders Morgenthaler created the series "Truth Facts" on their comedy website Kind of Normal. The humorously honest graphs show the hard truths of everyday life - especially online life."

"With the Illum, Lytro is targeting a more specialized market. In addition to the 8X (30 - 250mm) zoom lens, it has a constant f/2.0 aperture, 1/4000 shutter, and a four-inch backside touchscreen display. According to the company, the new sensor can capture 40 million light rays (Lytro doesn't list megapixels) to the original's 11 million. Its desktop processing software works with traditional products, like Adobe's Photoshop and Lightroom. Photographers can use the camera's software to refocus pictures after the fact, generate 3-D images, adjust the depth of field, and create tilt shifts. It will be available in July for $1,500."

Google+ isn't as big as Facebook, but it's bigger than Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram and all the rest. But size is irrelevant at this point. The fact is that it's way too big and active to kill. Google+ provides the best information Google has at its disposal for understanding hundreds of millions of users' social relationships, interests, identity and product and brand affinities. Google+ supports serious initiatives in the company like Android, Chrome, Chromebooks, Search and more.