EDUC 439/639 Social Networking - Fall 2012

"Having started a half dozen MOOC's in the recent months, I have found most of them tend to share a common trait. Many MOOC's currently represent a sort of parody of higher education's worst practices, its most spectacular delusions about itself."

This is a great app for classroom management.

"Over the past few years, publishing content in this manner makes me a curator of sorts.  Not an aggregator.  And here is why. Curation goes one step beyond aggregation by adding an active, ongoing editorial component."

"I have created example forms for each of the different topics, follow the links in each of the ten sections. With help from a Googler I have included a link so that you can get your own copy of the form - click on the appropriate link and it should open in your docs home."

"This article will take a critical look at curator journalism, an umbrella term for the numerous ways in which professional journalists combine their own work with material found from online sources."

Nancy and I decided to organize the special issue around "socially mediated publicness," both because we find that topic to be of great interest and because we felt like there was something fun about talking about publicness in truly public form. We weren't sure what the response to our call would be, but were overwhelmed with phenomenal submissions and had to reject many interesting articles.

Tweetbook.in lets you take a backup of your tweets in the form of a diary like PDF ebook. Login to start creating your tweetbooks.

"Unlike any other website you have the freedom to do whatever you like and wish to see. Even the profile viewers can be edited according to your wish. It can be made into a very useful account if you follow the below mentioned 10 tips."

Installing the Web Highlighter bookmarklet enables you to easily highlight and bookmark webpages in iPad Safari, just like in iBooks.

"Thanks to a new addition to Google's Takeout service, YouTube users can now download all of their videos in one fell swoop. For those unfamiliar, Google's Takeout service, which is a part of Google's "Data Liberation Front," allows users to download key data hosted by Google in one file. Data includes Google Docs, chat history, Picasa albums, and now YouTube videos."

101 websites that every teacher should know about

Nice! I will copy this link into Diigo. Thanks for sharing.

"I put together this list of websites for elementary teachers, hoping that you'll finally be able add something fresh and fun to your lesson plan."

Most universities are not teaching about social media.

On Saturday U.S. Senator Chris Coons (D-Delaware) spoke at Podcamp East in Wilmington, Del. The fact that he is one of the few elected members of Congress that not only "has" social media but uses it made him the perfect candidate to talk to a completely engaged and social audience about the use of social media in the political and government sphere.

A good rule of thumb is if it's boring to write, then it's probably boring to read. The reason is that your enthusiasm for the subject is reflected in your treatment of the subject. If it's a subject you are passionate about, it is only natural that you lavish attention on the details and spend that extra time fussing over the language. So how do you take a hum-drum post and make it awesome?

"This is a followup (of sorts) on some of those ideas and food for thought for those thinking of using Twitter in the HigherEd online, hybrid or face to face classroom, specifically at the graduate level."

"blogs with more frequent posts tend to receive more traffic than blogs that post once a month, as new content brings in new page views, but in this case the goal isn't necessarily to bring in hoards of traffic, it's to get your readers used to coming to your blog. It's to create a posting schedule people who follow your blog can remember, so that they know when to expect your next post. "

"As a former K-12 teacher and a current educator in higher education, I grappled with the idea of creating a Facebook account to communicate and become "friends" with my students. I was less concerned with using Twitter because of the difference between "following" and "friending." In my youth I was told by parents and teachers, "I'm not your friend." They said this to distinguish between the roles of friends and adults in the rearing of a child. An assumed level of respect was maintained between teacher-student and parent-teacher when such boundaries were made clear. Today's shift in learning environments to learner-centered classrooms thus raises these questions: Do educators now want to be friends with their students? Do students actually prefer not to be friends with their teachers?"