EDUC 439/639 Social Networking - Fall 2012

Dale J. Stephens is a Penguin author, Thiel Fellow, and education activist. He founded UnCollege in January 2011 because we are paying too much for university and learning too little.

The idea that a college diploma is an all-but-mandatory ticket to a successful career is showing fissures. Feeling squeezed by a sagging job market and mounting student debt, a groundswell of university-age heretics are pledging allegiance to new groups like UnCollege, dedicated to "hacking" higher education.

Dev Bootcamp, a nine-week intensive program that takes students with no programming background and turns them into world class beginner, job-ready software engineers. More than 90 percent of all Dev Bootcamp graduates, who are called "Boots," have found jobs in the tech community within three months after graduation.

Facebook Subscribe lets you get feed updates from people who don't have to Subscribe back. It's essentially Twitter within Facebook. So to reduce confusion and hopefully boost traction, it's adopting Twitter's terminology and renaming Subscribe as "Follow".

"Wherever the money is coming from, and however it is being spent, the root of the crisis in higher education (and the evidence that investment in universities may amount to a bubble) comes down to the fact that additional value has not been created to match this extra spending. Indeed, evidence from declines in the quality of students and graduates suggests that a degree may now mean less than it once did."

"ATOMS are creative toys that enable kids - big and small - to make things that do things. Fun, innovative, and iOS controlled."

we have to realize that no matter the level of tech saturation in their lives outside of school, that this introduction of ever-present connectedness during school is something very different for students too. So my approach with the following students was to ask them to simply share what some positives and negatives were with their first few months of this newfound access to the Web. Here are their unabridged responses…

"What are the characteristics we would expect to see in a successful 21st century educator? We know 21st century educators are student-centric, holistic and they are teaching about how to learn as much as teaching about the subject area. We know too, that they must be 21st century learners as well. But highly effective teachers in today's classrooms are more than this - much more."

"That's the latest number from the Social Media Report, an annual snapshot by Nielsen and NM Incite. The report says that Facebook is still the top social network, though its tally of unique visitors has fallen 4 percent from the same time last year. Blogger, the second-place network, also saw a slight decline (3 percent) while third-place Twitter saw a gain of 13 percent. Wordpress, likewise, saw a 10 percent jump. The break-out social media star of the past year has been Pinterest, the report said, which jumped 1,047 percent from the same time last year. And since its Sept. 2011 debut, Google+ has grown 80 percent."

"There is already evidence that teachers are using social media as part of teaching strategies, with the aim of encouraging students to view social networks as less of a pleasurable distraction, and more as something that can be used in projects and for personal expression in a medium they prefer. Steven Anderson has recently proposed a comprehensive set of general approaches to integrating social media into the classroom, and focuses on the need to carefully review existing teaching strategies and understandings of social media before making changes."

"She's a celebrator," said Anne-Marie Slaughter, a Princeton professor and former State Department official. "You feel the tremendous amount of pleasure she takes in finding these things and sharing them. It's like walking into the Museum of Modern Art and having somebody give you a customized, guided tour."

Costly digital technology that has the power to transform education often sits in boxes because teachers do not know how best to use it, a study claims.

Tables, counters and whiteboards will eventually become displays. Meeting rooms will have touch panels, and chalk boards will be replaced by large systems that have digital images and documents on a display that teachers can mark up with a stylus.

"As soon as it was explained to me, I said, "Wow. I know a lot of professionals who have first world career problems." In my line of work, I interact daily with people who are unemployed or under-employed - many of whom are professionally challenged. They've got outdated skills, or were part of a dying industry that lead them to where they are now. So, when I hear someone who is educated, articulate, and above all, employed, say one or more of the first world career problems below, it can be tough to find compassion for them. I have to remind myself that "perception is reality.""

"A new survey finds that about a third of middle-schoolers now use smart phones or tablets not just for entertainment and communication, but also for homework. Paired with young people's interest in science, math, and technology, it's another sign of the potential for digital learning that educators are slowly beginning to tap."

"In a chapter titled "What College Could Be Like," Mr. Khan conjures an image of a new campus in Silicon Valley where students would spend their days working on internships and projects with mentors, and would continue their education with self-paced learning similar to that of Khan Academy. The students would attend ungraded seminars at night on art and literature, and the faculty would consist of professionals the students would work with as well as traditional professors."

"Among faculty, cost (88% reporting as important or very important) and ease of use (86%) are most important for selecting online resources. The time and effort to find and evaluate are consistently listed as the most important barriers by faculty to the adoption of open education resources."