EDUC 439/639 Social Networking - Fall 2012

"Educators now have 100s of fantastic free online tools to help their students create and learn through digital storytelling. Many of these online tools have free apps available on i-devices and Android devices. Through digital storytelling we motivate our learners to apply, contextualize, visualize, and personalize the knowledge they learn."

English professor Christine Cucciarre said social media will play an integral role in her course "Writing the New Media," which is offered in the spring. She said the class requires students to use Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia, blogs and web design programs. Cucciarre said she likes using social media sites because of the ability to share posts. She said the class's Facebook group allows her students to share an interesting story or news clip with their peers, and students can also share content with their friends by reposting the link to their own page.

Hofstetter and Plourde both said the site provides its customers with a way of communicating, especially between students, that educators want to tap into. Plourde said the website is similar to a type of hangout, where people come together to share stories without physically meeting.

"Just the other day I was observing at a restaurant in Palo Alto that's popular for many business lunch meetings, that most, if not all, of those engaging with other humans were also equally engaged in their digital devices. I watched three different tables and in a time period of 15 minutes, every person at every one of those tables averaged checking their smartphones and responding to something at least three times."

"This past semester, William Kiker and I (Kelly Wroblewski) applied to be part of a pilot iPad program at our high school.  As members of a small project based  learning community within Austin High School in Austin, TX, we latched on to the ShowMe app pretty quickly."

"It's been interesting watching this unfold in music, books, newspapers, TV, but nothing has ever been as interesting to me as watching it happen in my own backyard. Higher education is now being disrupted; our MP3 is the massive open online course (or MOOC), and our Napster is Udacity, the education startup."

We're speaking over the same overtaxed cellular networks that he hopes will enable Datawind to educate every schoolchild in India through the world's cheapest functional tablet computer. But it's a losing battle, as his connection to one of the 13 separate cell carriers in Mumbai buckles under too much competing traffic. He has to repeat himself when he tells me the ultimate price university students will pay for his tablet, after half its cost has been subsidized by the Indian government. It's $20. In India, that's a quarter the cost of competing tablets with identical specifications. Similar tablets in China, the world champion in low-cost components and manufacturing, go for $45 and up, wholesale. Which means the Aakash 2 isn't just the cheapest fully functional tablet PC on the planet because the Indian government has decided it should be-it's the cheapest, period.

First of all, what is the "it" that I am referring to? "It" is a transformed reality where access to new tools, abundant content, and vast networks simultaneously provide countless new affordances and associated challenges.

"Despite the rapid advances in telepresence and distributed working tools, people still brave traffic and go to the office. Business travel is on the rise as people congregate for meetings and conferences. Attendees pay $7,500 for tickets to TED talks when the content is all posted free of charge on their website. And 250 leaders [including John Hagel] will attend Techonomy 2012 in Tucson starting Sunday. Are we just stubborn creatures of habit who are slow to adopt a better solution? Or, is there a fundamental value to the brick-and-mortar, flesh-and-bone world that cannot be replaced?"

"Memes are great for relevancy IF you have an obvious tie to the meme OR you're an online pundit whose writing/content basically lives off of commenting about news and other people's ideas. Otherwise they have little brand value."

"Did anyone not answer yet? Who still has a popsicle stick? Are you kidding me? Bring your classroom management into the 21 century with the Random Name Generator Tool."

I use this all of the time! I still use the popsicle sticks to change things up a bit though :)

""It will be harder to get into Minerva than any other university," says Nelson. "You'll have the same criteria for your grades, essay, and application. But you'll get no brownie points for how good an athlete you are, for how much money your parents can donate, or for what state you were born in.""

Great Facebook sites for educators

"Google, which is based in Mountain View, California, decided to stop censoring its search results in China in 2010. To avoid breaking the country's laws, Google moved the computers for its Chinese search engine from the country's mainland to Hong Kong, where the same censorship requirements aren't imposed. Since Google took its stand against censorship, its search engine and other services have been periodically unavailable."

"Here's my main insight from the iPad Summit that I helped host over the last two days: If you are teaching and creating learning experiences with iPads, we really need you to share your practice online. "

"There are 8 possible monetization strategies that MOOC providers like Coursera, or Learning Management System providers could adopt:"

This is for a K-12 educator. Please comment on these kids' blogs. They are elementary to middle school age, so please keep that in mind.

Hi, This site is great for creating blogs for kids-really user friendly or is that I just got use to WordPress. -:) http://scratchprogramming.wikispaces.com/Weebly+Tutorial I am going to share it with some of my colleagues.

Creating Your White Board using the Wii

"Create beautiful timelines! Tiki-Toki is the best and easiest way to create beautiful interactive timelines that you can share on the web"

"Think of Stixy as your online bulletin board. Create as many Stixyboards as you like, one for each project. "