EDUC 439/639 Social Networking - Fall 2012

"As the Embedded For-Profit industry develops, he predicts it will further curtail professors' autonomy, already somewhat weakened by colleges' use of outside companies to host learning-management systems - and more recently to help manage and produce online-education programs."

"Touchjet WAVE Plus transforms TVs in living rooms, meeting rooms, and classrooms everywhere with more features than any TV set boxes or smart TVs can offer."

"Get the digital skills you need to grow your business, your career or just your confidence. We'll set you up with a personal learning plan, completely free."

""According to multiple, peer-reviewed studies, simply being in an open network instead of a closed one is the best predictor of career success," he writes. "In fact, the study shows that half of the predicted difference in career success (i.e., promotion, compensation, industry recognition) is due to this one variable.""

"Social media is all about being in the moment, having real-time interactions, and sharing with others. If your classroom rules are too restrictive, you can't naturally and fully take advantage of what social media has to offer. Still, it is important to be initially cautious and make sure you get to know your students before you begin engaging with them on social media to any great extent."

"No one believes that knowing the alphabet and sounding out words mean that a person possesses the deep literacy needed for college-level learning. Yet our ideas about digital literacy are steadily becoming more impoverished, to the point that many of my current students, immersed in a "walled garden" world of apps and social media, know almost nothing about the web or the Internet. "

"Paul Otlet described a future networked environment - the Mundaneum - that in many ways resembles the present-day Internet. But his vision extended well beyond the scope of a simple information repository."

"hat we're witnessing is the changing role of faculty in Competency Based Education - I (and many ed. reformers) believe instructors SHOULD function more like tutors, coaches, and mentors than their roles have traditionally called for! The faculty role has been historically constructed as a "fount of knowledge", sage on a stage, the smartest person in the room - this was a historic necessity during the long era of information scarcity that we are transitioning away from. Now that information is abundant, infinitely reproducible, instantly accessible, subject matter experts need to share space with faculty who specialize in the interpersonal nuances of teaching students. In fact "regular and substantive interaction" is scarce in higher education, unless you count lecturing and note-taking as "interaction". Do you? Is this the standard that OIG is measuring WGU against?"

"The key question we face is whether online learning should aim to replace teachers and instructors through automation, or whether technology should be used to empower not only teachers but also learners. Of course, the answer will always be a mix of both, but getting the balance right is critical."

"After leaving their positions at Lingua, the editors started a new open-access journal called Glossa. The new journal charges a $400 APC to authors, and waives that fee for authors who do not have the funds. Lingua's APC, by contrast, is still $1,800, the same as it was before the previous editorial board's departure. "

"I think the most significant change is in the recognition of information literacy as a set of multiple literacies. This means that information literacy will need to redefined (and it was ill-defined to begin with). It also means that the pedagogy of information literacy will have to change. It will become a pedagogy of multiliteracies."

"The first totally online credit course delivered entirely via the Internet was taught in January, 1986 at the University of Toronto, through the Graduate School of Education (then called OISE: the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education). Thus January, 2016 marks the 30th anniversary."

"There's been much debate in recent years about the role of public colleges in an era when students pay for more than half their education in most states. Sure, state funds might make up less than 10 percent of the budget at the University of Virginia, the University of Michigan, and Berkeley, but the fact of the matter is that most public colleges couldn't survive if not for their states."

"Young has reduced the number of students failing, withdrawing or performing below average in Bio 208: Human Anatomy from 50 percent to fewer than 20 percent in about four years, and poorly performing students have watched their grades climb, with continued improvement on the horizon."

"If you are lucky enough to never experience any sort of adversity, we won't know how resilient you are. It's only when you're faced with obstacles, stress, and other environmental threats that resilience, or the lack of it, emerges: Do you succumb or do you surmount?"