EDUC 439/639 Social Networking - Fall 2012

"Over 49,000 students registered for the class, over 16,000 attended the first week's lecture, and over 4,900 students earned a certificate at the end of the 10-week course. It would take 32 years of teaching our SI 502 foundations course on networked computing to interact with that many students."

"If you have an exercise bike in the back room, you could be the small selection of people that use it everyday to get fit. But then again, you could be one of many more who bought it in the hope of regular practice but were unable to make it part of your routine. The MOOC or Massive Open Online Course, which has come to prominence this year, often has much the same effect. Students may enrol in the online free courses from prestigious universities in their tens of thousands, but overwhelmingly they bomb out with attrition rates up to 80-90%."

"Yet sadly, despite all your efforts, you probably have fewer friends than most of your friends have. But don't despair - the same is true for almost all of us. Our friends are typically more popular than we are."

"I don't believe that the LMS is dead, yes my livelihood depends on it, but the facts are that institutions like "software systems" that help meet strategic objects. The cool part (and often challenging for buyers) is that there are hundreds of systems that use the LMS moniker."

"Increasing use of tablets and the move away from Flash development is bringing HTML5 to the forefront of eLearning. In this new Hot Topics report, HTML5 and eLearning: What Managers and Practitioners Must Know, Judy Unrein examines HTML5's capabilities, why HTML5 is a worthy contender, and design and authoring considerations."

"The problem with the internet is that nothing is temporary. "

"Thanks to the game Babylonian Twins, iPhone and Android users can explore creative renditions of monuments in and near ancient Babylon, including the legendary hanging gardens, the Ishtar gate and processional way, and the ziggurat some believe to be the Biblical Tower of Babel."

NetSmartz Workshop is an interactive, educational program of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children® (NCMEC) that provides age-appropriate resources to help teach children how to be safer on- and offline. The program is designed for children ages 5-17, parents and guardians, educators, and law enforcement. With resources such as videos, games, activity cards, and presentations, NetSmartz entertains while it educates.

When Tweeting was Fun to read during an open session

The dire need for repairs still remains, despite a broad range of approaches designed to fix public education. The pendulum swings to and fro. This year, the highly politicized strategy is to increase the stringency of standardized tests (often without warning) and then to blame the teachers for the widespread failures of their students to meet those standards.

You cannot repair a system when its foundation has been destroyed. I think most students want to take control of their learning. The use of Web 2.0 tools can move this process alone and the teacher's role must change from a 'sage on state' to a social media coach.

I have told her to name names. I'm not sure it'll have much of an impact, but just as the Reddit community now must deal with the increased scrutiny on its machinations and culture, I'd hope that a little more transparency and openness about academia's own culture will do it a lot of good.

Cost and completion issues have turned the state of Texas into a proving ground for unconventional ideas such as outsourced online competency-based learning and the $10,000 bachelor's degree. Now the University of Texas will enter MOOCs into the equation with the hope that it will make a Texas degree less expensive for some students.

Free Webinar Raise Student Achievement via Formative Assessment 10/17/12 at 2pm ET

This is an important find! Thanks!

This looks like a nice change from PP. Not static.

"All large-scale, multi-user communities and online social networks that rely on users to contribute content or build services share one property: most users don't participate very much. Often, they simply lurk in the background. In contrast, a tiny minority of users usually accounts for a disproportionately large amount of the content and other system activity. This phenomenon of participation inequality was first studied in depth by Will Hill in the early '90s, when he worked down the hall from me at Bell Communications Research"