EDUC 439/639 Social Networking - Fall 2012

"Cardale Jones, a third-string quarterback at Ohio State University, tweeted on Friday that athletes shouldn't need to attend class, ESPN reported. "Why should we have to go to class if we came here to play FOOTBALL, we ain't come to play SCHOOL classes are POINTLESS," he wrote. Once media organizations noticed and started to write about the tweet, it was removed, as was the entire Twitter account of Jones. The university suspended Jones for one game as a result of the tweet."

I really think I thought people just died if they didn't finish college. That kind of crazy superstition is how bubbles are made. For a time, we collectively seemed to believe that people might die if they didn't own their own houses. So we plowed money and faith into that conceit, and look what happened.

"At this year's Educon I had the opportunity to collaborate with some wonderful librarians (Michelle Luhtala, Joyce Valenza, and Shannon Miller) and a fantastic student (Michael DeMattia) to share our experiences and have a conversation about teaching and learning in a no ban and no filter zone. The conversation is important because around the nation there are schools that are making the choice to do what is most convenient rather than what is right for kids. Rather than thinking outside the ban and empowering children to use the devices they own and access the internet they encounter outside of school, students are being banned and blocked. "

"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?"

"Many institutions have invested substantial resources in diverse initiatives to deliver distance learning and/or enhance campus-based learning with online resources. To these institutional efforts, faculty and students are now adding online tools and resources from beyond the campus. Higher education institutions are confronting the need to connect these various efforts to create more powerful and integrated learning experiences for all of their students. In this interview, Brian Hughes, Director of Social Media at the Teacher's College at Columbia University, discusses the issues surrounding social media integration."

The course management system (CMS) reinforces the status quo and hinders substantial teaching and learning innovation in higher education. It does so by imposing artificial time limits on learner access to course content and other learners, privileging the role of the instructor at the expense of the learner, and limiting the power of the network effect in the learning process. The open learning network (OLN)-a hybrid of the CMS and the personal learning environment (PLE)-is proposed as an alternative learning technology environment with the potential to leverage the affordances of the Web to dramatically improve learning.

"Facebook "likes" are being added to webpages even if a user has not clicked a like button, or even visited the page in question, the company has admitted. A US security researcher found that simply sending a web address to a friend using Facebook's private messaging function would add two likes to that page. "

"There are a lot of gadgets out there, right? Shiny new products with fun, useful, or amazing capabilities are being churned out at quite the clip. They're available for use in workplaces, schools, and at home, and the scope of what we can do with all these neat devices is only expanding. So, we know that students are connected - Very Connected. They have computers, smartphones, tablets, and a variety of devices in between. But just how connected are they? And what does this mean for teachers?"

"#Edchat began on Twitter three years ago. Like dog years, three years in social media time is much longer. Back then, there were far fewer educators exchanging ideas on Twitter. Twitter was only beginning to emerge as a serious method of collaboration for educators. Celebrities dominated the network and got great media coverage about their tweets. Serious use of Twitter by educators for collaboration was never covered by the media. It was not media worthy."

"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. "

"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."

"KitchenAid deleted the original tweet and apologized within eight minutes, according to SimplyMeasured and as reported by Mashable. Minutes are an eternity on Twitter, where retweets can spread like wildfire, especially during major news events - and the widely watched presidential debate at the University of Denver saw more than 10 million tweets sent while the two candidates were on stage."

"There's nothing I like better than when good content begets other good content. After all, producing content is a relative cinch. But producing good (or even great!) content? That's a lot harder. Which is why you've got to make sure you squeeze every last drop of engaging goodness out of every piece of content you generate. Or, as C.C. and I write in Content Rules, think REIMAGINED, not recycled."

"Last month, State Governor Jay Nixon signed Senate Bill 54, which goes into effect on August 28, 2011 in the state of Missouri. The new law bans direct social networking contact between teachers and students in the hopes of setting more distinct boundaries on the relationships between the two."

""This flies in the face of all these traditional views that all structural development happens in infancy, early in childhood," Schlegel said. "Now that we actually do have tools to watch a brain change, we are discovering that in many cases the brain can be just as malleable as an adult as it is when you are a child or an adolescent.""