EDUC 439/639 Social Networking - Fall 2012

"Thirty-five" was the answer to the following question posed to a marketing agency's hiring manager: "What is the minimum Klout score a college student can have and still be considered for an internship at your firm?" I immediately went into a state of shock - Shock that Klout has gone mainstream so quickly, and shock because my digital marketing student's Klout scores typically range from 15 to 25. As an instructor, I had to ask myself: "Am I doing everything I could to prepare my students for the real world workplace?"

One of our classmates mentioned a brother who had an online mugshot and I thought this article was interesting. udsnf12

"Horror stories have been published about employers asking for job applicants' Facebook passwords. Recently, psychologists discovered that employers frown upon applicants without a Facebook presence. The lack of a profile raises many red flags: is this person anti-social? Was once tagged in too many party photos? Is he or she just pretentious?"

"Bullying in a Networked Era: A Literature Review", by Nathaniel Levy, Sandra Cortesi, Urs Gasser, Edward Crowley, Meredith Beaton, June Casey, and Caroline Nolan, presents an aggregation and summary of recent academic literature on youth bullying and seeks to make scholarly work on this important topic more broadly accessible to a concerned public audience, including parents, caregivers, educators, and practitioners.

"There's a lot at stake and that means plenty of outlets resort to illicit practices (read: faux users and spambots) to improve their reputation. In a Gartner study, analysts found that by 2014, between 10 and 15 percent of social media reviews will be faked."

"Over the past few years, publishing content in this manner makes me a curator of sorts.  Not an aggregator.  And here is why. Curation goes one step beyond aggregation by adding an active, ongoing editorial component."

Social media is now an active reality for marketers. No longer something to consider as an option, marketers are rapidly increasing their budgets in this space and trying to leverage social media to best connect with consumers. Many marketers believe social media is a low risk, high reward channel. However, these 5 pitfalls will increase your risk and lower the reward, leading you down the path to social mediocrity.

"We force our youth into taking virtually all the same classes, subject them to the same standardized tests, and judge their future worth and potential off an average. In doing so, we bring smart students down to an average level, ignore average students, make under-achieving students feel absolutely hopeless, and leave brilliant students unchallenged and completely unmotivated. By destroying this natural variation we suppress the best parts of our human condition; the unique strengths and individualistic tendencies that lie within all of us."

"Wikipedia remains misunderstood because many educators have yet to recognize the distinction between Wikipedia as a tool for teaching and Wikipedia as a tool for research. Unfortunately, fear of the latter has blinded most to the possibilities of the former. I believe Wikipedia to be an effective tool for both."

Questioning App using Bloom's Taxonomy to ask questions to students at their levels.

This is a great app for classroom management.

"From the first week of school, the six year olds in my classroom begin to create an online presence in the form of a digital portfolio.  We use a blogging platform to do this, and include artifacts that show their progress in writing, reading, math, social studies and science."

This is what I LOVE about this article: "Students relish the feedback a comment gives, whether it is from a classmate, a parent, or someone they have never met. The audience becomes part of the student's learning." Now, I still have privacy concerns, but from reading her comments to others who were skeptical she says that she has not received inappriopriate comments in the 8 years she has been doing this. OK- Matt, my eyes are opening...a little bit. ;)

Michael: This content is protected... Can you find an open source to point us to?

Interesting...had no idea that they've been around for that long!

I use these little pictures quite a bit. I kind of like it when the little green guy replaces them because he seems very playful and helpful.

"In "The New Multi-screen World: Understanding Cross-Platform Consumer Behavior," we discovered that 90% of people move between devices to accomplish a goal, whether that's on smartphones, PCs, tablets or TV. We set out to learn not just how much of our media consumption happens on screens, but also how we use these multiple devices together, and what that means for the way that businesses connect with consumers."

"Having started a half dozen MOOC's in the recent months, I have found most of them tend to share a common trait. Many MOOC's currently represent a sort of parody of higher education's worst practices, its most spectacular delusions about itself."

Online Education Technology for Teachers and Students

This is great. I really like the direction that education is taking. I think that the more we incorporate technology into our schools, the more the students will respond and make significant gains.

"The project involves choosing a charity in the UAE, contacting them and working with them to discover their needs - then planning, organizing and leading an event, awareness campaign, fundraiser, etc and then explaining the results and all the feedback loops involved (the control phase). The final report will be a one page summary outlining the highlights of POLC and a five minute video of the POLC process they took."