EDUC 439/639 Social Networking - Fall 2012

"Now I have over a thousand unread messages in one email account, and I'm tempted to declare email bankruptcy. Since then, I've been focusing on one email account that I check consistently and keep organized. I've found that it's more efficient for me personally to manage one inbox than it is to jump around checking multiple accounts. Here are several strategies for staying on top of email:"

"We're in a technology tsunami," says her coach, Ms. Klaus. "Whether you love it or hate it, ultimately we have to figure out how to survive it and make it work for us."

Glass looks like only the headband of a pair of glasses - the part that hooks on your ears and lies along your eyebrow line - with a small, transparent block positioned above and to the right of your right eye. That, of course, is a screen, and the Google Glass is actually a fairly full-blown computer. Or maybe like a smartphone that you never have to take out of your pocket.

"This summer Sylvia wrote a number of excellent blog posts containing sound information for anyone that has questions about using social media in elementary school classrooms."

"Unlike most MOOC's, which seek to teach as large a group of students as possible, UnderAcademy caps enrollment in each course at 15, with the idea that students should shape the courses and have a more personal learning experience. "

"Both movies - Bruno and District 9 - made over 14 million dollars on opening night. On the second day, Bruno fell to meager 8.7 million, while District made a respectable 12.6 million dollars. Has Twitter had anything to do with it?"

Great list of ways to use an iPad in the classroom

"In combining the classic feeling of handling a book with the interactivity of the computer, Waldek Węgrzyn of the Academy of Fine Arts in Katowice, Poland, has created a new human-computer interface. His "Electrolibrary" project connects the custom made book to a PC. Providing additional information, relevant to the page being viewed, on-screen. Turn a page in the book, and you "turn a page" on the website as well."

EverFi, Inc. the leading education technology company for critical skills, today announced that it has built Sash, the first open-source badging platform that enables education companies to use badges to encourage and recognize student achievement. EverFi launched t open-source badging technology across its K-12 learning platform in the 2012-2013 academic year. The technology behind Sash allows organizations to integrate badge creation, management, and display into their own products. The badging platform follows the metadata format established by the Mozilla Open Badge Infrastructure.

"Class2Go stands out for a variety of reasons. It is open-source, it is nonprofit, it is portable and it is designed not only for teaching but also for research, so Stanford professors will be able to learn about learning as they teach."

"From multimedia to geocaching, the possibilities for using mobiles to engage learners are endless. Teachers tell Emma Drury how and why they are using the devices in school"

This is the course blog for the section of ETAD 470 that I teach for the College of Education. The current iteration of this site is for the term starting in January 2013.

For many years, Professor Pollock has actively worked for improving the participation of women and other underrepresented groups in computer science. She has been an active leader at the annual Grace Hopper celebrations of Women in Computing, encouraged her students to have service learning opportunities, and has been active in the development of high school Computer Science curriculum. Her students report that she exhorts them to find ways to use their technical knowledge to make the world a better place.

Jonathan Finkelstein, director of the BadgeStack Project, was recently featured in a video produced by the NYC Department of Education to help introduce educators to the impact of digital badges in K-12 classroom settings.

""Most campuses are seeing that we can't just keep firing this content out on all channels," says Malcolm Brown, a director at Educause, the higher-education-technology consortium. Not only do students feel inundated, but staff members may be overwhelmed by the extra work of reporting events and messages on multiple sites."

One of the questions about badges that came up seems like a crucial issue as we grapple with different ways of characterizing and describing badges. This post aims to add the category of badge functions to other badge taxonomies like the one by Carla Casilli.

"A comprehensive and groundbreaking new report released Monday by the Pew Research Center's Internet and American Life Project has found that only four users of Facebook derive pleasure of any kind from the popular social networking website. According to the report, the remainder of the 950 million people registered with Facebook, despite using the site on a regular basis, take no joy in doing so, and in fact feel a profound sense of hopelessness and despair immediately upon logging in."