Group items tagged

The divide in academia - those who blog and engage in the online world, and those who don't. Very good post. Also ties in with the connected researcher sessions we've done for Fass.

"All students today are increasingly expected to develop technological fluency, digital citizenship, and other twenty-first century competencies despite wide variability in the quality of learning opportunities schools provide. Social network sites (SNSs) available via the internet may provide promising contexts for learning to supplement school-based experiences. This qualitative study examines how high school students from low-income families in the USA use the SNS, MySpace, for identity formation and informal learning. The analysis revealed that SNSs used outside of school allowed students to formulate and explore various dimensions of their identity and demonstrate twenty-first century skills; however, students did not perceive a connection between their online activities and learning in classrooms. We discuss how learning with such technologies might be incorporated into the students overall learning ecology to reduce educational inequities and how current institutionalized approaches might shift to accommodate such change."

New tool that allows you to connect all your contact info, tweets, email, facebook stuff together

What is the Story of Stuff? From its extraction through sale, use and disposal, all the stuff in our lives affects communities at home and abroad, yet most of this is hidden from view. The Story of Stuff is a 20-minute, fast-paced, fact-filled look at the underside of our production and consumption patterns. The Story of Stuff exposes the connections between a huge number of environmental and social issues, and calls us together to create a more sustainable and just world. It'll teach you something, it'll make you laugh, and it just may change the way you look at all the stuff in your life forever.

Project to embed usb drives in walls etc for anonymous, no connection, sharing. Could be like e-geocaching!

"Braben has developed a tiny USB stick PC that has a HDMI port in one end and a USB port on the other. You plug it into a HDMI socket and then connect a keyboard via the USB port giving you a fully functioning machine running a version of Linux. The cost? $25."

Maths engine that can connect to Moodle - runs in any real browser. We should check it out.

Sounds like the connection is a marketplace app, not a full part of the suite. Less inspired than possibility of G+ and hangout tech.

We are witnessing the emergence of something profound: Humans, historically divided by geography, culture and creed, are beginning to connect and collaborate on a scale never seen before. The driving force behind this creative wave are digital tools and networks that allow new forms of collaboration and knowledge creation.

Developing a communication system by which users can connect to each other and share information in the absence of convenient access to the Internet.

Education, and in particular higher education, has seen rapid change as learning institutions have had to adapt to the opportunities provided by the Internet to move more of their teaching online1 and to become more flexible in how they operate. It might be tempting to think that such a period of change would lead to a time of consolidation and agreement about approaches and models of operation that suit the 21st century. New technologies continue to appear,2 however, and the changes in attitude indicated by the integration of online activities and social approaches within our lives are accelerating rather than slowing down. How should institutions react to these changes? One part of the answer seems to be to embrace some of the philosophy of the Internet3 and reevaluate how to approach the relationship between those providing education and those seeking to learn. Routes to self-improvement that have no financial links between those providing resources and those using them are becoming more common,4 and the motivation for engaging with formal education as a way to gain recognition of learning is starting to seem less clear.5 What is becoming clear across all business sectors is that maintaining a closed approach leads to missing out on ways to connect with people and locks organizations into less innovative approaches.6 Higher education needs to prepare itself to exist in a more open future, either by accepting that current modes of operation will increasingly provide only one version of education or by embracing openness and the implications for change entailed. In this article we look at what happens when a more open approach to learning is adopted at an institutional level. There has been a gradual increase in universities opening up the content that they provide to their learners. Drawing on the model of open-source software, where explicit permission to freely use and modify code has developed a software industry that rivals commercial approaches, a proposed

Some materials from FutureLab on social media (with a cost$) 

Terry Anderson with a recap of 3 generations of learning theory, nets, sets, groups, and a final section on Athabasca Landing built using Elgg to allow social learning and connection.

I like the concept! Take an education term and strip the jargon from it in 1000 words. A collaborative book for Connected Educators month NZ.

Open source solution for sharing content. connecting and collaborating. Integrates with other systems.

SHort Faculty Focus piece on connecting with your students and learning vs grades on the first day of a course.

"This time next year, your students will likely not remember a lot of the material you're trying to cover during this time, but they will remember the connection you built with them. They will remember your flexibility, generosity and compassion."