scott klepesch's List: Social Networking

• While students haven’t become enamored with Twitter yet, it has become a hot  spot for educators to find professional development and resources. One of the  most popular types of educator events on Twitter are “EdChats”—one-hour  conversations that take place every Tuesday around a particular topic. The chats  are the brainchild of several educators, including Thomas Whitby, a co-creator  of a 3,700-member Ning site called The Educator’s PLN, for  “professional-learning network.”
• Social networking is allowing teachers, who often feel isolated in their  classrooms, to revolutionize the way they connect with others, says Whitby, a  former English teacher who is now an adjunct professor of education for  secondary English at St. Joseph’s College in New York City.

• he current educational system is based on individual and teacher learning. However, this simply isn’t realistic in today’s classroom. Students are social creatures and their education should be delivered in a way that is more in line with their day-to-day interactions. The solution? Go back to the principle that worked so well in the single school house model: social learning.  Student-to-student and social learning has already proven to be effective and cost effective (it’s free).
• As part of a redesign of our instructional model, students should be provided with the infrastructure to collaborate with each other live, in real-time, 24 hours a day. We should give students free, collaborative, multimedia online study rooms with access to standards-aligned content. We should do this because we have a social responsibility to do it, but it also makes good plain economic sense.
• Why limit your student population to a few hundred when you can leverage the knowledge of hundreds of millions?

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• Foremost are the effects of the "digital divide." Many teachers I work with each semester wonder how social technology would ever relate to their assignments in cash-strapped Baltimore schools. So, we spend a semester reimagining funding and policy. Last year, one of my students persuaded his principal to let him pilot a tablet program with money that otherwise would have been spent on a more expensive desktop computer lab. Andrew Coy, a teacher at the Digital Harbor High School, has turned an unused room and a few computers into a new media center. But individually, teachers can only do so much.
• It is growing exponentially wider on a daily basis. From students connecting with authors and scientists via Skype, to kids engaging in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) curricula via MIT OpenCourseWare, to students tweeting and conversing with people half a world away in the midst of a revolution (as students at my own school did during the events in Egypt), to teachers participating in daily worldwide discussions on professional development via the #edchat Twitter feed, connectedness will define the value of education over the next generation.
• A gap will emerge between those schools that can offer the capacity for network building — represented by their own network of connected teachers and administrators — and those that will not make the connection
• or most children, the key to success will continue to be sharp critical skills, strong connections, effective communication and the nerve to be creative and entrepreneurial. The difference is that we are living at a time in which all of those skills are defined by one's proficiency in connected media.

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• Scaling across happens when people create something locally and inspire others who carry the idea home and develop it in their own unique way" (p. 36).
• Juxtaposition to other leads to learning. Connecting with others leads to potentially powerful ideas.  Technology allows us the means to connect across cultures, genders, politics, ages, nationalities, and geographies while tapping emerging and/or established affinities/interests, wonderings, passions, and disciplines.
• Instead, information technology has become a participatory medium, giving rise to an environment that is constantly being changed and reshaped by the participation itself. The process is almost quantum in nature: The more we interact with these informational spaces, the more the environment changes, and the very act of finding information reshapes not only the context that gives that information meaning but also the meaning itself (
• Learning now, therefore, goes far beyond a simple transfer of information and becomes inextricably bound with the context that is being created.

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• ED, Wired and other conference organisers increasingly recognise that forming connections is a significant part of the value they offer, charging attendees even when the talks themselves are often released for free.
• n addition to the value in human networks, there is often latent value in networks of different data sets. For example, by combining seemingly unrelated data, Walmart discovered that Pop-Tarts sales in the US rocket when there's a hurricane warning, a finding that now helps them to stock smartly.
• Metcalfe's law states that the value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users of the system

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