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The world has become increasingly “flat,” as Tom Friedman has shown. Thanks to massive improvements in communications and transportation, virtually any place on earth can be connected to markets anywhere else on earth and can become globally competitive.1 But at the same time that the world has become flatter, it has also become “spikier”: the places that are globally competitive are those that have robust local ecosystems of resources supporting innovation and productiveness.2 A key part of any such ecosystem is a well-educated workforce with the requisite competitive skills. And in a rapidly changing world, these ecosystems must not only supply this workforce but also provide support for continuous learning and for the ongoing creation of new ideas and skills.
Essentially, these are Web 2.0 or Social Web technologies, technologies that enable communication, collaboration, participation and sharing.
This ECAR research bulletin discusses the use of student-developed social contracts to support a vital online community of inquiry. In blended classes—which combine co-present and web-mediated interaction—contracts that address both settings are particularly effective. This bulletin provides examples of successful student social contracts and describes students’ views on the impact of the social contract on their learning.
* A new course teaching media, mass communication, and political identities in the Middle East and North Africa explored the use of social media in pursuit of effective learning.
* Using a variety of social media and other tools encouraged student engagement in and out of the classroom.
* Student responses varied from discomfort with the technology to enthusiastic adoption and continued use after the course ended.
Social networking services routinely enroll millions. Social music-sharing services continue to grow, as Last.fm continues to build a user base and Apple’s iTunes now maintains a social function, My iTunes (http://www.apple.com/itunes/myitunes). It is no longer shocking to realize that photos are largely digital, rather than analog; it is also not surprising that they are published in active social networks, such as Flickr and Picasa. RSS feeds appear not only on most blogs and news sites, but on campus home pages and corporate intranets. Folksonomic tagging, briefly controversial, now appears in the most widely used platforms, like Amazon.com and YouTube.
For this reason, the widget seems to be very close of the social network and is definitely related to it. Widget is the kind of ideal complement of a social network. This is the missing part that has been waited to complete the first aim of a social network which is above all for its members to keep contact with their friends.
Facebook, the most popular social networking Web site in the world, was founded in a Harvard dorm room in the winter of 2004. Like Microsoft, that other famous technology company started by a Harvard dropout, Facebook was not particularly original. A quarter-century earlier, Bill Gates, asked by IBM to provide the basic programming for its new personal computer, simply bought a program from another company and renamed it. Mark Zuckerberg, the primary founder of Facebook, who dropped out of college six months after starting the site, took most of his ideas from existing social networks such as Friendster and MySpace. But while Microsoft could as easily have originated at MIT or Caltech, it was no accident that Facebook came from Harvard.
there's some suggestive evidence that the brain might contemplate other people very differently when that person is a virtual Facebook "page" and not a flesh and blood individual, with a tangible physical presence. Humans, after all, are social primates, blessed and burdened with a set of paleolithic social instincts. We aren't used to thinking about people as computerized abstractions. (The Frontal Cortex)
"Moodle is one of the brightest stars in the lineup of Learning Management Systems (LMS). It is arguably the best LMS available because of its open-source architecture and social constructivist philosophy."
Mahara is an open source e-portfolio, weblog, resume builder and social networking system, connecting users and creating online learner communities. Mahara is designed to provide users with the tools to demonstrate their life-long learning, skills and development over time to selected audiences.
"Social networking essentially requires a less controlled, user-generated environment, which challenges conventional views of the effective "management" of teaching and learning. Therefore, can social networking both as an instructional concept and user skill be integrated into the conventional approaches to teaching and learning? Do the skills developed within a social networking environment have value in the more conventional environments of learning?" (Campus Technology)
"In her thesis, she proposes that everyday involvement with these sites can be metaphorically represented as a “virtual campfire” that “bridges the gap between the place of the hearth and the space of the cosmos, potentially reversing what has been called “the disintegration of the public sphere” (Habermas 1962: 175)." (antropologi.info)
in list: Technologies for Teaching and Learning, Clones, Drones and Cyborgs
"Sync integrates with Scholar, allowing students to post relevant links to share with classmates. Some of Sync’s other features include integration with Blackboard’s message boards, access to grades and a page with announcements and recent course updates — viewable only to the student who’s both logged on to Facebook and enrolled in the given courses." (Inside Higher Ed)
Digg, Wikipedia, and the myth of Web 2.0 democracy. - By Chris Wilson - Slate Magazine (02.22.08)
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