e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: tww2.0

  • Social Software in an Academic Context is Hard

    People standing next to each other in a subway station, texting
    CC License: Josh Liba

    A couple of things have gotten me musing about social lately. The first was Dave Cormier’s thought-provoking blog post about how PLEs are supposed to disaggregate power, not people. The second was a private conversation with a friend who is thinking hard about how to add a social layer to an existing LMS. And the third was a blog post by Union Square Ventures VC Fred Wilson expressing skepticism about Google’s plan to add a social layer to its existing services. I have been struggling to articulate why I am ambivalent about both the attempts I have seen so far to create a Personal Learning Environment and attempts to layer on social capabilities to existing LMSs. Wilson says it better than I can:

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  • Storytelling with Web 2.0

    From my college friend @SarahM, who has turned out to be vastly cooler than I am, comes a tip about storytlr, a new service that looks like it has some interesting potential for the classroom. Basically, it takes inputs from all kinds of Web 2.0 tools—Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, Picasa, Facebook Random RSS feeds, etc.—and strings them together into a narrative. Basically, you choose the inputs, the date range, and the web page template, and the system puts out a storyboard with your pictures, videos, blog posts, tweets, etc., in chronological order that you can then edit. This would be fantastic for class projects or trips.

    Sweet!

  • Check Out smARThistory

    Just want to give a quick shoutout to my friends Steven Zucker and Beth Harris for their beautiful work on the newly redesigned smARThistory web site. When I think about Open Educational Resources, this is the sort of thing that I want to see. The site is clean and well-organized with an extremely high signal-to-noise ratio. They also have links out to useful Web 2.0 tools like a Dipity timeline and annotated photos at Flickr. It would be nice to see those sorts of resources even more tightly and pervasively integrated with the main assets of the site going forward, but that would really be icing on the cake.

    Good stuff.

  • Letting Facebook Be Facebook

    My colleague Linda Feng pointed me to an interesting article about a study by the University of Liecester about how students are using Facebook and how it impacts their lives at the university. Two critical points come out of this for me. On the one hand, social networking in and of itself does seem to help students. In particular, the researchers found that it is “part of the social glue that helps students settle into university life.” Nearly three quarters of the students said “Facebook had played an important part in helping them to settle in at university.” The article doesn’t specifically mention first-year retention measurements, but my guess is that successful use of social networks can improve retention of students through their first year and into their second year. More than a third of the students also “used Facebook to discuss academic work with other students on a weekly basis.”

    On the other hand, “41 per cent of students were against being contacted directly by tutors via Facebook,” and less than a third were interested in being contacted by the university via Facebook for administrative matters. Facebook isn’t a portal and isn’t an LMS either. It can play a vital role in student success, but only insofar as universities relinquish the idea that it is somehow beneficial for them to control that space. Think of it as being like off-campus housing. It plays a vital role in university life, but it does not belong to the university.

  • Please Welcome Guest Blogger Michael Staton

    Michael is the CEO of a company called Inigral, the company that produces the Facebook Courses application. You may have seen his earlier guest post for the On the Horizon. I have been talking a fair bit with Michael lately because my team at Oracle has been working with his company on integration through the IMS Learning Information Services specification. (Again, more on this real soon when we release our product.) We’re entering a new era with Web 2.0 where the university (with the students’ permission) may want to share data with outside applications for specific educational purposes. These new software configurations lead to new kinds of business partnerships, where the university’s relationship with the vendor is quite different than the traditional model. This is all in addition to the basic question of how these Web 2.0 capabilities should fit with and influence the unversity’s approaches to teaching and learning with technology.

    Michael is grappling with all of these issues right now, so I’ve invited him to come and think out loud with us here about them here on e-Literate.

  • Teaching with Web 2.0 del.icio.us Tag

    I’ve created a new del.icio.us tag and am inviting you all to use it. The Teaching with Web 2.0 tag, or tww2.0, is for all resources that…well…are useful for teaching with Web 2.0. I’ve refrained from calling it e-Learning 2.0 because it’s not clear to me that using Web 2.0 tools necessarily means that you’re doing anything revolutionary in your pedagogy.

    Anyway, I’d love to see some resources accumulate, so please do use the tag liberally.

  • Looking for del.icio.us Tutorials

    I’m putting together a “Teaching with Web 2.0” talk and cookbook and I’m looking for tutorials on how to use del.icio.us–preferably something basic that can walk technology-timid faculty through the steps of setting up an account, installing the bookmarklet, tagging pages, finding pages tagged by other people, etc. Anybody know of anything like that? The help pages on del.icio.us itself are OK, but I’m looking for something more like a set of tutorials.