Mashable write up of our Twitter article: Alan Cann, Jo Badge, Stuart Johnson, Alex Moseley. Twittering the student experience. ALT-N, Vol. 17, October 2009. http://newsletter.alt.ac.uk/xrctg5ovlfkimsphpsy77s
CommentPress is an open source theme for the WordPress blogging engine that allows readers to comment paragraph by paragraph in the margins of a text. Annotate, gloss, workshop, debate: with CommentPress you can do all of these things on a finer-grained level, turning a document into a conversation. It can be applied to a fixed document (paper/essay/book etc.) or to a running blog.
The Critical Friend is a powerful idea, perhaps because it contains an inherent tension. Friends bring a high degree of unconditional positive regard. Critics are, at first sight at least, conditional, negative and intolerant of failure.
The Participation Divide: Content Creation and Sharing in the Digital Age Hargittai, E. & G. Walejko. (2008). The Participation Divide: Content Creation and Sharing in the Digital Age. Information, Communication and Society. This paper looks at the prevalence of creative activity and sharing in an age when the barriers to disseminating material have been considerably lowered compared to earlier times. Findings suggest that despite new opportunities to engage in such distribution of content, relatively few people are taking advantage of these recent developments. Moreover, neither creation nor sharing is randomly distributed among a diverse group of young adults. Consistent with existing literature, creative activity is related to a person?s socioeconomic status as measured by parental schooling. Once we control for Internet user skill, men and women are equally likely to post their materials on the Web.
I'm interested that when Michael Wesch or Howard Rheingold undertake this sort of social/distributed teaching, they rely quite heavily on RAs to pick u the slack and fill in the gaps. Perhaps that where I'm going wrong, expecting the students to achieve this sort of outcome with insufficient scaffolding.
Wikis, blogs and podcasts: a new generation of Web-based tools for virtual collaborative clinical practice and education BMC Medical Education 2006, 6:41
A. Rovai. The Internet and Higher Education, 10 (1):
77 - 88(2007)Special Section of the AERA Education and World Wide Web special Interest Group (EdWeb/SIG).