Splicing information and social relations to suite the needs of different situations is increasingly important. The fields of learning and development have not yet been transformed to the online environment. The combination of learning/knowledge analytics, data visualization, and activity streams provide, I think, a sufficient basis for educators to begin planning for a post-course view of education.
Schoology is a startup that seeks to address many of the pain points of the LMS: Schoology is easy to use. It's free. It offers data portability. It encourages communication and collaboration with look and feel of contemporary social networking sites rather than the bulletin boards of circa 1996. But it isn't simply a social networking tool. Schoology provides the functionality of its big name competitors - Blackboard, Moodle.
The recently released ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology gives some excellent insights into trends in college students' technology ownership, perceptions, skills, and habits.
In Activity Streams, verbs are their own objects, and the variety of actions that can be represented is limited only by the standard itself. Providers can also use verbs outside the standard, taking the chance that they'll eventually be incorporated, or that a downstream client could parse them anyway. Here's a list of the verbs incorporated in the Activity Streams standard so far:
Video Chat with up to 20 people for free. TokBox requires no download, only an internet connection and a webcam. Sign up is free and takes just seconds.
‘Amplified events’ utilize social networks to record and relay discussions from a physical event to a much larger online audience. This case study is an analysis of the impact of Web 2.0 tools to amplify a local staff training event. We explore the affordances of social technologies to increase participation in the event beyond the confines of a single institution and give practical advice for others who would like to run an amplified event.
Designing for participant engagement To provide guidance on how best to prepare, structure and plan sessions to ensure participant engagement. Learning and familiarisation with Elluminate To provide guidance on the most effective ways of learning and becoming familiar with Elluminate. Technical issues To provide guidance on the likely technical issues that may arise and how best to minimise their impact.
"Last December, Andrew dropped out of university. “We signed him up for freshers’ events, hoping he would socialise, but after two weeks he’d not been to a single lecture or seminar,” Mary continues. “He was in paradise: he had internet in his room, a cafe nearby, and nobody to badger him. When essay deadlines and exams came up, he just dropped out. He knew he would fail.”"
This page displays the number of entries (articles) in PubMed (Medline) published every year, that conform to search strategy (such as a phrase) you enter.
JISC has launched a new resource to help universities safeguard staff and student identities. Identities need to be protected even when staff and students are using a personal username and password to log onto social media site like Facebook. The reason is that through them they can access applications listing library books they have on loan, log on to Google docs stores of academic papers, or develop a twitter hashtag for course discussions.
The “thin portfolio” concept (borrowing from the prior “personal information aggregation and distribution service” concept) represents the idea that you don’t need that portfolio information in one server; but that it is very helpful to have one place where one can access all “your” information, and set permissions for others to view it. This concept is only beginning to be implemented.
This plugin adds PubSubHubbub ( PuSH ) support to your WordPress powered site. The main difference between this plugin and others is that it includes the hub features of PuSH, built right in. This means the updates will be sent directly from WordPress to your PuSH subscribers.
Yammer is opening up its microbogging platform. In "Yammer Community" people may now create a community without the requirement that an email address be associated with a particular domain.
A US study (http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2010/Social-Media-and-Young-Adults.aspx) has indicated that younger internet users are losing interest in blogging and switching to shorter and more mobile forms of communication. The number of 12 to 17-year-olds in the US who blog has halved to 14% since 2006, according to a survey for the Pew Internet and American Life Project.
Google has rolled out a subtle change to Google Reader that lets you create custom feeds to track pages that don’t already have them. You can subscribe to updates for any webpage simply by typing the URL into the “Add a subscription” text box.
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
Second Life alternative. 3DXplorer is a web3D platform for collaboration meeting conferencing. Free option. Works on UoL campus! Java-based, a bit slow to load.
This site provides a simple bookmarking service. We follow your twitter feed, and whenever one of your tweets contains URLs, we add them to your delicious.com bookmarks. Optionally, bookmark URLs in @replies to you. We'll even add a delicious tag identifying the sender if you like.
14.5% of all online time is spent on MSN Live Messenger - 14.5% of 27 billion total hours. The next biggest service is Facebook at at 5.2% with YouTube coming in third at 4.4% (Google's biggest slice of the online pie.) Facebook climbs 200% in usage since the same time last year.