While an individual user may use Twitter primarily as a conversational tool or a broadcast medium, in its totality, Twitter operates a lot like a wiki: as a knowledge-sharing, co-creation platform that produces content and allows its consumption. Conversation is perhaps the most simple and obvious form of collaboration, but would anyone claim that Wikipedia is a conversational platform? Despite the presence of information sharing, co-creation of an end product, and even discussion pages, Wikipedians on the whole aren't having conversations. According to this argument, Twitter is no more a conversational platform than Wikipedia is.
Wikipedia is ubiquitous. It’s handy. And it works. However, wouldn’t it be a great resource for the lay community and an important learning opportunity if these students were actually editing and adding to Wikipedia instead of making it their primary source for new clinical information? It wouldn’t take many medical schools requiring a “Web 2.0 Medical Resources” course focusing on available information, credibility, and online research to drastically increase the utility of Wikipedia and its ilk for both the medical community and patients.
Google Scholar (GS) was released as a beta product in November of 2004. Since then, GS has been scrutinized and questioned by many in academia and the library field. Our objectives in undertaking this study were to determine how scholarly GS is in comparison with traditional library resources and to determine if the scholarliness of materials found in GS varies across disciplines. We found that GS is, on average, 17.6% more scholarly than materials found only in library databases and that there is no statistically significant difference between the scholarliness of materials found in GS across disciplines.
Publish full articles without needing a blog or site. There's no setup or login. Just write your text and Write4net will publish it using your Twitter account.
Wikirage tracks the pages in Wikipedia which are receiving the most edits over various periods of time. Popular people in the news, the latest fads, and the hottest video games, Internet memes, zietgeist, and trends bubble to the surface.
WordTwit is a plugin that utilizes the Twitter API to automatically push a published post to your Twitter account as a tweet, using the blog domain as a short URL.
"Despite the attractions of security (behind the wall solutions) and cost effectiveness (on someone elses’s yard), I conclude that there is no one best solution from the three I discuss above. Perhaps only dancing among the compleixty and simultaeously hosting all three solutions in every fromal education program creates the necessary blend of security, innovation and public presence that defines quality education in networked era."
By filtering your results by popularity, you'll be able to pare down a bunch of results that are presumably all relevant into the top sites on your topic, or some surprising ones you might not have heard of.
EDUCAUSE Quarterly Magazine, Volume 32, Number 1, 2009 By Elizabeth J. Aspden and Louise P. Thorpe Learning environment development has been a key part of the Academic Innovation Team’s remit for a number of years at Sheffield Hallam University (see About Us). Beginning with our research into the impact of e-learning on the student experience in 2002 — and recognizing the way e-learning influenced students’ views of physical spaces — we started to look more closely at the ways in which our students and faculty use on-campus spaces, and at ways in which our environments needed to evolve. A recurring theme that emerged was the importance of serendipitous meetings and the ad hoc use of those "in between" times: in between taught sessions, in between focused study, in between study and home.
BuddyPress is a suite of WordPress plugins and themes which extends WordPress MU and brings social networking features to a new or existing installation.
Love Digg's RSS feed but don't have time to keep up with it all? Disstill is like your regular Digg RSS feed but filters out stories below the minimum diggs that you set.
Screw Blackboard... do it on Facebook: an investigation of students’ educational use of Facebook’ paper by Neil Selwyn, London Knowledge Lab. Paper presented at the ‘Poke 1.0 - a Facebook social research symposium’, London Knowledge Lab, University of London, UK - Thursday 15th November 2007
TinyChat is about as simple as a build your own web chat page could be. You just click a button to create a room and then enter the room or copy the link to share with others.
Since the reason for the variable degree of success of online social tools for scientists is largely attributed to the lack of participation, I think a great way to pull in participation by scientists would be to offer that kind of value up-front. You give it a paper or set of papers, and it tells you the ones you need to read next, or perhaps the ones you’ve missed. My crazy idea was that a recommendation system for the scientific literature, using expert-scored literature to find relevant related papers, could do for papers what Flickr has done for photos.
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.
Run instant usability studies for your website using your real users. You can get it up & running in seconds with one line of javascript, and immediately watch movies of your users’ browsing sessions to analyze their behavior. Free to start, and if you find it useful, you pay only $0.05 per recorded user.
Wikis, blogs and podcasts: a new generation of Web-based tools for virtual collaborative clinical practice and education BMC Medical Education 2006, 6:41
What are the questions we need to answer to understand the needs and demands of future learners? Particularly in relation to the use of technology and the implications that has for education. List them here.
PostRank claims to measure social engagement, including blog posts responding to someone else, bookmarking an article, leaving a comment on a blog, or clicking a link to read a news item.
Tweetree puts your Twitter stream in a tree so you can see the posts people are replying to in context. It also pulls in lots of external content like twitpic photos, youtube videos and more, so that you can see them in the stream without having to click through links.
This site aims to provide a community resource for those interested in ePortfolios and Personal Development Planning (PDP). This site was first set up to document an FDTL4 project in which we built a configurable ePortfolio.
Imagine a whole generation of kids growing up and learning about the world through YouTube. In the first half of the 20th century, people grew up reading books and newspapers. Then there was a generation that grew up on movies and television. The last shift was to the Internet. And now web video is creating yet another generation. Kids no longer learn about the world by reading text. Like the television generation, they are absorbing the world through their visual sense. But there is a big difference. Television was programmed and inflexible. YouTube is completely micro-chunked and on demand. Kids can search for what they need anytime. This is different, and powerful.
A celebration of all the people who are willing to share. Essays by Howard Rheingold, Lawrence Liang, Cory Doctorow, Yochai Benkler, Isaac Mao and Marko Ahtisaari; with a foreword by Lawrence Lessig.