What should we do to help get more followers

Saw an info graphic about how to get more followers, and it made me think about why people think it's just the numbers. It's not about how many people you say it to, it's that you have something to say that's good enough that all those people want to know what you say.

That said, the graphic provides some insight into what things should be talked about in posts. I'm wondering if we can use this to help drive participation/interest in course tweets...

Too much Technology in the Classroom?

In the recent article, "More Face-to-Face, Less Face-to-Screen" in The Chronicle of Higher Education, St. John's College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Assistant Professor Sharon Marshall writes about the struggle to maintain face-to-face connections while still taking advantage of technology in the classroom.

How much texting is going on in the classroom?

2 professors from Wilkes University surveyed students to find out how much texting is going on in the classroom. Their findings are not unexpected, though the students' perspective might be--from the press release: "In fact, students frequently commented on the survey that their professors would be 'shocked' if they knew how much texting went on in class."

Link includes recommendations on how to curtail texting in the class. Or it might be time to start exploring how to incorporate this ubiquitous technology into the class--engaging through the technology instead of banning it.

Gamifying Classes

Sarah over at Harper College passed this to me: an article about gamifying classes from the Chronicle of Higher Ed, or how to use game mechanics to create incentives for students to engage course content.

The comments have some really nice ideas (language learning and literacy). The thing I thought of was to create achievements for using specific vocabulary in posts in Stats class...getting students to use the language of the course.

Too many choices and not enough time...

An interesting column in the New York Times that talks about yesterday's hot new commodities and what they still mean to online learning opportunities.

Captivate Available for Mac Users

Captivate is an Adobe product used to create tutorials - I use it to design instructional library and information literacy tutorials for classes. According to The Unofficial Apple Weblog, Adobe is releasing Captivate 5 which is now available for the Mac platform and offers new features like better video synchronization within projects. If you do go for the Mac version, just keep in mind that the PowerPoint plug-in piece (allowing you to import PowerPoint presentations into your projects) is still only available to Windows users.

Emerging technology and the way things were

In yet another blog entry on iPad, the folks at Gizmodo did a quick review of the effects on ebooks and the obsolescence of book covers. In particular, the effect of this on the market place seemed well placed related to learning:

"Yes, people who would have purchased a book because they saw three people reading it at Starbucks may not purchase said book in an ebook world. But they might purchase another book, because they saw it on their buddies' Twitter feeds, or because iTunes spat out some kind of automated recommendation for them that's actually grounded in data, beyond their 20-person, Dan-Brown-biased coffee shop sample group. More to the point, the loss of this totally unquantifiable benefit to publishers is probably—and probably massively—offset by the fact that all these secretive ebook enjoyers are now, at all times, just seconds away from tapping into a vast digital bookstore, which delivers books in a matter of seconds." (Source)

Similar arguments are directed to learning, and yes the new technology in the old environment can be problematic...but it's the new technology in the new environment where things get exciting.

iPads for All New Students

In a post from ReadWriteWeb, Frederic Lardinois reports that two colleges, Seton Hill University and George Fox University, have announced plans to give all incoming students a choice between a MacBook or an iPad. This may be a premature endorsement of the iPad considering it hasn't been tested enough yet and it is not yet apparent whether the iPad will suceed where Kindle hasn't with the textbook market. It remains to be seen whether textbook publishers will be able to leverage the iPad's interactive capabilities to bring new value to students and educators.

Teaching Naked

Last July, an interesting article was published in the Chronicle about how technology is used in the classroom, and what happens if we remove "computers" out of the environment. José A. Bowen, dean of the Meadows School of the Arts at Souther Methodist University, did just that to see what would happen. He discusses his findings in the video below (from the Chronicle website). He is not a technophobe, but disucusses how technology can extend the classroom, as opposed to replacing the classroom. There is a lot of good that can happen in the classroom, maximize that good, and use the technology to extend the good.

Video Search Tool

VideoSurf is a new metasearch tool for online video resources that searches such sites as Hulu, CNN, Metacafe, ESPN, and Comedy Central. (Hopefully, they'll add more in the future!) It bases its searches on visual identification as opposed to only relying on text to locate a source. It also allows users to navigate through results to find "the specific scenes, people or moments they most want to see". This may be a wonderful tool for locating video for instruction and educational purposes as well as providing new ways of accessing this medium for research purposes.

You Can Give a Man a Fish...

Gardner Campbell, in an article in the September/October Educause Review, wrote an article about the need to understand the media of all this instructional technology we've been implementing. His suggestion: Quit limiting the creativity of the students, and open up the possibilities. He's got some interesting ideas about how to create environments that might foster commitment from students, but would require commitment from faculty and IT in order to implement. Notes 1, and 4 - 6 are especially interesting.

A Peak into the Future...

Part of the fun of browsing through technology blogs is finding those little gems that look like they might actually apply to teaching and learning. Gizmodo did a story on possible new technology coming from Microsoft that could have very exciting potential for the integration of textbooks, interactive learning environments, collaboration, and well...just straight-out student success. As you can see from the picture, it looks like a souped-up e-reader. But take a look at the video after the jump and really see the potential.

Of course...this is just a rumor, and it might be nothing, but wouldn't it be cool?

Update 04/29/10:
Gizmodo posted another update that the Courier has been killed.

Update 11/03/09:
Gizmodo posted another video that shows the user interface in greater detail.

Finding New Content Made Easy

Xmarks is a bit different than other online bookmarking services, in two ways:

1. It uses your browser bookmarks, also allowing you to sync up your bookmarks between different machines, and even different browsers.
2. It takes you interests and suggests other sites that may be of interest to you. (Hopefully some new things that you could use in a class.)

Now I'm not sure if it's going to be that easy to discover things, but it certainly sounds fun. Looking through my bookmarks is stuff on pirates, and games, and polymer clay, and a whole bunch of media watchdog and political sites. Wonder what it will suggest? I think I'll give it a try this week.

Tech-free Classes?

NPR has an interesting article about Jose Bowen who is a Dean at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. Contrary to how it may sound, he is not actually anti-technology when it comes to teaching. In fact, he has created and uses online games as a way of teaching music history to his students. Bowen is advocating an inversion of current teaching models (such as lecturing) in which instructors wait until students enter the classroom in order to introduce them to class materials and content. Bowen advocates using technology to familiarize students with content before coming into the classroom and then use the classroom time to interact directly with the students, rather than lecturing. This may be a really useful way to structure classes at ECC in order to take advantage of the technology we have available while freeing up precious class time for more interactive and collaborative work.

Some news...

Some interesting things have come up in the context of data and the control of the data now that more and more data is stored "in the cloud."

• Student sues Amazon.com (seeking class-action status) for the removal of a purchased book from his Kindle, rendering his class notes useless;
• Thoughts on Amazon.com and it's "control" over purchased data, and implications;
• FCC looks at Apple's App Store and practices on approving and removing apps;
• Podcast of Talk of the Nation segment: "Who Really Owns Your Data?" (mp3, transcript)

All have relate to things we need to keep in mind as we start using more and more of the Web in our learning environments.