Social media and education

Twitter can be a powerful weapon in your arsenal of learning resources. So we figured a few Twitter tips for students and others might be in order.

Education of its citizens is society’s highest ambition. Digital education is changing the landscape with powerful technologies that extend learning to everyone, everywhere. It’s changing the future of the classroom and creating a crisis for teachers, schools, and the trillion-dollar business of education.

Here's a neat little app for you. The good folks at hosting provider Peer 1 have launched a new app called 'Map of the Internet' which, well, does exactly what it says on the box.

Available ...

Critical thinking is a teachable skill best taught outside the K–12 classroom

Informal learning environments tolerate failure better than schools. Perhaps many teachers have too little time to allow students to form and pursue their own questions and too much ground to cover in the curriculum and for standardized tests. But people must acquire this skill somewhere.

Our society depends on them being able to make critical decisions, about their own medical treatment, say, or what we must do about global energy needs and demands. For that, we have a robust informal learning system that eschews grades, takes all comers, and is available even on holidays and weekends.

Starting this week, those downloading movies, TV shows and music illegally in the U.S. are going to start getting called out for committing Internet fouls.

Copyright holders RIAA and MPAA in partnership with five major Internet service providers are launching the “Copyright Alert System” a.k.a. “Six Strikes” a.k.a. “The Copyright Surveillance Machine.” What does it mean?

Serendipity means a "happy accident" or "pleasant surprise"; specifically, the accident of finding something good or useful while not specifically searching for it.

The word has been voted one of the ten English words hardest to translate in June 2004 by a British translation company.[1] However, due to its sociological use, the word has been exported into many other languages.[2]

The hackers who attacked Twitter, Facebook and Apple employees likely claimed many more victims, an expert said Wednesday. But exactly how many remains unknown.

His site, which has about 200,000 registered users, is "the most widely read dedicated iOS developer forum," he said. Most visitors are software developers who discuss technical issues around building apps for the iPhone and iPad.

Not everyone who visited his site was hacked. His own computer, for example, was not infected, he said.

Sefferman said the hacker appeared to remove the malware from the site on Jan. 30. But on Wednesday, the site had not been taken down and experts warned users not to visit it because it may still infect their computers.

Adobe has pushed out the announced update for Acrobat and Reader that patches the two vulnerabilities that were recently exploited in attacks in the wild.

But, the popularity of these Adobe products, the amount of security bugs they apparently contain, and Adobe's consistently slow release of patches make them the perfect entry point for cyber attackers, so it's no wonder that security experts are advising and users considering using alternative PDF viewers.

Google has solved part of the problem for users by building in a PDF viewer into Chrome and turning it on by default. Apple's Safari has done the same for Safari for Mac.

And now Mozilla has introduced one in its latest stable version of Firefox (v19.0).

Twitter will soon attach value ratings to users' tweets. Here's why.

The value judgements will be assigned to the public metadata of tweeters' posts, and used by Twitter's streaming API to help developers more selectively curate massive amounts of status updates.

===> Designations of "none," "low" and "medium" will most likely debut on Feb. 20, according to a post by developer advocate Arne Roomann-Kurrik on the Twitter developers' blog. A "high" value option will be rolled out sometime after the initial batch. <===

Organisations need to allow a certain amount of wandering around the corridors, through the accumulated knowledge, we need to mix things up a bit, create cross channel communities and be unafraid to cross boundaries. Creativity is a fire that needs fuel: relationships, knowledge, technologies, resources, we have to feed it to feel the heat.

We should welcome the curious, encourage adventure and introduce just a little uncertainty into the process of learning. You never know what it will turn up.

Two academics discuss the pros and cons of using Twitter as a learning tool to encourage instinctive thinking in higher education

At the end of 2011, a few geeks in Sweden set up the Swedish Twitter University, which brought lectures in a series of tweets to a class of around 500 followers. It may have been the first time Twitter was used to deliver higher education, and given recent debate about massive open online courses (MOOCs), it seems apt that we reflect on what Twitter might do to transform the classroom and open up a new space for public education?

“There’s no competitive advantage today in knowing more than the person next to you. The world doesn’t care what you know. What the world cares about is what you can do with what you know.”

- Tony Wagner

A lot of talk, press, and focus in this era of learning is on common core standards and 21st century skills and literacies.  What is often neglected is the importance of building social emotional s...

We put together an infographic that describes some leadership qualities that can be developed and put in your own skills filing cabinet.

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I would love to hear from others. How have you balanced your learning, your work load in the age of technology? Is this an issue that is bigger and more concerning than just my world? If so, what are some possible answers?

===> How do we keep up with the ever changing environment of learning without burning out? I am tired just thinking about it! <===