This site just amazes me. Both the quality of the content and the quality of the UX design are exceptional. From the ability build playlists of courses to providing a citation for the video with 1-click to the "dim the lights" feature...this is so well done. I am working my way through the course on Game Theory. I watch the lectures, can grab the syllabus and do the reading if I choose and I can even look at past exams and solutions to past exams. The class video also includes the questions from the students and the professor's answers. So I am just wondering; does this raise deeper questions about the value of a university education? Now don't get me wrong, I LOVE universities, I love campuses and student unions and libraries and so on...some of my fav places in the world really - BUT - do we need to be a bit more honest about why students are paying to go there when all of this content/interaction is available? I mean if we extrapolate and see a day when all of a college's content is online like this...what the are you paying for with tuition? Student-to-student interaction? Teacher-to-student interaction? That's a shift isn't it? Then we're selling interactions and not content...and we can now engineer interactions in a whole myriad of ways...

Do you know what whuffie is? Do you have any? Can you spare some? Did you know that it came from a book and that there is a whole book about it? The whole idea is reputation-based currency. Instead of money, your ability to move through society is based on an aggregate score of how people regard you and your actions - the other catch is that this score - essentially your community-determined worth - is instantly and always visible to others. So when we are talking about implementing social media for learning within organizations, we can see the value of having something like whuffie right? I mean it would help us determine at a glance, how much we initially trust sources or data. It could also help re-structure entire organizations' hierarchies of expertise by making the basis of your 'organizational wealth'  - how much you are helping the organization. Dan Gillmor had a recent article on this and about how we could maybe begin to create an aggregate model by pulling in your eBay rating and maybe your ratings from other social network sites that you may be involved in. Got me thinking about how we could think about creating this kind of currency within organizations to help spur the use of social media...could we create a universal standard for this as a currency and those standards could just be applied to groups at an organization's discretion...and the REALLY important question...what could you spend your whuffie on?

(link) Excerpt: The U.S. government is taking a giant leap into the virtual realm with the creation of a parallel world intended for training, education and networking. What began as a platform to improve collaboration of emergency management personnel has evolved into a benefit for all government agencies. The project is government-owned and incorporates techniques and technologies unavailable in civilian efforts, offering a robust, powerful tool for conducting business."

So I'm doing a couple of things at DevLearn 2009 this year. I'm doing a pre-con workshop on Social Media and Learning and we're also doing a Social Learning Camp that will run throughout the conference. Of course I want to use Social Media to develop the ideas, themes and focal points for these events and I've always found that you can't really learn if something will work unless you actually try to use it for something - so here goes. I always liked using post-it notes and whiteboards (I know, how very 0.5 of me) for general organization of something so I like this metaphor that PinDax is using.The image you hopefully see below is a live view of the PinDax board I'm using to organize thoughts for DevLearn. The full board is here. It's not perfect - I want to be able to edit notes once they are posted and I want some way to export the whole thing to my desktop for an archive - but the price is right and I think its got some good functionality. I've checked with a couple of folks and while you should be able to view the site without signing up, you need to sign in to be able to leave a note- should take a few seconds - pls let me know if there are any problems. Anyway, once you are signed up, please feel free to add, move, comment, etc - there is also a synchronous chat app so we might check that out - but I do believe that We are better then Me at putting something like together and would love and value your input. Thanks and Happy Posting!

"Most forms of collaboration in the classroom are considered cheating." Henry Jenkins (video)

"Years of research have shown us that textbooks are among the least effective ways to teach, but they're in every classroom" James Paul Gee (video)