With John Key (NZ’s prime minister for those overseas) at last agreeing to go to the Copenhagen summit on climate change, my mind turned to the resource I had small part in creating for TakingITGloblal’s education section. The ‘Tread Lightly Toolkit’ looks at historical cases of the impact of man on the environment, the current issues for the planet in relation to climate change, and a challenge for students to reduce their own ecological footprint. The purpose of the resource as stated in the kit is to help young people worldwide to: Understand the basic science of climate change and how human activity is contributing to the problem. Realise the dangers of living beyond the earth’s carrying capacity. Understand how climate change and other environmental issues are interconnected. Foster a sense of personal and collective responsibility towards the earth. Identify and adopt eco-friendly skills, behaviours and attitudes. Become more interested in climate change policy at local, national and international levels. It is well produced with useful resources. I helped to create the handouts on the historical examples but this is just one small part of a very comprehensive resource. Check it out at: http://store.takingitglobal.org/files/treadlightly/TL-Teacher-Toolkit.pdf

What is Wall Wisher? Wall Wisher is an online Web 2.0 application that allows someone that has signed up for an account (free) to create a digital wall.  Once given the URL of the wall, a number of users can simultaneously post virtual sticky notes to the wall making it a great tool for gathering contributions during a brainstorming session. A big advantage is that the users do not need to have accounts themselves to post a sticky note so it is quick and easy to use in a group situation. Sticky notes can contain up to 160 characters and can include hyperlinks to other sites. Multimedia that is hosted online on other sites, such as images, videos and sound files, can also be added to a sticky note by using the URL. Once a wall has been created, you can also embed the wall in other online spaces such as wiki pages or blog posts. How can you use Wall Wisher in your classroom? This simple yet effective tool has a number of classroom applications. Here is a list of some ideas to get you started. Use Wall Wisher to: brainstorm knowledge about a topic before beginning a study brainstorm key questions to investigate during a study summarise key learning points about a topic after a study collect student feedback on a lesson have students collect feedback from their peers on the work they have completed create ‘to do lists’ link to online resources for a given topic link to work that students have completed that is available online create a multimedia space for a topic where students can view videos and images or listen to sound files as well as add their own brainstorm ideas on how to deal with issues that have arisen in the classroom have students document how they are demonstrating the key competencies To see Wall Wisher in action and add your own ideas to the ones above, visit the wall set up at this address: http://www.wallwisher.com/wall/interface Example of Wall Wisher How does Wall Wisher work? Visit http://wallwisher.com and sign up for a free account. Click on ‘Build a wall’ at the top right of the screen. You will then be given a number of options for your wall. You need to add a title, subtitle and image for your wall.  You also need to choose the end of the URL for the wall and decide who will be able to leave sticky notes on the wall. Once you have completed all of those steps, click on ‘Done’ in the bottom right of the screen. The wall will be created and you will be sent an email containing the URL of the wall to give out to other people. To add a sticky note, users need to double click anywhere on the wall.  You can type up to 140 characters into a sticky note. You can also add an image, audio track or video link by pasting in the URL of where these are hosted online.When you have finished adding your content to the sticky note,  need to click on ‘OK’ on the bottom right corner of the sticky note to ensure the note is visible to others and remains on the wall. Close up of a sticky note.

First impressions count! Combine poor theme choice with a cluttered sidebar and you have a recipe for convincing first time visitors NOT to subscribe to your blog.  They’re too busy being turned off to notice your great posts! Unfortunately sidebar clutter creeps up on most bloggers.  So I thought it would be helpful to share the process I regularly use to declutter my sidebar. Prioritizing SideBar Decluttering What I do is take a critical look at my design in the following order of priority (which also reflects their location in my sidebars): How obvious is it for readers on how to subscribe to my blog? Feedburner RSS subscription - Is it prominent? Feedburner Email subscription - Is it obvious? How easy is it to find information on my blog? Search widget - Is it prominent & near top of blog sidebar? (I prefer a search that only search my blog) Categories and tags - Are they helping readers easily find relevant information? What other widgets do I have in my sidebar?  Which ones can I live without? — if you compare this blog with The Edublogger you will notice a difference in number of widgets in the sidebars. Tip: If you want to display Archives on your blog sidebar it is better to use a drop down menu as it takes up less room. Editing Categories Unfortunately my categories failed this latest audit in terms of "Are they helping readers easily find relevant information?" - so I changed too many messy categories (21 categories on this blog) to fewer, more relevant categories (10 categories). Off course editing each post on this blog (300 posts) and The Edublogger (100 posts) to fix categories was thoroughly excruciating enjoyable. NOTE: Refer to this post to learn about the difference between categories and tags. My tip for speeding up the process is to hold the Ctrl key when you left mouse click on the title on the post in your blog dashboard — this opens up the post so you can edit it in a new tab (for FireFox, Flock and Internet Explorer 7).  This open up 15 posts in 15 separate tabs and work through the task faster! FINAL THOUGHTS Would love to hear your priorities in using widgets on your sidebar especially in terms of what are your ‘must have’ widgets and why? This was part of the Day 8 Task for Building a Better Blog. Image adapted from John Pannell licensed under Creative Commons ShareAlike. And if you’re enjoying this blog, please consider Subscribing for free!

Unfortunately it is very easy to misinterpret and/or mis-use any type of statistics. People often look at the number while failing to consider how the statistic was calculated or what it truly means. About Misinterpreting Statistics Here’s an example: Statistics show that 45% of the population can’t read the newspaper. Shocking literacy rates! Or is it? How many included in that statistic were too young to read, didn’t speak English, had some form of disability etc? What percentage of the entire population was sampled, what method was used, did the method bias the result etc? Using Statistics in Blogging So where am I going with this? Well bloggers love statistics and they love to know how they rank against other bloggers. Since Technorati authority is no longer reliable bloggers have looked at other options. So some bloggers are using PostRank. For example, here are the top blogs on education based on their ranking by PostRank. Trouble is bloggers are looking at the statistics and the number 1-10; not considering how it was calculated, how blogs are ranked against each other using PostRank or what these numbers mean. Effective use of PostRank Let me be clear! I love PostRank. It is an incredibly valuable tool for quickly analyzing and comparing all of your blog posts in terms of number of: Comments Bookmarked (Delicious, diigo etc) Twittered Linked to All of which helps you reflect how the different post types impact how readers engage with the posts. For example, if your aim is a long informative post you would expect few comments but hopefully lots of bookmarking and/or linking. PostRank helps you work out if you achieved this goal. Misinterpreting PostRank But if you are using PostRank to compared your blog’s performance against another blog, or identify the best blogs for a topic than you need to look more closely at their statistics. In particular look at those eye icons that represent views. What do they mean? Well they are the number of your readers that click the post title in the PostRank widget in your sidebar. Should high clicking on the PostRank widget in a sidebar make a post (and blog) high ranking? Below is a screenshot from PostRank. The example on the left is a perfect 10 from another blogger (educational) whose rank on that post is entirely based on click on the PostRank widget. While The Edublogger post had high bookmarking, linking and comments. And if you’re enjoying this blog, please consider Subscribing for free!

I’m doing a presentation next week for Alec Couros‘ s EC&I 831: Social Media & Open Education course and as part of it I’ve need to organise some required reading one week prior to the presentation. I’ve been asked to focus on educational blogging and building personal learning networks so I’m hoping you can help as I want to: Demonstrate how conversations in blog comments provides greater knowledge gain for all involved, because each individual sees a different perspective of the task - giving everyone greater "food for thought!" Model personal learning networks in action! About The course EC&I 831: Social Media & Open Education course is an open access graduate course from the Faculty of Education, University of Regina for both registered and non-registered students. Participants are all teachers, or principals, and most are new to using social media. Can you share your thoughts on the following: What are the benefits of blogging with students and/or yourself? What are some of the challenge of student blogging and how do you avoid them? Can you recommend any ‘must read’ articles on student blogging? What questions would you most like me to answer if you attended a presentation by me on educational blogging and building personal learning networks? And if you’re enjoying this blog, please consider Subscribing for free!

Commenters on my What Are Your Thoughts on Educational Blogging? post asked if I would share the essence of my presentation from Alec Couros‘ s EC&I 831: Social Media & Open Education course — so as promised here it is! You can watch an Elluminate recording of the session here. Pre-presentation Preparation One of the best aspects of Alec’s course is that participants post reflections on their blogs.  Wouldn’t that be nice if you could research and interact with participants before every presentation to be better prepared? By checking out their Shared Google Reader folder I was able to: Read their posts and leave some comments. Get a feel for who they are as individuals and where they are at Find out what they learnt in previous sessions Target my presentation based on my perception of their needs Most of the participants are fairly new to using social media and blogging so I decided to focus on what they really needed to know about educational blogging. Here’s What I Covered I created the following diagram to explain how through the process of writing posts and engaging in discussions in comments we are constantly evaluating, reviewing, reflecting and revising information.  And that by this continual process we’re learning. Unfortunately I don’t feel I adequately emphasized how this learning is very different from how most of us are used to learning. Nik Peachey provides a great summary in  his comment "With out this final stage of reconstructing information and turning it into knowledge that is useable by others in my professional community, much of the information that I read or see on the web would just pass straight through me". Community and learning as part of a community (or network) is one of the most important aspects of educational blogging and one of the key areas that most educators fail to appreciate. The whole process of creating, connecting, communicating and collaborating as part of a community through the interactions of posts and conversations in comments is essential. Unfortunately educators often fail to adequately encourage the community and commenting aspects in their student blogging programs. Here are a few examples of good approaches to student blogging: Jan Smith’s Huzzah class blog - starts her students on the class blog and gradually moves them onto their own student blogs. Sue Wyatt’s Student blogging challenge It’s really important to experience how blogging  changes your own learning to appreciate the impact it has and to understand how to use it effectively with students. Here is the participants brainstorming of their thoughts, challenges and concerns based on where they are currently at with their blogging. A key point I emphasized is their course provides them an excellent opportunity which is ideal for developing their blogging skills; they need to focus on working together as a community while gaining skills they can use with their own students. My tips were: Step 1: Change comment moderation settings Currently they are all using the default comment moderation setting which means all commenters must have had a previously approved comment otherwise the comment is moderated. Unfortunately in their situation this is negatively impacting in the comment conversations.  New commenters don’t gain from reading older comments. You change comment moderation settings by going to Settings > Discussion. Step 2: Set up Google Reader The best way to work as a community is to set up your Google Reader account so that you are subscribed to both posts and comments from all the blogs. Here’s my instructions on how to Manage Comments and Posts On Blogs Using Google Reader. Step 3: Engage in Conversations They need to start focus more on learning off each other and engaging in conversations by: Reading each other posts - each of them will have different perspective on the topic and working collectively they will gain more than working individually Commenting on each others posts - take the time to share their thoughts in response to each others posts.  To expand the conversation and really make each other think. Comment back to comments on their own posts - respond to people who leave comments.  Use it as an opportunity to find out more information from the person who left the comment. Learn how to pingback on other bloggers posts Final Thoughts Alec asked me to frame a question for response by participants at the end of my session. So I’ve asked them to write a post on "What are 3 questions (and why) you would like answered on educational blogging or building personal learning networks? so that I and the other participants could visit their posts and leave comments to answer their questions. If you would like to ask me these same questions please feel free to write your own post and: Pingback my What Are Your Thoughts on Educational Blogging? post so I’m notified of your post And/or leave a comment with a link to your post on this post Thanks to everyone who left comments on What Are Your Thoughts on Educational Blogging? — all participants have been asked to read through your comments! Would also love to hear your thoughts.  What would you have said differently?  What else should I have included? And if you’re enjoying this blog, please consider Subscribing for free!

Lingueo, the Paris based marketplace for online language lessons launched a new website although the actual format is around for quite some time already. PolyglotParty.com is the new home of the very successful offline event with the same name that … Continue reading →

As everybody is talking about the recent changes in the Google algorithm and more importantly the effects of those changes I am pleased that David Schapell, the CEO of TeachStreet, gave me his OK for a quick talk about that. … Continue reading →

Editor’s note: This is a guest post by Michael Butler. Recently I discussed two broad approaches to materials creation, which I termed episodic and systematic. Today I would like to discuss two approaches to instruction, which I term Incremental and … Continue reading →

Tuesday evening I had the pleasure of hosting TWiST Paris, our meetup that enables French start-up companies to pitch a local audience in English and then get the opportunity to present their business to US entrepreneur and investor Jason Calacanis live via … Continue reading →

As today is a public holiday in France (Assumption Day, just fyi) what better day to choose than this to start a new series on this blog. The inspiration has formed over the past couple of weeks when a few … Continue reading →

We have the first LAUNCH Pad Tablet Conference coming up on Oct. 21 at Microsoft in Mountain View, California. As the name suggests, the conference will focus on how tablets have changed the way we use technology and engage. The … Continue reading →

One of the major topics among edupreneurs, online marketers, blogger and others relying on Facebook traffic is the recent change in what fans actually see popping up in their news stream. I wanted to title this post "Waahaa - Cry Babies want their Facebook traffic back!" but that would have been a bit unfair . [...]

Published August 2004 What does the increasing move toward outsourcing mean for CLOs? What skills and new responsibilities will be necessary for success? What will be the new measures of success? First, CLOs will increasingly need to focus on the "business of learning." The 2004 Accenture Learning Survey of 285 enterprise learning organizations found that CLOs are being measured more and more by how they run their learning function as a "business unit." CLOs are focusing more on capabilities such as managing their learning budget to plan, and increasing efficiency and effectiveness by focusing on the business impacts of learning. Figure 1 below examines the most prevalent performance measures in place. New alignment processes will also become important to CLOs. These range from managing service-level agreements (i.e., measurements promised by outsourcing partners in the operation of a function) to formally tracking the business value of the investment in learning, ultimately providing business insights. CLOs will also need to look at more effective governance and accountability structures to align learning to business goals. Establishing a governing board for the learning function is only the first step toward aligning learning with business goals. Governing councils are also vital. These councils-for the senior leadership of the organization as well as for each business unit-provide input into how learning can achieve strategic business priorities. Decision-making councils involve executive and senior management, business unit management and business/learning relationship managers. Governance of the learning function must involve a process for consistently translating business challenges into the performance needs of the workforce. The difference between being a manager and being a leader may be the greatest challenge CLOs face. As interest in outsourcing increases, CLOs will focus less on managing the day-to-day design, development and delivery of learning, and more on exercising leadership and communicating a vision. CLOs will need to be effective communicators and marketers, and this means more than learning portals, road shows, course catalogs and newsletters. An effective communications plan is vital. Leading learning organizations work with their marketing and communications professionals to plan and execute a blended marketing model that leverages both on-site and online marketing and communications tools. The outcome is that all levels of the organization, as well as the extended value chain, understand that learning is a strategic asset, not simply a cost of doing business. CLOs who understand the learning and business dimensions of their jobs will prosper. Some companies may fritter away their learning investments on programs that have not changed substantially year-to-year. Successful learning organizations will design and communicate the decision-making parameters and mechanisms that will enable learning investments to fulfill the strategic priorities of the organization. A business-focused CLO will be the difference between success and failure of the function. Technorati Tags: Outsourcing, CLO

YouTube has become an important teaching tool. In fact University of California at Berkeley follows MIT in posting entire course lectures on the Web’s No.1 video-sharing site. It all started in 2001, when a number of high profile web-based educational projects were "exploring new models of learning." These higher education experiments included NYU Online, Fathom, Virtual Temple and MIT Open Courseware. Today, only MIT Open Courseware has survived. In fact, one could say it has flourished and in the process it has changed higher education forever, encouraging other universities, like UC Berkeley to experiment with new ways of sharing knowledge in an open forum. MIT Open CourseWare offers course materials from MIT classes on the Web. The original plan, as approved by MIT in 2001, was to share syllabi and other textual information, such as articles and exam questions. But today the site includes some combination of videos, podcasts and animations for all 1,800 MIT courses, as well as translations of course materials in Chinese, Portguese, Spanish, and Thai by another 160 universities that have joined forces to form the MIT Open Courseware Consortium. The video below features an event celebrating MIT’s decision to put materials from all of its 1,800 courses online for free. The event, held recently at MIT, was hosted by MIT President Susan Hockfield and included a talk by author and New York Times columnist, Thomas Friedman (who of course wrote the hugely influential book The World is Flat). One of the more interesting aspects of this project has been the discovery of who exactly is accessing MIT Open CourseWare. While originally designed for faculty and students around the world to advance their knowledge in science and technology, it is now accessed mostly by "self-learners," meaning primarily those working in corporate and government organizations around the world. (This group accounts for more 50% of the 1.6 million downloads per month.) These self-learners are using the MIT Open Courseware site for refreshing their knowledge in a range of subjects, including chemistry, physics, computer science and search engine technology. This level of interest has motivated other universities to also offer their course materials free. UC Berkeley, for example, has made over 300 hours of course lectures available free on YouTube. The topics of study posted by UC Berkeley include chemistry, physics, biology and even a video lecture (below) on search-engine technology given in 2005 by Google cofounder Sergey Brin. So how will this free online content impact corporate learning departments? I think more and more we will see this free intellectual capital readily accessible on corporate university portals, and where appropriate free content may also be integrated into formal learning offerings for post-course references or into corporate mentoring/coaching situations. Perhaps the more challenging question is: Will corporate learning departments simply be customers of this open learning movement or will they join the movement by sharing some of their own non-proprietary intellectual content? Technorati Tags: Free content, Higher Education, Open Learning, YouTube

I have been giving seminars this past month on how companies are experimenting with social media to maximize knowledge sharing and collaboration and one theme is consistent across companies of various sizes and locations: they are turning to their training departments to be the test beds for using new social media tools like blogs and wiki’s. This is the case with Jet Blue University (JBU), the corporate university of Jet Blue Airlines. Jet Blue University has 200 faculty spread across three locations, in Orlando, Florida (where they train flight crews), in Queens, NY (where they train operations and technical crews) and in Salt Lake City ( the training arm for reservations and customer services representatives). Early in 2008, Jet Blue University powered its training faculty with a Web 2.0 toolkit of blogs and wiki’s as a way for them to share best practices and be the pioneers for social media tools. Murry Christensen, Director of Learning Technologies at Jet Blue University, says that the main driver to experimenting with these new technologies is to capture process improvements and "next" practices that are working among faculty across the country. It really makes a lot of sense for companies to use their "learning organization" to test out new ways to collaborate and share best practices. First, for employees in the learning department of an organization, part of their job is to share best practices around the enterprise. However, often they have been frustrated with their company’s attempts at knowledge management systems. So now they can become blogger champions and learn first-hand the power of social media while using the tools to do their job—share lessons learned across their community of peers.. Secondly, while the training faculty may have good intentions about sharing best practices, they often lack an easy tool that allows them to collaborate with their peers. So, I can see how empowering the training faculty to be a community of blogger and wiki champions can create excitement and even be a vehicle to re-invent and re-brand an entire learning organization. Some topic areas to think about having your faculty share best practices using blogs and wikis’ include, new-hire employee on-boarding, leadership development of high potentials and even company-wide blogging guidelines, assuming the company then decides to expand this initiative enterprise-wide. Finally, professionals in a company’s learning organization want to "role model" what is expected across the organization. What better way to be a role model business unit than to be the first to use these new social media tools. The Jet Blue University’s social platform, which went live early this year, was provided by Awareness, a company that focuses on delivering enterprise-wide blogs and wiki’s to both internal and external communities. In fact, the folks at Jet Blue University are so enamored with their "experiment" that they went ahead and made a series of videos describing why they did this. Tune in to hear what they say below: So, is your learning department taking the lead to "test out" new social media tools for the enterprise? What has been your experience to date?

One of my recent posts entitled From e-Learning To m-Learning talked about the enormous potential for m-Learning. This topic was debated recently by a panel of experts including Chad Hurley, CEO of YouTube, and Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, at the World Economic Forum last month. The current estimates for mobile phone penetration are impressive: today 3.2 billion people have mobile phones and about 10% of these are smart phones, which are web enabled. In fact, Zuckerberg estimates that among the 200 million unique visitors to Facebook each month, 25 million are using mobile applications to post updates and share photos and videos. And as devices continue to enter the market, new features and new capabilities are, and will continue to be, appearing at an accelerated rate. For example, there are now custom applications that allow students to turn their mobile phones into sophisticated calculators. Programs such as Space Time and QuickGraph are just two examples. But the bar is being raised once again. As reported in the New York Times in an article entitled Industry Makes Pitch that Cellphones Belong In Classroom, Qualcomm, a producer of chips for mobile phones, is funding a million dollar research project targeting Millennials in an attempt to understand how cellphones could be used in high school to augment or even replace computers. This is a significant opportunity since K-12 schools now spend hundreds of millions of dollars on computers to provide an average of one computer for every three students. Think about the potential if schools spent even a percentage of their budget on mobile phones instead of computers. But also think about the impact on corporate learning and human resources as Post Millennials (those now aged 12-18 years old) enter and college and then the corporate world with the expectation of using their mobile phones instead of their computers to work, communicate, and even learn. Already there has been a buzz in the market as some companies are asking sales professionals to use their mobile devices for every day computing needs instead of their laptop. And many road warriors say they are willing to entirely ditch their laptops in favor of their mobile as the technology improves, which it has been doing by leaps and bounds. Finally, food for thought: In a report published in January by research firm In-Stat based on a survey of 1,402 technology users, 52% of respondents to the In-Stat survey said they could envision using a smart phone in the future as their sole computing device, provided handset companies make improvements like better keyboards, expandable screens and applications that work as well as they do on PCs. What are you waiting for to develop your m-Learning strategy? Share your thoughts with me in your comments, or over email. Technorati Tags: Millennials, Chief Learning Officers, Mobile learning

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c Twitter Frenzy Daily Show Full EpisodesImportant Things With Demetri Martin Political HumorEconomic Crisis You know Twitter has hit mainstream when it becomes a topic for Jon Stewart and Social Media Analyst Jeremiah is talking about dreaming in 140 characters in his recent blog post.. Ask Jeremiah: Comprehensive FAQ Guide To Twitter. All kidding aside, Jeremiah Owyang is one of the most "qualified" people I know to share how to really leverage Twitter to advance your personal brand as well as to increase your productivity at work. Here’s a short story on how I used twitter to build my network. I was a speaker this week at a Human Capital Institute event in Scottsdale, AZ. My speech entitled Creating Next Generation Learning" was to take place on Tuesday, March 10th, but I arrived on Monday the 9th. I wanted to connect with as many folks as possible so I sent out a tweet about my being at the HCI event. All of the sudden I connected with nearly a dozen folks from around the world who were also going to be at the event. We planned several lunches and even created a poster for our lunch table entitled Twitter Friends at HCI. I have written about using Twitter as a learning tool here and here, and so I wanted to and got to hear first hand about how it is being used by Human Resource and Learning practitioners. How long did it take me to do this? All of 5 minutes and 140 characters. There are countless other examples of how I could have been built my network, but I was deliberate about doing this on Twitter and in doing I connected with a group of fellow Twitter users and we all discussed how we are using microblogging to improve our productivity and build our networks. Here are some of the ways Twitter is being used on-the-job and in one’s personal life as discussed at HCI: 1) Think Before You Tweet Yes it’s informal and only 140 characters but it is searchable and, yes, it can be googled. 2) Answer the Question: "What Is Interesting/Innovative" rather than just "What Are You Doing Now?" Embed links to interesting content so all your followers learn what you are reading and what influences your thoughts on a topic. 3) Approach Twitter as a Social Learning Tool It is participatory, collaborative and, at its heart, contextual. It may in fact be one of the best ways to instantly share knowledge among your network. 4) Explore how best places to work use Twitter to build their brand. Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, was one of the keynote speakers at HCI event this week. He is a big user of Twitter with 218,906 followers. Zappos made the list in Fortune Magazine’s annual "100 Best Companies To Work For" list, and Fortune began and ended the article by talking about how Zappos uses Twitter to build more personal connections with people. Zappos came in at #23 on the Fortune list making the company the highest ranking newcomer for 2009. In fact in Zappos Corporate Employee directory they have all employees ranked by the number of followers they have on Twitter. Now that’s an incentive to start sending tweets. Tony even created a beginners guide on how to get onto Twitter. You can find this at: http://twitter.zappos.com/start 5) Explore how your company’s public relations, marketing communications and customer relations departments are using Twitter. What can you learn from these departments in order to experiment with your own learning department? In the case of Zappos, they have transformed their public relations and marketing departments to use Twitter as the first way to connect to customers. 6) Join the dialogue Follow me at www.twitter.com/jcmeister Join "Social Learning Question Of The Day" on Twitter at http://twitter.com/slqotd. We have 447 followers. A pdf of all the questions asked prior to February 2009 can be downloaded as a pdf. Thanks to Kevin Jones and Dave Wilkins for moderating this group. 7) Learn from "THE" social media analyst on this topic As mentioned previously, one of the most qualified individuals on this subject is Jeremiah Owyang, Senior Analyst at Forrester Research covering social computing. Below are top 7 questions from FAQ Guide Jeremiah created and is something I consider to be a "MUST READ" for all those already on Twitter or thinking about joining Twitter. Ask Jeremiah: The Comprehensive FAQ Guide to Twitter Complete FAQ’s are found here. Question: What are common terms and phrases I need to know? Do I Tweet or Twitter? Twitter, which evolved from simple status messages to now a global conversation, is referred to in a number of times. Asking folks: "Are you on Twitter" is appropriate. When you want to use Twitter, and want to refer to it as a verb, it’s appropriate to say "I’m Twittering that". However, it’s more appropriate to say to say, "Did you Tweet that?". (verb conjugation) It is never appropriate to suggest "I’m twatting now". Question: I just joined, now what? I don’t get it.Twitter on it’s own makes little sense, why? It’s a social tool and this means you have to follow others. First, use the address import tool to add folks that are in your Yahoo mail and Google mail. Secondly, do searches for people you may know to find them. If Twitter search doesn’t’ work or the "Find people" search, use Google and seasrch "First Last Twitter" to find folks. Once you find people you do know (or want to know) see who they are following, and add them. You can always add me, but you should first see how I use Twitter. Question: Who gives a donk what I ate for lunch, can I talk about something else? Yes, talk about anything you want. The twitter question "what are you doing now" isn’t the most effective way of using the tool. Instead, answer this question "What’s important to me" or better yet "What’s important to my followers". Also, engage in dialog, ask questions and answer others questions using the reply feature. Question: Why 140 Characters? 140 characters is the size limit of text messages using SMS, since Twitter integrates well with mobile devices, you can text to "40404" and enter in 140 characters to tweet from your phone. Also, 140 characters is a true bite sized chunk of information making it easy to consume and create -ideal for rapid sharing of ideas. Question: How do I use the reply feature? Easy. When you see someone’s tweet, there’s a small ‘arrow’ next to their tweet. If you feel like responding to them, click that arrow and it will automatically load their name into the text box. Type your answer in 140 characters and submit. This will make conversations easier to track and find. Question: How come people don’t write in normal English in Twitter? Good question, due to it’s limited 140 characters style of publishing, Twitter has formed it’s own unique nomenclature, similar to how users of pagers in the 90s developed shortened codes and how text message have developed their own digital shorthand. Often you’ll hear people use Twinglish, a combination of "Tw" plus other English words like "Twello Texas". It’s cute once in a while, but can grate on ones nerves after a while. Twanks Tweeple. Question: What is a DM? DM stands for "Direct Messages" which suggests that an individual can message another individually using the private messaging system (like email) to other members. You can only DM users that are following you. You may hear individuals say "DM me for details about conference discounts" suggesting the user wants to take the discussion private. Do note that Twitter’s DM system still resolves in 140 characters and is fairly primitive, many conversations may naturally shift to email, or even the archaic phone! Happy Tweeting See you online, Jeanne Meister Technorati Tags: Social Learning, Twitter, Forrester Research, Jeremiah Owyang, Zappos, Human Capital Institute

We have been spending a lot of time in recent posts talking about the enormous potential for m-Learning. In a span of only 20 years, wireless services have reached almost 50 percent of the world’s population. There are now more than 3 billion mobile subscribers globally, that number is expected to grow to 4.5 billion by 2012. In the workforce development industry, these numbers translate into new ways to reach and engage learners. On Wednesday, June 10th, 2009, at 2PM EST, come join me, along with Don Duquette, GP’s corporate learning and development expert, for an interactive webinar, sponsored by General Physics Corporation, on practical solutions to help you navigate the opportunities and pitfalls of mobile learning. The webcast will focus on: Explosive growth of mobile subscriptions Huge interest in mobile as device for K-12, University and Corporate Learning Results from survey on the current uses for learning & development Potential bandwidth, instructional design, LMS capability challenges We want to hear from you before the webinar-what are your questions, and what issues are you dealing with as you explore how to implement m leanring in your orgnaizaiton. Send me an email here Thanks and See You Online. [tags]M Learning, Performance Support, Talent Management, General Physics Corporation

For the past month, I have been a lurker in the Khan Academy Google Group.  I've been reflecting on the constant flow of comments submitted by "users" of the Khan videos who include a wide mix of people but often are teachers and students.  I am inspired but also saddened by the comments from students who share empowering stories of how the videos have enabled them to experience their capabilities to learn.  And this experience is the catalyst that sparked my most recent GETInsight blog* post.  I hope you enjoy it and feel inspired to leave a comment on the post or in the VoiceThread."I’m Not Stupid": How Open Educational Video Resources Will Change the Future of Education*The GetInsight blog is an integrated resource of GETideas.org, a community for education leaders.  I am a paid consultant for GETideas and write a monthly post about a related topic.  Everyone is welcome to participate in the conversation and I hope you'll join us!

by TZA on FlickrEach month, I author a blog post on the GETinsight blog, part of Cisco Systems' GETideas.org network, about a topic relevant to educational innovation.  This month, I am exploring the relationship between cognitive brain research and mobile learning -- not a topic a claim to be an expert on, but certainly one I've been pondering quite a bit lately.  From my own mobile learning experiences, I find a much a higher rate of retention and deep learning when I am a mobile learner (usually on a walk or in a quiet place at a time that is convenient for me) versus in a scheduled, face-to-face setting.  Mobile learning seems to meet the human brain's craving for multisensory experiences and offers the opportunity to, well, be mobile and engage in physical activity while learning -- which is kind of like sprinkling your brain with vitamin powder. I hope you'll venture on over to the blog post here, take a gander, and join in on the VoiceThread conversation I've set up.  Hope to "see" you soon! Take me to "Is Mobile Learning Smarter Learning?"

I speak with a lot of faculty, staff, and administrators about teaching with technology.  And nearly every single time, one of the first questions I am asked is, "What do we do about all the faculty who don't want to change?  Who are resistant to trying new things?  Who don't believe, for example, a cell phone could ever have a place in a classroom?"  The fact that this question is asked so much is, I think, indicative of a bigger problem. I think it's time, folks, that we reframe our focus. Yes, many faculty are resistant to change.  Yes, many faculty refuse to accept new forms of technology in their classrooms.  We need to accept that this is the way it is.  We need to accept that we can't change everybody's perspective on what teaching and learning should look like.  After all, academic freedom is at the core of our teaching values, right?  Why would I suggest such a thing?  Because as so many of us sit around tables building plans and strategies to figure out how to change the unchangeables or worse yet, throw in the towel and give up hope because all we see are the unchangeables we are ignoring and, in turn, risking the greatest assets to the future of our educational system -- the changers. Have you sat down and engaged in a Twitter chat using the hashtag #edchat?  Or #flipclass?  Don't know how?  Just go to Twitter.com and in the search box enter either of those two terms (#edchat or #flipclass). These are called hashtags on Twitter and when you send a tweet with a hashtag, they can easily be filtered into a search stream creating a 'chat' like scenario.  By doing this, you'll see tweets sent from educators around the world sharing resources with each other about how and why they're using emerging technologies to reinvent their classrooms.  These are teachers committed to change.  These are teachers driven by an internal passion.  This passion doesn't stop at the concrete curbs surrounding their schools or campuses.  It doesn't sync up with an academic calendar.  They don't wait for professional development or teacher inservice days to learn.  They're always learning, always sharing, always innovating -- and social media tools like Twitter and mobile devices like iPads and smartphones enable their learning and facilitate connections with their growing global networks.  They understand how to use technology to change the way students learn because they use technology to learn.All of you have creative, risk-taking educators on your campus.  There may be just one or there may be many -- but they are there.  They may share a lot with their colleagues and they may share absolutely nothing, but that does not mean they aren't sharing with someone, somewhere.  Last year I enrolled in a full-day Google workshop to learn how to use the latest Google tools in my classes.  It was an awesome day.  The facilitator was fabulous -- someone I had known previously and is part of my own personal learning network (PLN) on Twitter.  I won't name that person here, as I do not have his permission.  Throughout the workshop he referenced how he uses various tools in his own classes.  We had a few casual conversations throughout the day and at one point I asked, "Wow, what do your colleagues think about all this great stuff you do in your classes?  Do they love it or what?"  He shrugged his shoulders and said, "They don't know what I do. There's just no interest."I do not intend to put words in anyone's mouth here.  These are my own observations ... and I certainly welcome yours. I think many of our innovative teachers -- regardless of the level they teach -- feel smothered by bureaucracy, frustrated, unsupported, exhausted, overworked, unappreciated, and may even at times question if they've made the right decision to become an educator.  Last summer after I finished presenting a keynote at a conference, a woman approached me with tears in her eyes and said, "I was going to resign this year.  After hearing that presentation, I'm going to give it one more year." As we approach that one year mark, I find myself thinking about her and wondering where she is in her journey.Folks, this is our crisis.  Let's try to stop focusing on the unchangeables and shift all that energy to those who are already out there changing the world.  

Each month, I write a sponsored blog post for Cisco's GETinsight blog, which is part of the GETideas.org network, a global community of educators with a shared interest in discovering ways to change and innovate education through technology.In this month's post, I share a detailed overview of a non-traditional learning activity I use in my online History of Photography class.  I have found that many educators see the potential in using web 2.0 and social media tools to activate student learning but what's critical at this moment is for specific practices to be shared so we call can come together, consider them, discuss them, and evolve them into what's right for our own classes.The activity I share is titled Visual Thinking and it's a 2-week activity that uses VoiceThread as the platform for a student-curated learning unit about mid-20th century photographers.  In the activity, students take ownership of researching one photographer, contributing media (examples of the photographer's work) and voice or video comments to the VoiceThread to fulfill the content criteria for the activity, as well as an open-ended discussion prompt. The following week, the class re-engages with the newly curated unit, delving into each other's discussion questions. I invite you to peruse the details of the activity by reading the post and reflect on the deeper question that guided this teaching experiment for me, "How does learning change when students become the teachers?" This question will be further explored in a free VoiceThread-sponsored webinar I am hosting on Thursday, July 19th at 12pm PST/3pm EST.  Click here to read the post.  Enjoy!

Nearly three years ago I shared a presentation at Loyola Marymont University about my journey through teaching with technology that led me to begin to use VoiceThread, transform my teaching approaches, and, eventually, flip my classroom.  That day, a man named Michael Kieley, whom I had never met, sat in the audience.  Michael did not introduce himself to me that day but did reach out to me afterwards via email to share how my presentation encouraged him to rethink the ways he was teaching his fully on-ground Visual Thinking course. We have remained in touch ever since.  And he's made many spectacular transformations in his class.  We have met a few times in person at conferences and he regularly attends my "Teaching with VoiceThread Hangouts."While Michael often credits my presentation as a formative moment in the beginning of his own teaching transformation, I have learned and continue to learn a great deal from him.  That's one of the things I love most about using social technologies for my own professional development. They allow me to engage in dialogue with educators outside my physical sphere of access. And the more educators are motivated to have dialogues with different people from varied contexts, the more we will shift our frames of reference, ask new questions, and continue to approach teaching as a process of life learning.Michael wrote to me today. He has been asked to share a 10-minute presentation about VoiceThread with his institution at a faculty development event tomorrow.  To convey the potential of VoiceThread in 10-minutes isn't a simple task.  His solution was to create a VoiceThread about his journey.  It is shared below. Enjoy.You may share this VoiceThread using this link: http://voicethread.com/share/4001638/