Category: Technology

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What it might look like if people who hate social networking got together

Via TechCrunch comes “NOSO,” or “No Social,” a relief from the social networking experience. The video on the site explains the details, but basically, the NOSO is a way to organize a group of people who agree to make no connections and to disengage from their various Web 2.0 networks for a set period of time.

Obviously, it’s a bit of a goofy art project. Still, as someone who has found himself rather distracted from his scholarship by online events this last week, a little NOSO-ing might not be a bad idea.

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"The Write Kit" on YouTube

I’m not even sure how I came across this:

“The Write Kit” (aka 186 Media) on YouTube is a series of short videos that act as creative writing exercises. I watched this one:

Kind of interesting…. I think that these exercises seem more geared toward a secondary school audience, and I’m not crazy that it seems to be structured as kind of a 5 paragraph essay. But it is a cool idea, potentially. I’ve been thinking about doing something similar to this with a series of short lessons on how to make a simple web site, sort of a video version of Krause’s How To HTML.

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"Beyond Google: How do students conduct academic research?"

Via jill/txt I came across this article in First Monday, “Beyond Google: How do students conduct academic research?” by Alison J. Head. Yet another example of something I don’t have time and/or am not in the mood to read right now. But the abstract looks quite interesting:

This paper reports findings from an exploratory study about how students majoring in humanities and social sciences use the Internet and library resources for research. Using student discussion groups, content analysis, and a student survey, our results suggest students may not be as reliant on public Internet sites as previous research has reported. Instead, students in our study used a hybrid approach for conducting course–related research. A majority of students leveraged both online and offline sources to overcome challenges with finding, selecting, and evaluating resources and gauging professors’ expectations for quality research.

This seems to fit in with some research that my friend/colleague Bill HD has done on the ways that students multi-task during the research writing process, and the abstract also suggests to me that what students are doing is making audience-based choices. In other words, if the professor will allow the student to “get away” with a lot of internet research, then they’ll use it. If not….

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DIY Social Networks, perhaps as an alternative/supplement to online teaching tools?

This is another couple of links that falls into the category of “this is interesting, but I don’t have time think too hard about this now:” TechCrunch had a post a while ago called “9 Ways to Build Your Own Social Network,” and this morning, I came across “34 More Ways to Build Your Own Social Network.” Having just looked at these things for 10-15 minutes this morning, these are all different options for doing MySpace/Facebook -like things on your own, with different levels of “do it yourself”-ness. Some of these solutions seem about as easy as Facebook itself, while other options involve software you have to install and run on your own server.

It seems to me a tool like this might be a good thing for online teaching. I tried to get students in recent online classes to have some networking with each other via Facebook, but they weren’t that interested. So many students at EMU are older and/or returning, and while I have lots of students with Facebook accounts, I also have a lot who don’t have them and who are leery of starting an account. And for students who do have Facebook accounts, most of them don’t seem to like mixing the “fun” of that social networking tool with the “work” of classes and school.

So, if a teacher (or a program) could build their own social networking space, perhaps that could help introduce the ideas/uses of this kind of software in a classroom while not crossing the “fun” border some students have in place with Facebook and/or MySpace. Maybe it could even replace clunky software like Blackboard.

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"Too Old for Facebook?"

This is a Business Week article (I don’t know if it’s just on their web site or not, “Too Old for Facebook?” by Rachael King. The basic point is that a lot of people “born in the 70’s and earlier” are starting to discover things like Facebook in large numbers. This might be something worth including in my teaching, in large part because I have a lot of students– particularly at the graduate level– who either actually were born in the 70’s and earlier, or they feel like Facebook is the kind of thing that only “the kids” do.

Of course, there are two other reasons why I’m linking to this now. First off, it seems like many friends and family (my wife, for example) have just recently discovered this new-fangled Facebook thing and that is kind of amusing. And second, I realize that I have become so old that I fall into the “and earlier” category.

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"Newspapers and The New Paradigm"

From ACM Ubiquity comes “Newspapers and The New Paradigm” by Mohan Babu K. I haven’t had a chance to read it, but I thought it might be worthwhile noting for teaching later on. Here’s the first paragraph:

The topic of the future of newspapers is almost as topical as the news that papers have been serving customers for centuries. In discussions during the past decade, the impact of the Technology was always at the fore: advances in printing, typesetting, desktop publishing and threats from other broadcast media — radio and television. Not surprisingly, innovations in Information Technology and widespread adoption of Internet are shaking the Newspapers publishing business by the roots. The recent wave of high-profile mergers and consolidation at large papers, now playing out at the revered Wall Street Journal is attributable in part to the threat from the online world.

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Just passing along some good links…

One of my favorite blogs to read for ideas about all things electronic is Charles Bailey’s “DigitalKoans.” Why? Because he posts things like this, “Web/Web 2.0 Tools,” which includes around 500 links to goodies about WordPress, social networks, CMS-es, PDF stuff, Photoshop stuff, etc., etc. Obviously, I haven’t looked at a lot of these things yet, but I can imagine there being some handy teaching stuff in here.