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Critical Thought about Senseless Contradictions

Archive for the ‘Social Media’ Category

The decade according to 9-year-olds. Watch this video for an educational perspective of technology

December 28th, 2009

Tue Dec 8, 8:51 pm ET

So much has defined this past decade, but imagine what it would be like if the past 9 years were the only years you had lived through. Yahoo! News editor Allison Louie-Garcia spoke to fourth graders in Orange County, Calif. to get some perspective on the ’00s from those who have only experienced it. From naming the biggest celebrities, to discussing computer habits, to explaining 9/11, these 9-year-olds’ answers–often funny, sometimes sobering, always candid–offered a clear snapshot of life in the 21st Century.

(For best quality please click ” target=”_blank”>here).

Special thanks to Ms. Lim and her wonderful 4th grade class.

via news.yahoo.com

Here’s a nifty interview of some West coast children and their ideas of the world from their 9 year old perspective.

A great lesson plan idea for teachers, no? Students consider what questions to ask, interview their peers, and record their answers. Would be interesting to map the trends of greatest hopes and biggest fears among various age groups.

Posted via web from Dallas’s posterous

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Posted in Critical Thinking, Education, Environment, Futurism, Internet, Media, Social Media, Sustainability, Technology, environmentalism

Tags: 21st century learning children perspectives Technology

World’s OS is about Conversation, not Information…

December 18th, 2009

: Image via Wikipedia

If we agree that the morphing networked world is about conversation, then we can picture the changes this way:

Web 1.0 was about stone tablets.
Web 2.0 is about smoke signals; recording our thoughts, ideas, and opinions and reacting to the thoughts, ideas, and opinions of others, whether synchronously or asynchronously.
Web 3.0 is about bridging the space-time gap to engage in live, direct, real-time conversation that is virtually – if not actually – face-to-face.

The new, real-time platform is unique because it will be enhanced by APIs that can mashup our interactions in order to shape new communities hitherto unattainable.

When we understand that technology is innovated to improve social communication, we become less device and application focused and more interactive. Hence, the social media phenomenon is here to stay and will increase in intensity as new mashup applications develop to aid our intrinsic need to share.

The challenge for education is that historically, assessment of knowledge is individually based. This makes perfect sense because it’s difficult to give a degree to someone who doesn’t demonstrate command of some particular knowledge-domain they have studied. However, the real-world of business does not run on individual talents as much as team efforts.

Pedagogical application has responded with case-based, project-oriented, and portfolio-developing lesson plans. But in the end, standardized testing still focuses on individual regurgitation of memorized facts. This is a senseless contradiction at best and reflects a broken system that needs to be redesigned to enter the 21st Century.

Web 2.0 Square (socialmediatoday.com)
Real-Time Web 3 (webwareforall.blogspot.com)
Real-time search (superfeedr.com)
Trackle’s New Trick: Human-Powered Discovery (gigaom.com)

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Posted in Education, Futurism, Internet, Social Media, Technology, pedagogy

Tags: Education Knowledge Management Mass media Standardized test Technology Web 2.0

Future of Business is Social Media driven…

December 17th, 2009

Extreme reputation model means you may not exist virtually!

via fora.tv

Gerd Leonhard makes some great points in three minutes. Mobile driven instant feedback mechanisms may mean your business no longer exists virtually. Are we allowing our customer eco-systems to be fed a balanced diet? Whether you believe in the value of crowd sourced data or not, it can make or break a business.

New models must be adopted that enable the crowd to have more control than is traditionally allowed by old business models. Nevertheless, it’s the open source, creative commons world we are entering. We don’t have a choice. We’re on a collision course. Brace yourselves.

Posted via web from Dallas’s posterous

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Posted in Futurism, Internet, Social Media, Sustainability, Technology

Tags: business future Internet Social Media Technology virtual

Polar Sea Ice Cap and Snow – Cryosphere Today – iPhone friendly puts data in your hands

December 17th, 2009

recent Arctic ice area N. hemispheric ice area N. hemispheric anomaly seasonal sea ice

via arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu

Before jumping on the ice-melt bandwagon, we should arm ourselves with the facts. This university science center website offers visual data, both historic and current.

The adaptation to the iPhone demonstrates how education is being changed by hand-held devices. Just this past week, a school in the U.K. gave iPhones to every student. Imagine trying to argue and debate with ubiquitous access to data in the palm of our hands.

Of course, critical thinking skills are still needed to sort through the vast array of opinion and conjecture and to skillfully help others release their death grip on old ideas without losing face.

Posted via web from Dallas’s posterous

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Posted in Conservationism, Critical Thinking, Education, Environment, Internet, Social Media, Sustainability, Technology, environmentalism

Tags: apps global warming iphone polar ice cap Technology web2.0

VoiceThread – Group conversations around images, documents, and videos

December 12th, 2009

via voicethread.com

Very likely VoiceThread is one of the best Web 2.0 tools for classroom use to come around in awhile. Very powerful and embeddable just about everywhere. Check out this short explanation and try one yourself. Family reunion? Old family pic you wanna post and encourage some comments from others? Too much fun.

But can it improve learning? Certainly fits the constructivist paradigm. How about a self reflection on a themed unit? Or a review of best practices for tech integration for diverse learners? Listening to others think aloud can boost our own critical thinking skills.

Powerful tool with lots of potential. Worth the time and effort to become skilled therein, don’t you agree?

Posted via web from Dallas’s posterous

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Posted in Critical Thinking, Education, Social Media, Technology, pedagogy

Tags: learning tools lesson plan ideas online education pedagogy resources voice thread web2.0

What are Educational Technologist Leadership Competencies?

December 1st, 2009

The cool possibilities about the more than 200 real-time web 2.0 tools under development (Like Google Wave) is that sync and async are being melded together along with multi-dimensional communication tools such as voice, text, image, video, etc.

When semantic web becomes the standard (searchable text becomes recognizable object) then tagging and bookmarking values will be reduced and personal and group collections will become more useful.

Such collections will not simply consist of some items “saved” to another location, but more likely will consist of “searched” items and “pointed to” results. http://popurls.com is demonstrating the real-time value of aggregating crowd sourced and theme specific topics. Studying such real-time results can be a great source of discussion for critical thinking development.

The most important quality for Ed Tech leaders is to understand trends and adapt their craft to emerging innovations. Higher education may do students a disservice by focusing too much on tool techniques and too little on trend research.

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Posted in Critical Thinking, Education, Futurism, Internet, Media, Social Media, Sustainability, Technology, pedagogy

Tags: Critical Thinking Education future pedagogy Technology web2.0

Community is Not Superficial…

November 5th, 2009

Cooperation is working toward a common goal. Collaboration results in collateral material. However, community may or may not be present and/or result from either cooperative or collaborative efforts.

AND COMMUNITY IS THE GOAL!

Which is why teachers should be careful about assigning cooperative and collaborative work without a clear goal in mind of fostering community.

Community cannot exist without a sense of trust and belonging; a sense that each member’s contribution is valued and necessary; and the belief that what the community produces bears significant impact on MORE than the community itself.

I have pondered this phenomenon a great deal recently due to my position with iMMEDIA and have come up with our Mission statement as follows: Shaping communities of impact through professional development targeting technology integration.

My point is that unless we visionize our student groups with the why; then the “what” and the “how” remain irrelevant and dysfunction results. The assignment may get done but not community resulted and in my opinion, we have done nothing more than drive the herd to market. I find this distasteful to the uttermost.

If there is not impact, members feel like they are given busy work. If the only goal is self enlightenment, members grow tired of the monotony of self centered foci.

If we ask them to cooperate, there must be a bigger reason than the subject matter alone. If we ask them to collaborate, the resulting collateral material should impact a wider audience than the group/class itself. It may work for awhile. But eventually everyone will see through the gloss and look elsewhere to satisfy their innate need to pursue the greater good.

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Posted in Education, Futurism, Internet, Simple Living, Social Media, Sustainability, Technology, pedagogy

Tags: collaboration collateral community cooperation Education pedagogy teaching web2.0