Alec has posted a CFP for a special issue on Technology and Social Media for the in education journal:
[Update: Thanks to your contributions, my student has been able to raise funds needed and reach the people needed to graduate. Thank you! Read the whole story at the link below…]
My student lacks the funds to graduate. We thought to turn to social media to help him graduate. Can you help?
http://helpmetograduate.wordpress.com/
In a couple of short weeks, I will be presenting a session at the Connecting Online 2009 conference (http://connecting-online.ning.com/). I am excited as this is my first online conference (and I suspect that it will not be my last). If you are interested in student engagement, please feel free to join the online conversation on February 6, 2009 at 6pm GMT at http://connecting-online.ning.com/. The presentation’s abstract is below:
Learner engagement can be defined as the learners’ act of investing effort and commitment to meaningful activities in anticipation of learning outcomes. The question of how to engage learners in the technology-enhanced classroom has proven elusive for educators and researchers alike. In this presentation I will discuss how a set of teaching strategies and pedagogies combined with the creative use of six technologies (a Learning Management System, a blog, audio podcasts, a video sharing website, a web conferencing and desktop sharing software, and a collaborative authoring application) engaged and empowered learners in a postgraduate level classroom to pursue their individual and communal learning goals, leading to impressive and unexpected outcomes.
See you there!
I was really happy to see Alec’s attempt to discover a definition of the term Personal Learning Network. Not only I consider such attempts to be valid forms of inquiring and researching a topic (see my attempt to discover a definition of the term Emerging Technologies), but I am uber excited that Alec had such a great response from his colleagues!
but instead I am blogging. I just got news that a proposal for a book project we have been playing with has been submitted. This is not the emerging technologies book – this is a whole new project that takes a more creative and “unorthodox” way to teaching and learning. I hope to be able to share more within the next month or so, once we hear back from the publisher. So far it looks promising as the published we pitched it to really liked our idea and the person we approached to write the foreword was positive. I’ll keep you updated, but it probably won’t happen until next year :)
This is an update on my work regarding my attempt to define the term emerging technologies for education: I was feeling a bit uneasy to write that the term “emerging technologies” has not yet been defined. Perhaps I was simply not discovering the definition? Perhaps the definition was laying somewhere out there and my research abilities weren’t up to par? (Unlikely, I know : ), but possible). I asked a few more people about this and ended up emailing George Siemens asking if he had a definition that he is using in his work. He asked the question on twitter here, and posted the replies he received here. Picking up on the twitter message and George’s blog post, a few other definitions have emerged here and here. Thank you everyone for contributing your thoughts – once again, I am thrilled to see educators worldwide adding their knowledge to this work! I will be using these thoughts to improve the ideas presented in my paper. The working book chapter with the definition of emerging technologies for education, teaching, and learning is now updated and available. This book is planned to be published as an open access publication by Athabasca University Press and the knowledge sharing that underpins this specific chapter makes a better case for why an open license is the best way forward!
I just received an email entitled “Amazon.com’s Black Friday Deals” and visited the amazon site to see if they have any deals on the books that i’d like to buy. I quickly stopped looking though because of the time required to go through the deals. Wouldn’t it be helpful if Amazon pulled together Black Friday wish list for me, showing me the books/items that were in my wish list AND were discounted on Black Friday? Simple and elegant, but apparently not available! Maybe next year…