Educause Connect

Educause Connect is a social networking website for people who are interested in all areas of technology in higher education. The site is organized by Tags (they seem to be pre-defined). The tag frequencies as of today were:

• Open Source (256)
• Blog (WebLog) (181)
• EDUCAUSE_ANNUAL (164)
• Teaching and Learning (159)
• E-Learning (95)
• Cybersecurity (94)
• OSS (Open Source Software) (93)
• Podcasting (68)
• Information Systems and Services (63)
• Policy and Law (59)
• Instructional Design (58)
• Social Software/Social Computing (57)
• Raves (55)
• Copyright / Intellectual Property Policies (53)
• CNI - Coalition for Networked Information (51)
• Rants (48)
• Events (47)
• Libraries and Technology (44)
• EDUCAUSE Conferences (41)
• Net Generation Learner (36)
• Intellectual Property Rights (34)
• Learning Space Design (33)
• Social Software (33)
• Blogs (32)
• Microsoft (30)

Each of these leads to a separate page on which numerous resources are brought together. Major sections on these pages include:

1. Featured Content and Primary Publications - from several sources, both text and multimedia
2. Community, including a Wiki, Educause-based Blogs that include the tag word, Jobs, Events, People
3. Elsewhere on the Net, which has the same categories as Community, but lists information from outside of Educause

All of these sections can also be subscribed to via an RSS feed, which I did for my favorite topics.

I stumbled upon this site through and email from the Educause national meeting that is coming up in October in Dallas, Texas. It looks relatively new, with almost none of the wikis having been started by anyone yet. And the site notes that it will be adding more resources in the future. Very worthwhile way of getting information, news and thoughts on your favorite new media applications in higher education. Check it out!

Global Voices Online - Blog Voices from Around the World

Global Voices Online was one of the winners of the 2006 Kights-Batten Award for innovations in journalism. The website received this award for developing “an extraordinary site that allows for both editorial gatekeeping and wide access to news and information from underreported parts of the world.“

Global Voices Online is a non-profit citizen news and media outlet for bloggers around the world. Its goals are (from its website:

1. To call attention to the most interesting conversations and perspectives emerging from citizens’ media around the world by linking to text, audio, and video blogs and other forms of grassroots citizens’ media being produced by people around the world.
2. To facilitate the emergence of new citizens’ voices through training, online tutorials, and publicizing the ways in which open-source and free tools can be used safely by people around the world to express themselves.
3. To advocate for freedom of expression around the world and to protect the rights of citizen journalists to report on events and opinions without fear of censorship or persecution.

This is a great site for classes that deal with contemporary global and regional issues. It allows students and teachers to read perspectives on current events directly from bloggers ( all of which are translated into English, for us Anglophones) living in the countries that are experiencing these events.

In my World Regional Geography class, I often send students to local online newspapers in different countries to write reports. Lately, the website I have used for this has been World-Newspapers.com, which I will continue to use. However, I will now add Global Voices Online as an option as well. It will be interesting to see how (and which) student use this blog site, and how the results compare with more traditional online news outlets.

Learning activities for educational social software

Learning activities for educational social software

This list of activities is designed specifically for the restricted access Me2U system (a version of the open source social software at elgg.org) at Athabasca University. However, the activities can be used on any social software site, including blog sites (MySpace, etc.), discussion forums, and wikis; and especially the Collaborative Learning Tools that bring many of those together in single environments, and which I previously blogged about. Web-based teaching environments, such as Blackboard and WebCT are also suited to these activities.

The activities are all presented in a very brief manner, which is good because they are not overwhelming -- especially since there are so many activities listed. Instead, these are very approachable and allows an instructor to modify any particular approach to meet their class situation. What is striking is how simple many of the activities are, and how familiar they are for anyone who has been involved in student-centered learning, whether online or in the classroom.

Here is an example of one of the activities:

Activity Name: Jigsaws
Number of participants: two or more
Activities:

• The instructor divides an assignment or topic into equal parts. Each participant is responsible for learning or completing their part.
• Each student becomes an expert on their topic and uses their blog on the ME2U web site to teach their section. Other students are encouraged to ask questions and post comments.

Assessment: learners are assessed based on the quality of their presentation of topic and follow-up discussion.
Support technologies: blog, learners can use the “Your Files" area of Me2U to upload files (graphics, text files, etc.) that can be used to enhance instruction.
Suggested time to complete: varies based on course topic


In sum, this website is a useful starting point for anyone interested in using social software in education.