Haven’t had a chance to really check this out entirely, but thought I’d throw it up here in case you have a chance to poke around. Looks like a lot of education specific apps…
http://www.google.com/enterprise/marketplace/search?categoryId=25&orderBy=rating
New report from the Pew Internet and American Life folks. Turns out that social Internet users are social in meatspace as well.
“75% of all American adults are active in some kind of voluntary group or organization and internet users are more likely than others to be active: 80% of internet users participate in groups, compared with 56% of non-internet users. And social media users are even more likely to be active: 82% of social network users and 85% of Twitter users are group participants.”
The report is here: The Social Side of the Internet
I implore you to really watch this. Gardner Campbell speaks a lot of truth here, and provides lots to think about.
This from the Chronicle of Higher Ed:
In November, with help from a U.S. Department of Education grant, Bellevue bought 500 netbooks—inexpensive laptops used to download and read Internet material—to rent out for $35 per quarter. Negotiations are still continuing with publishers, but the cost of the e-textbooks used on the devices can be half that of traditional books.
I have to say that as cool as this might sound, I HATE hardware-based solutions, especially when the college is holding the bag. I hate ARS (e.g., clickers) for the same reason, especially when phones are ubiquitous and there are systems available to allow them to act like clickers. Granted, there are ancillary benefits of having access to a netbook, but I wonder how many of the target students already carry smartphones? The latest Pew research seems to indicate that lower-income students tend to access the internet on devices:
Teens from low-income households, particularly African-Americans, are much more likely than other
teens to go online using a cell phone. Source – Pew: Teens and Mobile Phones, April 2010
Read the rest of the Chronicle article here.
New report from the folks @ Pew about the demographics of Twitter users. Minority Internet users are more than twice as likely to use Twitter than are white Internet users. Another opportunity for faculty to reach out to historically/statistically (at least in the Los Rios district) underperforming students?
http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2010/Twitter-Update-2010/Findings.aspx
@JaneBozarth: Hotel lobby: Looking at real newspaper for first time in forever. It’s all news I read on Twitter yesterday. Original Tweet: http://twitter.com/JaneBozarth/status/13227779881439233 Sent via TweetDeck (www.tweetdeck.com)
These are flyers posted in a couple of places at FLC. Is this the message we want to be sending? Given that smartphones are handheld computers, do we really want to prohibit our students from using computers? Is “Students having loud, disruptive conversations…” too nuanced for a sign?
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/outreach/wiki/Public_Policy_Initiative
This project has students improve Wikipedia articles as part of the curriculum. Anybody feel like working with me to adapt this effort to your own classes? Anybody?
Great interface for easy QR code creation for all the usual stuff – url, sms, etc. – but also things like email and vcalendar.