One of the advantages of working
in a school is that we are constantly given training, if we want it, on how to
use applications not only for classrooms, the library, or our areas of
expertise, but for personal use. The younger teachers are very savvy;
technology is second nature to most of them, but many of us have to be trained as to the myriad of teaching and learning possibilities out there.
Once a month it’s Tech Tuesday for
faculty and staff for one hour. Yesterday it was billed as Newseum and other
networking applications. Our website already has private access for students
and faculty to have wikis and blogs for class work.
Though I am a long-time computer user who
utilizes many task and project oriented applications, my social networking apps
have been primarily blogs, Facebook, Twitter and Skype so far. Our training began with
the relevancy of Facebook and Twitter for more than strictly social
purposes. Since I am a sponge for
learning and teaching and embarrassed by the time I sometimes waste “playing”
on the Internet, now I can rationalize my usage better. (Can't I?) I’ll admit that I’m not
an iPhone, Blackberry, iPod or MP3 user—yet. I guess all these social
networking apps can be downloaded to the phones.
Facebook. Most of us know
that Facebook started out as a
social networking site reserved only for college students, but now it's for
everyone. Created by Mark Zuckerberg in 2004, Facebook has quickly turned into a
popular cyber destination for teenagers and adults of all ages. Whether you are
posting pictures, linking to published works, using it to keep in touch with
friends far away, or using it to create cohesion within your company, Facebook
has taken on several practical uses. On March 2, Southern
California Public Radio's Larry Mantle talked to Greg Atwan, co-author of The Facebook Book, about the frenzy around
the popular website and the future of Facebook. The link will take you to the podcast. I found it very informative.
Twitter. Yesterday we had a quick overview although almost everyone already had an account or knew about it. The following links were given to us today that really gave me a
strong sense that Twitter has a lot more going for it than I had previously
understood. I came to Twitter almost as reluctantly as to answering machines back in the early 1980s, but after yesterday's presentation, I realized that the app has a lot more going for it than I previously understood. For example, try Academic Hack, Tech 42, or College at Home.
Next came two Daylife applications
by Jonathan Harris.
We Feel Fine is an exploration of human emotion on a global scale. Since August
2005, We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of
weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world's newly posted blog
entries for occurrences of the phrases "I feel" and "I am
feeling". When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to
the period, and identifies the "feeling" expressed in that sentence
(e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.). Because blogs are structured in largely
standard ways, the age, gender, and geographical location of the author can
often be extracted and saved along with the sentence, as can the local weather
conditions at the time the sentence was written. All of this information is
saved.
The result is a database of
several million human feelings, increasing by 15,000 - 20,000 new feelings per
day. Using a series of playful interfaces, the feelings can be searched and
sorted across a number of demographic slices, offering responses to specific
questions like: do Europeans feel sad more often than Americans? Do women feel
fat more often than men? Does rainy weather affect how we feel? What are the
most representative feelings of female New Yorkers in their 20s? What do people
feel right now in Baghdad? What were people feeling on Valentine's Day? Which
are the happiest cities in the world? The saddest? And so on. (OK, why, you ask?)
Universe reveals our modern mythology by supporting the exploration of personal mythology,
allowing each of us to find our own constellations, based on our own interests
and curiosities. I haven’t figured out yet how this works. Way over my head.
Newseum blends high-tech with the
historical. It’s actually a 250,000-square-foot museum of
news — offering visitors an experience that blends five centuries of news history
with up-to-the-second technology and hands-on exhibits. The Newseum in reality is located
at the intersection of Pennsylvania Avenue and Sixth Street, N.W., Washington,
D.C., but the link above allows you to visit the Newseum virtually.
Voicethread allows distance
learning anew for business and education. It allows discussions to
extend beyond the classroom walls by capturing the voices of students and
educators anytime and anywhere, although it obviously has social/personal potential, too. The teachers were particularly excited by this
app.
Second Life. One of our part-time librarians is
also a college librarian and she introduced Second Life,
a free online virtual world for higher education imagined and created by its residents, or avatars. From the
moment you enter Second Life, you'll discover a fast-growing digital world
filled with people, entertainment, experiences and opportunity. I’ll admit I have never been a gamer, but most of our younger learners are
fully in-tune with this kind of model. Universities all over the country are
using Second Life and there’s a link there for Sloodle and Moodle which I did not understand at all. This site would take days to learn I think,
but the opportunities for learning are limitless. I would definitely have a very high learning curve.
Then came two sites just for fun:
Pandora and Slacker. Both are free personalized radio services featuring a myriad of expertly programmed genre stations and the ability to create your own perfect stations . I have set up a Sarah Brightman-like station in Pandora to write this entry. I Pandora came out of the Music Genome Project.
I can't imagine that any of you stayed this long, but if you did, won't you share apps that you know that are used for social networking, but can also be used for learning--or fun.
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