Daily Bookmarks 07/28/2009

• “Living and Learning with Social Media”

  danah boyd on implications of social media for education, focusing on teens

  tags: socialmedia, socialnetworking, education

  • Youth engage with others to work out boundaries, to understand norms. This is how they learn power and authority, how they learn the networked architecture of everyday life. It’s easy to eschew this, to argue that this is irrelevant, but most people spend a decent amount of their time working through social issues as a part of being an adult in this society. We talk about it as “politics” usually but it’s about people. And teen years are where this is worked out.
  • Since we’re using social network sites as a case study, let me point out one of the places where they FAIL miserably. On social network sites, you have to publicly list your Friends and you have to have the functioning network to leverage it. What happens if you’re an outcast at school? Does bringing it into the classroom make it worse? What happens if you’re forced to Friend someone who torments you because you share a class? And then you have to face that person in your “private” space online as well? Bringing social network sites into the classroom can be very very tricky because you have to contend with social factors that you, as a teacher, may not be aware of.
  • It’s critical to realize that just because young folks pick up a technology before you do doesn’t inherently mean that they understand it better than you do. Or that they have a way of putting it into context. What they’re doing is not inherently more sophisticated – it’s simply different. They’re coming of age in a culture where these structures are just a given. They take them for granted. And they repurpose them to meet their needs. But they don’t necessarily think about them.
  • Educators have a critical role when it comes to helping youth navigate social media. You can help them understand how to make sense of what they’re seeing. We can call this “media literacy” or “digital literacy” or simply learning to live in a modern society. Youth need to know more than just how to use the tools – they need to understand the structures around them.

• 5 Tools for Social Media Monitoring | Social Listening | Off Madison Ave

  Tools for visualizing conversations, URL shorteners, search, and analytics

  tags: socialmedia

• A.J. Hyman’s blog » Conferences & Jobs

  A collection of conferences & events for ed tech & e-learning, plus some job boards

  tags: e-learning, career, edtech

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Why a Wiki?

Our team uses a wiki to document our design and development processes, something I wrote about in a short column for the eLearning Guild’s Learning Solutions magazine. This weekend I was imagining a conversation between two people about the benefits of a wiki. This overlaps quite a bit with the reasons in my article, but it’s a more fun presentation with Xtranormal.

I kept this conversation pretty generic; I think these reasons apply to documentation for any kind of group, not just instructional designers or e-learning developers. This also focuses exclusively on the “why” of wikis. If you want more ideas on the “how,” check out my article in Learning Solutions. (Registration is required to read the articles, but even free Associate members get this benefit.)

Daily Bookmarks 07/26/2009

• YouTube – How to add Closed Captions and Subtitles to your video

  Quick tutorial screencast by a kid on how to create and add captions to a YouTube video

  tags: accessibility, video, tutorials

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Daily Bookmarks 07/25/2009

• Free Music Archive

  Over 10,000 free mp3s for download, all CC licensed

  tags: music, audio, free, creativecommons

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Daily Bookmarks 07/24/2009

• What the F**K is Social Media: One Year Later

  Not too serious slideshow on social media, with a number of stats on impact. Emphasizes the idea that social media is a conversation, not a broadcast platform for marketing.

  tags: socialmedia, marketing, conversation, slideshare

• Beth’s Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media: Guest Post by Gaurav Mishra: The 4Cs Social Media Framework

  A framework for principles of thinking about social media, aiming to look at the underlying purposes and benefits of the tools without getting caught up in the specific tools or buzzwords.

  tags: socialmedia, community, collaboration

  • 4Cs of social
    media: Content, Collaboration, Community and Collective Intelligence
  • Collaboration can happen at three levels: conversation, co-creation and collective action
  • The third C, Community, refers to the idea that social media
    facilitates sustained collaboration around a shared idea, over time and
    often across space.
  • The great thing about collective intelligence is that it becomes
    easier to extract meaning from a community as the size and strength of
    the community grow.

• Facebook Applications for Learning – 2009 – ASTD

  Applications for sharing presentations, books, quizzes, note-taking, and research. Some of these are more general applications than learning ones (like SocialCalendar & Files), but a number of these apps are new to me.

  tags: facebook, learning, education

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Daily Bookmarks 07/23/2009

• WebAIM: Blog – WCAG 2.0 and Link Colors

  The WCAG 2.0 guidelines for contrasting colors mean that if color is the only indicator of difference, you need to have sufficient contrast. It’s really hard to meet the requirements with color alone, but if you underline your links it’s OK.

  tags: accessibility, webdesign, color

  • Because of the WCAG 2.0 contrast requirements, if you don’t underline your links, there’s not much flexibility if you want to be Level AA, let alone Level AAA conformant.

• Beyond Social Networking: Building Toward Learning Communities — Campus Technology

  Social networking and learning communities–moving beyond just the social aspects to reflective learning in a community. My coworker, April Hayman, is cited in the article.

  tags: education, socialnetworking, e-learning, learningcommunity, digitalliteracy

• BackupMy.Net Dashboard

  Backups for email, blogs, photo accounts, and Twitter. To get a free Twitter backup, you need to Tweet about the service once.

  tags: twitter, blog, tools

• AdViews

  Collection of thousands of TV commercials from the 1950s through the 1980s. Most or all of these are still copyrighted, but educators doing projects should fall under fair use.

  tags: primarysources, marketing, history

• Twitter A Dead End Investment For Small Business

  Cautions about Twitter. A lot of this seems to be about being realistic about the investment of time to really engage people effectively, plus pointing out Twitter’s bad fundamentals.

  tags: twitter

• Collecta

  Collecta calls itself “real-time search.” It focuses on searching blogs, Twitter, news sites, etc. rather than more static web content.

  tags: search, twitter, tools

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Glitchy Failure Captions in Captivate

Recently I’ve been working on a Captivate tutorial to help our facilitators better understand the thought process of troubleshooting a specific part of their course setup. This is basically a software simulation with an avatar & audio. Most slides have a clickable area within the LMS interface. This click box has both a hint caption and a failure caption. Each slide also has a hint button to give learners some extra tips.

The hint button was working fine, but I noticed during testing that some of the time the failure caption wasn’t showing up. I saw it some of the time, but not consistently. After a few tries, I figured out that the failure caption only appeared if the Hint button had already been clicked. If you skipped the hint and went right to trying to perform the action, you didn’t get any feedback at all.

I played with the timing and pause settings, but still got the same behavior (or created some new glitchy problem). I also noticed that a few of my slides were working just fine without any change to those settings. A-ha! The difference on the slides that were working was the order in the timeline. To get the failure captions to appear, the click box needs to be above the hint button in the timeline.

It’s a simple solution, but I was feeling frustrated this afternoon until I figured it out. I want to record the solution so if this comes up again I will know to try this.

Has anyone else run into this issue? I’m using Captivate 3; I’m curious whether the same holds true for Captivate 4.

Daily Bookmarks 07/22/2009

• PosteRazor – Make your own poster!

  Open source project for printing images on multiple sheets of paper, making your own posters.

  tags: graphics, opensource, tools

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Daily Bookmarks 07/21/2009

• The 100 Best Open Education Resources on the Web | MasterDegreeOnline

  Open education resources from colleges, museums, libraries, and other organizations. Includes lectures, podcasts, videos, media, and reference materials.

  tags: education, openaccess

• 22 Why Reasons People Go Online: Which is Your Blog Connecting With?

  Why do people go online? The most popular category is learning: educating yourself, doing research, or keeping informed. Fun reasons like passing time and being entertained as well as socializing also ranked high.

  tags: blog, learning, research

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Daily Bookmarks 07/19/2009

• edtechpost – PLE Diagrams

  Collection of diagrams showing PLEs–lots of different ideas here

  tags: visualization, ple, learning

• Social Collider

  Visualize connections in conversations on Twitter. Search for a user, tag, or trends. Tweets that generate conversation appear as spirals as they bounce around between people, so perhaps someone with lots of spirals would be someone who generates lots of conversation rather than just talking at people.

  tags: socialmedia, visualization, twitter

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.