Googles, Tweets, and Pods: Social Media and the Millennial Learning

April 17, 2009. Lilly East Conference, Newark, Delaware, U.S.A.

URL of this session: http://tinyurl.com/LillyEast09
---

Presenters

Name
Title
Department/Unit
Contact Info
Chris Penna - penna@udel.eduAssociate ProfessorDepartment of Englishhttp://tinyurl.com/chrispenna
Dawn Fallik - dfallik@udel.edu
Assistant ProfessorDepartment of Englishhttp://tinyurl.com/dawnfallik
Mathieu Plourde - mathieu@udel.edu
LMS Project Leader/Instructional DesignerIT-User Serviceshttp://udel.edu/~mathieu

0. Random Links Related to the Lilly-East Conference or our Presentation


1. Introduction


2. Setting up a Back Channel on Twitter


3. Easy Podcasting with Gcast and Yodio



A podcast is like a radio show you listen to on your computer or Ipod.  It can include only voice or voice and photos.  Many places allow you to create a podcast simply by using your phone – then it pops up on your computer and you can link to it on your Facebook page, put it on a class website or keep it private.

Several podcast programs include gcast, yodio and drop.io.  You can also create a podcast on GarageBand if you have a Mac.

Students can use podcasts to critique writings, offer opinions,  as language lessons, practice interviews and create their own shows based on their own interests.
Some examples of podcasts available online:


Yodio activity directions: http://tinyurl.com/yodio

4. Using Google Docs for Collaborative Writing


An Intro to Google Docs:



Discussion Why is Collaborative Writing Worthwhile?



Some Tools For collaborative Writing



Some Features of Google Docs and Some Sample Work

 



Summary Benefits



 

Some Resources


"5 Things you probably didn't know you could do in Google Docs & Spreadsheets"


Google Tools for Educators

 

Try Google Docs


The link below takes you to the practice page we shared during the session. Unfortunately at some point near the end of the session, everyone was deleted as a collaborator for that document. But although you can no longer edit it, you can see it by clicking on the link. And if you scroll to the bottom of that page, you'll see a quick guide for enrolling your students in Google Docs.


5. Hands-on sessions

We will split the the attendees into three groups, spend roughly 10 minutes at each station, and then rotate. Participants will be asked to create account, start using the sites, and discuss.

6. Bringing it All Back Together


Glossary

Below are Mathieu's out-of-head definitions of some concepts exposed during the presentation.

Aggregator

Combines different sources of information into a contextualized user interface. Start pages, news sites, email clients, and RSS feed readers are considered aggregators.

Back Channel

A back channel is a side conversation that happens during a live event between attendees. As a live performance happens, participants might want to comment, ask questions, send related links, etc. Most of the time, back channels are ignored, but more and more people are starting to use them to enhance the live performance and involve the audience. Twitter is a perfect back channel, but any synchronous or near synchronous tool can be used for this.

Browser Add-on

Some websites offer users to install a add-on to their browser to make some processes easier. For instance, the social bookmarking site Delicious has a browser add-on which allow users to add a bookmark to their list without having to visit the Delicious site, simply by pressing a button in their browser tool bar.

Client Software

A software installed locally on a computer. A lot of web 2.0 sites can also interact with clients. Twitter users, for instance, can use TweetDeck or Twhirl to send and receive updates. Microsoft Outlook is also a client software: it gathers and organizes email. Client software can also be installed on mobile devices like cellphones and media players.

Community

Web 2.0 sites usually have a social aspect to them. Communities of users add value to web 2.0 sites, following the rules of the network effect.

Copyleft

The idea behind the concept of copyleft is that it authorizes users of a digital content to use it, instead of locking it up behind copyright laws. It is very important that students and instructors use online material that they are authorized to to avoid digital piracy.

In computer sciences, a very popular copyleft license is the General Public License which fuels the open-source movement, and states that the code developed for an application is open to any alteration and free to use.

As for publications, there are different types of licenses, as described by this figure:



Unless it's considered ok under fair use, you have to ask the owner of a content to reuse it, remix it, redistribute it, etc. under the Copyright laws. Creative Commons are a set of licenses that allow someone to use a specific content under certain conditions. Material in the Public Domain is free to use.

Digital literacy

Now that the read/write web is a reality, information flows at the speed of light. Users of the internet need to develop skills to use this powerful tool, but they also need to understand how much is too much, what can be shared online, how to communicate through this medium, etc. The internet is a new permanent record, where information about anyone is a Google search away, so managing your online identity is of the utmost importance. Students and instructors have to be made aware of this to become good net citizens.

Embedding

To embed something is to insert a digital content from another page, site, inside another page. For instance, I could embed a YouTube video or a Flickr photo inside a blog post to give it a context.

Embedding is like a set of Russian dolls. You can put one inside the other multiple times. You can always add another bigger wrapper.




Attibution: backpackphotography on Flickr.com

Filtering

In an era of information overload, where users of the internet are also the content producers, filtering this information is becoming critical. Filtering can be done through tagging, identifying users, categories of users, search engines, and complex queries.

On another level, our brains can also act as filters. Skim reading or screening phone calls, for instance, are filtering behaviors. You can also define complex filters on Yahoo Pipes.

Folksonomy

A taxonomy created by a community of users. Instead of being imposed or enforced (top-down approach), a folksonomy emerges from a large set of user-generated tags.

Mashup

A mashup is a mix of data of different nature to create something new. Although most internet users think of a mashup as a video made from pictures, video snippets, and audio, a mashup can be something totally different, like a map the location of all the pizzerias in a specific area, with user ratings and pictures.

Network effect

The network effect is a concept that states that the more people use a system, the more value this system has for all its users. This is one of the reason why social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace get more people joining them that obscure but creative startup with better features.

When choosing which tool to choose for teaching or collaborating, this is something to consider. It's easier to meet people where they hang out than to drag them to a new place you have decided to use.

RSS

The RSS accronymn means Really Simple Syndication. In plain English, an RSS feed is information you can subscribe to and get notified when it's updated. You can subscribe, for instance, to someones blog, a news feed from your local paper, or a podcast. The idea behind RSS feed is that you don't have to look around all the information sources you want to follow to see if there's something new since the last time you checked. Through a feed reader, you'll see all the new information you want to be aware of.

Attibution: jrhode on Flickr.com

Social Bookmarking


Since the beginning of the internet, users have saved important web links in their browser. This method is OK for a small number of links, but is inefficient for a large number of links updated daily.

Instead of saving these links on a single browser on one computer, user can now save those bookmarking on a web site. In addition to saving the links, descriptions and tags are added by the user, and it's also possible to easily share bookmarks with others, and see other people's bookmarks. Some other sites ask users to rate web content to push better websites up on a chart.

Start page

A start page is a web page composed of widgets of different nature that can be customized by a user. NetVibes, Pageflakes, and iGoogle are examples of start pages. Some instructors have used public start pages to aggreagate different information sources for their students.

A start page is a kind of dashboard. The idea of a dashboard is to give you information on the status of the machine, and buttons to modify its behavior.


Attibution:. SantiMB . on Flickr.com

Stream

A stream is a flow of information concerning what users are currently doing on a site. Twitter is the best example of what a stream is. As users you have subscribed to post tweets online, you can see them show up on your personal Twitter stream in real time. Facebook also has a similar streamy feel nowadays, giving users a better sense of presence.

Tag

A tag is a label, a keyword, to identify, classify, or contextualize a resource. Tags are very useful on an individual level to retrieve information quickly in a flat system (without folders), and are very important in keeping web applications organized through taxonomies and folksonomies.

Taxonomy

A taxonomy is a set of keywords or tags that are designed to describe events and contents in a standardized way, to simplify information retrieval and classification by a group of users. A taxonomy is usually created by a sub-group of experts and enforced within a group.

Viral

When something goes viral on the internet, it means that a lot of users are sending a piece of information around to all their contacts, are blogging or tweeting about it, etc. This internet buzz makes this information more visible to everyone during a period of time.

Citations of Literature and Research Relevant to Session Topic, APA format


Alexander,B., 2006, “Web 2.0: A New Wave of Innovation for Teaching and Learning?” EDUCAUSE Review, vol. 41, (2) 32–44.

Boyd, D and N. B. Ellison,2007, "Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship." Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. 12(1)210-230.

Guess, A., 2008, "Better Learning With Sites and Sound," Inside Higher Ed  Dec. 3. Retrieved from  http://insidehighered.com/news/2008/12/03/audio.

Java, A. and Song, X, Finin, T., and Tseng, B., 2007, "Why We Twitter: Understanding Microblogging
Usage and Communities," from the Proceedings of Joint 9th WEBKDD and 1st SNA-KDD Workshop ’07 , August 12, 2007 ,
San Jose, California. Retrieved from http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/_file_directory_/papers/369.pdf

Thompson, J.,2007, "Is Education 1.0 Ready for Web 2.0 Students?" Innovate: Journal of Online Education 3(4).

VanderMolen, J., 2008, "Four Web 2.0 Collaborative Writing Tools." Educators' e-zine, June 1, 2008. Retrieved from http://www.techlearning.com/showArticle.php?articleID=196605249 .