Whilst this is not significantly educator oriented, I couldn't resist sharing it with you all as this is the trend of aggregator sites we want to make our online lives easier to manage:
Tia Carr Williams
Discussions started by Tia Carr Williams
Learn to use 21st century skills in the classroom
Yahoo! will be offering educators free workshops to get the most from the new Yahoo! Teachers.
Discover how to bring Yahoo! Teachers and the Gobbler into your classroom. Yahoo! Teachers is free for all teachers, administrators, and education specialists. On the top right you will see the powerpoint from slideshare to help you.
Given the stats on internet usage:
- 72% adults
- 93% high schoolers
- 98% college students (with margin of error could be 100%)
Broadband has reached almost 50% homes in U.S.
- 55% of online teens have created their own profile
- 51% of young adult internet users have uploaded photos to the internet
- 26% teens remix stuff they find on the web as posts, blogs, etc.
- 9% of adults
Yahoo is preparing to launch a key teaching collaborative. An integral part of the idea behind Yahoo! Teachers was a tool that could be used on any web site to gobble content.
Based on this original idea Bill Scott created a rapid prototype of the gobbler over a weekend, refined it for a week or so and launched it initially to the first Yahoo! Teachers of Merit workshop at the Yahoo! Sunnyvale campus.
Gobbler is a widget that you can popup on any web page and just grab text, images and links from the page and drag and drop them into your Y!Teachers projects. (You can also bookmark the site as well).
Its a bit like Google Notebook, bluemark, clipmarks and other clipping services but has unique properties. First, you can simply tear things off the page with drag and drop. Second, when you drop things from the page into the gobbler you are dropping them directly into your projects within Yahoo! Teachers. They get immediately saved there. Third, the assets you drop are thus brushed with meta data from the project itself (like grade level, subject, state standards). Fourth, the projects (and the assets) are then shared with any teacher anywhere in the world that is part of Yahoo! Teachers.
The combination of gather (gobbler), organize (projects) and share (teacher network) creates a powerful combination.
How many people use mobile technology?
According to Yahoo CEO Terry Semel, there are 900 million personal computers users and 2 billion mobile phones (rising daily) currently in use around the world. With mobile devices becoming a primary way for people connect to the Internet Semel suggests that much accessing of information, connect ion to online learning communities, and creation of content for the Internet via a mobile device will become normative.
A recent study by the Irish National Teachers Organization (INTO) endorsed this idea. According to INTO, only 20% of the 671 students surveyed report using their mobiles to make phone calls, whereas 81% report using their mobile to communicate via text or IM messages.
The INTO survey seems to dovetail with the results of a 2005 Pew Internet and American Life study on teens and technology. Like their peers in Ireland, American youth preferring using IM or TM for everyday conversations with friends.
Other key findings from the Irish National Teachers Organization survey:
96% of 11 & 12 year old students have a mobile phone
60% have a camera on it
72 % say they use it to access the Internet
20% use it to make calls
81% use it to send texts
Acknowledging the growing connection between mobile media and youth, the popular social networking community MySpace teamed with Helio to provide a mobile version that includes access to Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Messenger, and various Yahoo! services.
A 2005 study conducted by the United States-based Kaiser Family Foundation also found that, although 90% of teen online access occurs in the home, most Gen Y students also have web access via mobile devices such as a mobile phone (39%), portable gaming device (55%), or other web-enabled hand held device (13%).
Derek Baird suggests that 'In order to create a better and more relevant learning environment for the digital learning styles of the Gen Y student, there is a need to integrate new pedagogical strategies that support the authentic use of technology to support and foster student motivation, collaboration, and learning.
The convergence of mobile and social media technologies, on-demand content delivery and early adoption of portable media devices provides higher education with an opportunity to leverage these tools into learning environments that seem authentic to the Gen Y students filling the virtual and physical halls of the 21st century university.
This is exactly the kind of conversation that needs to happen--especially here in the USA where our use of mobile technology to support student learning (mLearning) lags behind that of Asia, Africa, Europe, and Australia.'
Related Resources
Looking Forward: Thinking About mLearning
Learning 3.0: Mobile, Mobile, Mobile
Leonard Low + mLearning
MoSoSo, Gen Y & Digital Learning Styles
MobilED
Totally Mobile
Given that this seems to be verified, Im kicking off with two excellent pdf's that give us a very comprehensive view about how the 'm' generation (m is for moble and we are talking phones) has a very specific way of transacting with information.
I believe the first document allows us to really understand the the deep connection (if you'll pardon the pun) that the student generation have with the immediacy of communication. Clearly, this has ramifications in a broad behavioural shift that cannot fail to reflect itself in the classroom. I would be interested to hear from you about observations on this.
My second choice to get our conversation started is from Educause and is a very good articulation from several perspectives about the expectations of the 'Net Generation' by Chris Dede, who is the Timothy E. Wirth Professor of Learning Technologies at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. Chris has served as a member of the National Academy of Sciences Committee on Foundations of Educationaland Psychological Assessment, the U.S. Department of Education’s Expert Panel on Technology, and the International Steering Committee for the Second International Technology in Education Study. , so he should know a thing or three.
http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/pub7101o.pdf
Remember, we will aggregate all the pdf's in a final document if you don't have time to download and read now, however, I shall be asking questions later.....
So, I'll kick off!
My name is Tia Carr Williams and Im an english woman living in Columbus, Ohio (which I put down to bad karma). Ive been here for nearly five years and have been working online for most of that time. In my previous incarnations I have run my own health centre, worked in Personnel and Hospital management, been a mature student in Psychology and Religion and raised two fine young adults on the way.
I parlayed my soft skills training into being an online consultant for Social Media (plenty of us about) as well as moderating and facilitating and coaching new entrepreneurs.
Im very excited about the opportunities that New Media Technologies represent in the field of learning, teaching and training as I think we have an unprecedented situation in accelerating the knowledge of young people if we can capture their imagination and their natural proclivity towards net life.
Tomorrow's Elluminate session will feature Truls Henriksen, the CEO of www.EctoLearning.com who will speak with authority about the needs and challenges of social media for educators and their students. I do hope you will join us.
Let me welcome you to Scope's 'Social Media for Educators' organized in collaboration with BCcampus Online Learning Communities.
I hope that you will find time to contribute and collaborate during the three weeks. I also hope you will take advantage of introducing yourself by the 'Voice Thread' as an opening gambit which is a new tool we are playing with.
I know that the assembled team come with outstanding pedigree and a deep desire to make your experience very productive in providing you with a forum and an opportunity to voice concerns, ask the tough questions, resouce answers from the collective experience of the attendees as well as the team.
I will do my usual net scouting to retrieve quality research around the topic which we will store in a thread for easy access and will be available in a 'take away' pdf by Therese Weel, who always provides stellar resource aggegation.
I sincerely hope you will get a lot out of the coming weeks and come away with a better sense of the role social media technology and application can provide in delivering education to the digital natives in your classrooms and elsewhere.
I would like to thank everyone else in the team for contributing their time and efforts to make this event a spectacular collective journey.
Tia