We never talk any more: The problem with text messaging - CNN.com
If you don't adequately acquire those skills, moving out into the real world of real people can actually become quite scary. "I talk to kids and they describe their fear of conversation," says Turkle. "An 18-year-old I interviewed recently said, 'Someday, but certainly not now, I want to learn to have a conversation.'"
Twitter is harder to resist than cigarettes and alcohol, study finds | Science | The Guardian
Tweeting or checking emails may be harder to resist than cigarettes and alcohol, according to researchers who tried to measure how well people could resist their desires.
“There have been some studies that suggest that it [new media technology] does dissolve some of the human connections: It objectifies people,” says Maureen Costello [CQ], director of Teaching Tolerance, an education program based at the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Ala.
One recent University of Michigan study found that college students’ empathy declined by about 40 percent between 1979 and 2009, with the biggest drop-off occurring after 2000.
A decade ago a cruel classmate might have simply taunted Clementi for being gay or kissing a man, or perhaps described seeing them together. That could be upsetting enough. But now, a Webcam allowed Clementi's roommate, Dharun Ravi, to post the video live—Clementi's sexual life was instant fodder for potential campuswide mockery. And it was far too easy to gather: Ravi simply turned on his computer remotely, and saw Clementi kissing another man. On Sept. 19, he tweeted "Roommate asked for the room till midnight. I went into molly's room and turned on my webcam. I saw him making out with a dude. Yay." In the new world, even the alleged suicide note became a piece of social media when Clementi wrote on his Facebook page "Jumping off the gw bridge sorry."
A video mashup project is one in which the student uses video editing software (like iMovie) to create a new piece of work by combing (or mashing up), existing video, new video, images, text and voice-over. In some student video projects a portion of the existing video that is utilized in the mashup is the same video that is assigned as part of the curriculum. The idea is to get students to work with the video, to create with the video, as opposed to acting as passive viewers. A video mashup project is an extension of a more traditional writing assignment, where students incorporate the curricular video into their term papers. You can see examples of student mashup projects for a sociology course I co-taught this past summer on the class YouTube channel.
Gloria Gadsden, a sociology professor at East Stroudsburg University in Pennsylvania, says she was suspended last week after updating her Facebook status with complaints about work that alluded to violence.
In January, she wrote: "Does anyone know where I can find a very discrete hitman? Yes, it's been that kind of day…" Then in February: "had a good day today. DIDN'T want to kill even one student. :-). Now Friday was a different story."
Gadsden says she posted the comments in jest, on a profile she thought could only be seen by friends and family. She says officials were notified of the posts by a student -- even though she says she had no students in her "friend" list.
Massachusetts high school teacher June Talvitie-Siple learned the hard way that a Facebook wall is probably not the best place to spout off about the students and parents in her community.
Talvitie-Siple, a supervisor of the high school math and science program in Cohasset, Mass., was forced to resign this week after parents spotted Facebook comments she wrote describing students as "germ bags" and parents as "snobby" and "arrogant."
Two parents in the community alerted the school superintendent after noticing the posts on her Facebook wall, Talvitie-Siple said. The superintendent, who was on vacation overseas, sent an e-mailing asking her to resign.
"She did what was probably the most appropriate thing to do," Talvitie-Siple told ABCNews.com. "I embarrassed her, I embarrassed the school district and, you know, if I were her, I probably would have done the same thing. It was not a surprise."
The 54-year-old teacher said she thought her posts would only be visible to her friends and didn't realize that her Facebook settings made the comments visible to others on the Internet.
That is why Hersh convinced Santa Barbara in 2008 to abandon Blackboard, the LMS industry leader, in favor of Moodle’s open-source platform, which he used to build the straightforwardly named “Human Presence Learning Environment.” The interface is designed so that professors can deliver lessons and messages using videos recorded with a Webcam. It also shows students who among their instructors or classmates are logged into Skype, the video-chat service, in case they want to have a live, face-to-face conversation. As an alternative to text, students using computers that have built-in recording equipment can post audio responses to discussion threads.
Understanding Students Who Were 'Born Digital'
This TED video by Clay Shirky is a MUST see. As you watch it, think about your organization. How will communication, collaboration and learning happen differently? Or how SHOULD it happen differently?! Why do we ask? Because communication has changed. Just look at the Twitter conversation that has happened around the Iran elections. It changes the way we work, create, innovate, learn – the list goes on…
Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace
Many young people use the Web not to keep up with the issues of the day but to form and express their identities, said Andrea Forte, who studied how high school students use social media for her dissertation. (She will be an assistant professor at Drexel University in the spring.)
“Your identity on Twitter is more your ability to take an interesting conversational turn, throw an interesting bit of conversation out there. Your identity isn’t so much identified by the music you listen to and the quizzes you take,” as it is on Facebook, she said. She called Twitter “a comparatively adult kind of interaction.”
From 1995 to 2005, however, the effect became even more pronounced. The proportion of newborns with common names in any given state and its immediate neighbours became 30% higher than would have been expected if there were no geographic effect. Dr Goldenberg and Dr Levy ascribe this rise to the internet. It certainly correlates with the emergence of the web, though whether the correlation reflects causation is unproven. But whatever the reason, it is a curious result.
Understanding Students Who Were ‘Born Digital’
Kids these days! If the technologies students use — and sometimes abuse — add up to an overwhelming jumble for some professors who teach them, John Palfrey and Urs Gasser have written a book that they hope will bridge the generation gap, at least when it comes to an understanding of the different habits, learning styles and ideas about privacy attributed to so-called “digital natives.” Their book, Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives (Basic Books, 2008), covers a lot of the territory mined at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, where Palfrey is a faculty director, and is part of its ongoing Digital Natives project. Palfrey, a professor and vice dean at Harvard Law School and Gasser, a professor of law at the University of St. Gallen, in Switzerland, and a Berkman fellow, answered questions via e-mail on whether professors should ban Internet from the classroom, the ongoing evolution of libraries, and whether students are learning differently thanks to new technologies.
