For my birthday, a new toy!
For my birthday, I received a cool little add-on for the iPod. iTrip is an FM transmitter that lets you play your iPod music through your car stereo. The industrial design and usability are both first rate. The iTrip creates a custom iPod playlist containing a bunch of preset [...]

As further proof that “there’s something going on here,” the NPR radio show “On the Media” today ran a report on social networking. Friendster and Columbia University’s Smallworld project were featured. The coverage was evenly balanced between the academic basics of social networking and its more popular “finding dates” spin. Poor Jonathan Abrams — the [...]

Numerous research findings, in addition to common sense, tell us that “community can’t be added on, it must be built in” to any online environment hoping to enable and support a community of learners. Unlike the document-centric, instructivist-based designs that have become the canonical models for eLearning platforms, social software applications represent a new and promising approach, whose core values are voice and dialogue instead of document and class management. Yet educators wishing to adapt “community-centered” environments to their online classes must remember that their work is not done once they’ve chosen their favorite blog solution. Building a highly engaged community of learners requires an carefully designed mix of technology, pedagogy, content, and community.

Being shamed by a friend over the very nondescript (and equally non-witty) name for my blog, I’ve changed it’s name (formerly “Home on the Blog”) to “The Electric Lyceum.” Being from Chicago, now I can implore readers to “hop on-board the El!”
Now if I can only remember all of the aggregator sites I need to [...]

To Kill an Avatar, published in legalaffairs, provides an excellent analysis of how virtual crime plagues the growing number of online immersive worlds (There, Everquest, Norrath), and explores the very real-world issues of balancing centralized laws with individual expression.

Social Software will wrest control of academic publishing from centralized publishing institutions and give it (back) to authors. But what happens to quality when everyone has a voice that sounds the same?

Finally, something to peel me away from the computer… the 2003 Tour de France has begun! And with only a prologue and two stages complete, the 100th anniversary of the race already has already had its share of drama: a terrible crash in the sprint-out at the close of the 1st stage.

With the rise of social software, will the established rules of academia need to be revised? Or is the institution itself facing obsolescence?

Clay Shirky, the insightful writer and consultant on social and economic effects of technologies, has many things right in his most recent article, “A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy.” But he’s very wrong about the value of experience in learning.

Has the recent buzz in “social software” destined it to the hype graveyard? No. Educators have long understood the role of social communities in learning and life. And while their early efforts building online communities did presage today’s social software ambitions, something *is* different this time around. With the “right tool for the job” finally in hand, educators will be able to realize their learning theories in ways never before possible. In doing so, they will rescue social software from the hype graveyard, and make it a mainstay of all learning communities.