Thursday, August 16, 2007

What is VET Virtual?

The Austarlian Flexible Learning Framework has a program going called Access to Bandwidth - which explores collaboration tools and best practices in VET using good Internet connectivity (bandwidth). VET Virtual is a set of collaboration tools to keep instructors and students together.

Most notably, there is a web conferencing feature or Rooms that stream audio / video / whiteboard / applications / presentations and resources. It is really quite amazing and it is free.

You simply sign up and are instantly given a room to utilize and invite people into.

Here is the direct link:

http://202.12.92.214

What is Flickr?

  1. The Best Online Photo Management and Sharing Application

Flickr wants to help people make their photos available to the people who matter to them. Maybe they want to keep a blog of moments captured on their cameraphone, or maybe they want to show off their best pictures to the whole world in a bid for web celebrity. Or maybe they want to securely and privately share photos of their kids with their family across the country. Flickr makes all these things possible and more!

From go2web20.net

Explore and Enjoy!

  1. Go to Flickr
  2. Wikipedia on Flickr
  3. Bill's flickr
  4. Robyn Jay's getting started with Flickr
  5. The handy Flickr Uploader Application

Evaluating Social Networking Tools

How do we evaluate the plethora of social networking and web 2.0 applications out there?

What does our critical framework need to be?

Robyn Jay suggests focussing on what you NEED to do, and picking the application or suite of applications that will help you achieve your goal vs. getting entangled in the next best thing.

Does Tony Bates model ACTIONS still hold validity for evaluating these applications and tools?

Does anybody Know what ACTIONS stands for?

Pedagogy / Andogogy

Social networking aligns / relates to various schools of thought and pedagogy/androgogy such as:

1. Constructivism, Vygotsky view of socially constructed knowledge

2. Cognitive and humanistic psychology, which views learning as primarily a social process

3. Theories of multiple intelligence (Howard Gardiner) and Emotional IQ (EI) which relates social skills, emotional perceptiveness with our ability to communicate effectively, make social connections and problem solve

Many of these theories which once focussed on explaining child and adolescent development extend into views of life-based and life-long learning, which is core and central to the need for social networking.

Perspectives on Social Networking

McClelland’s Needs Theory

In his acquired-needs theory, David McClelland proposed that an individual's specific needs are acquired over time and are shaped by one's life experiences. Most of these needs can be classed as either achievement, affiliation, or power.

Look at Me / Us – Need for Acknowledgement
Look at Who I / We Know – Need for Affiliation
Look at What I /We Can Do - Need for Power / Recognition
Look at What I/We Made – Need for Achievement

I see these basic needs as intertwining and intersecting with each other and forming the foundational motivation for social networking.

Studies in distance education have demonstrated that an over emphasis on social presence may be inversely correlated to the facilitation of cognitive presence. We can actually generate certain rules / mores / norms online as we generate community, trust and belonging so that we might circumvent risk taking, more critical inquiry and challenging viewpoints or the co-creation of new knowledge.

What is Del.icio.us?

A collection of Favorites - Yours and Everyone Else's
Del.icio.us let you keep links to your favorite articles, blogs, music, restaurant reviews, and more and access them from any computer on the web. Share favorites with friends, family, and colleagues. Discover new things. Everything on del.icio.us is someone's favorite - they've already done the work of finding it.

From go2web20.net


Explore and enjoy.

  1. Wikipedia on Del.icio.us
  2. Go to Del.icio.us
  3. Bill's Del.icio.us
  4. Robyn Jay's Getting Started with Del.icio.us

For the Cerebral Ones Amongst Us!

Risks of Social Networking?

This paper, entitled Semantic Analytics on Social Networks, by a research team led by Amit Sheth of the University of Georgia in Athens and Anupam Joshi of the University of Maryland in Baltimore reveals how data from online social networks and other databases can be combined to uncover facts about people. The footnote said the work was part-funded by an organisation called ARDA.

From 9 June 2006 - NewScientist.com news service by Paul Marks