Trebor Schulz explains why social media changes everything

While it is several years old, Trebor Schulz (scholar of digital culture at the New School, NY) has an excellent presentation that makes clear the way that creativity, networking and new forms of social behaviour linked to mobile and connected digital media is changing the expectations of students.

The presentation can be read in two ways. First, it is one of many (but definitely one of the best) which glosses the profound changes which connectivity and digital media bring. There’s beauty in its breadth, though always still questions as to its depth. More importantly, its origins with a scholar of new media and critical Internet Studies suggests that ther perspective we bring to analysing social media really matters. Schulz’s take on education and the future may not be entirely accurate, but it shows a distinct, new breed of academics, the kind of people who critically analyse, but nevertheless work within, the paradigm of new media, perhaps even more easily than the students they teach.

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Simple creation of interactive content

http://speakingimage.org/

With thanks to a tweet from @web20education

The basics

This web service allows users to upload a diagram, picture, map or other image file and then add annotations, links and other content which is accessed by clicking on the amended image. Layers can also be created, effectively creating ‘depth’ in the image. In a nice sign of the way the collaborative potential of the Internet now infuses pretty much everything developed for it, the site describes its main purpose: ” to provide an online tool for interactive annotation of images” but rapidly adds, “[and] interact with other users through standard social network tools.”

Despite the name, there’s no audio involved — it’s text and graphics. At first glance, image work seems relatively straightforward

Clever Educational Affordance

Users can attach their image(s), with their annotations and other manipulations (links, colour-coding and so on) to a wiki, on the website, at which comments, discussion and written articles can be maintained. Outstanding! There’s also the now-common group feature, as well as export and embedding support.

Example

From the site, an example from astronomy:

 

Alternative

Academics at MIT have created Labelme, which is similar, but with a more educational orientation; note the lack of significant collaboration and other tools. See also a highly technical paper on the coding development and some uses at  Torrabla et al. 2010.  Labelme: Online Image Annotation and Applications. Proceedings of the IEEE, 98.8: 1467-1484,

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Collect information: for comment

http://livebinders.com

The Basics

“LiveBinders is dedicated to helping you empower others with the information you work hard to collect. If you’re like us, you’ve used ‘creative’ tactics to keep track of all your links either through email, word documents or endless lists in your browser bookmarks folder. It’s hard to put a group of links together in any meaningful format. And sharing a group of URLs is cumbersome for everyone – the sender and the receiver. Have you ever looked through your bookmarks list and forgotten what they are all for? We created LiveBinders so that you could do with digital information what you do with the papers on your desk – organize them into nice containers – like 3-ring binders on your shelf. With our online-binders you can also upload your documents and easily combine them with your links in a neat and organized way.”

A useful tool, new to me, that basically takes all the things you find online, digital knowledge objects, and arrays them in a faux-binder. usefully, these items can then be commented on, making it far more than an organiser.

Clever educational affordance

Binders can be rated from 1-5 using stars. Nice, non-threatening form of inbuilt assessment, perhaps for all students to use on each others’ binders?

Example

Here is how one person has used Live Binder, for a collection of resources on using Twitter in school education:

http://livebinders.com/play/play_or_edit?id=34291

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  • Updates to this site appear on this page, commencing April 2011. The remainder of the site is relatively static and is the outcome of the Learning in networks of knowledge project conducted by Matthew Allen as an ALTC Teaching Fellow between 2009-2010.

    I encourage you to comment, make suggestions, criticise and more, via the comments box below; please also explore the site and play with the many web 2.0 applications and services.

    I expect to contribute at least 1 update post / week, either a particularly good web 2.0 application or some additional ideas.