2011 brought us the buzzword craze of “gamification” in education, or the quest to make learning online more like a video game. Inspired by FourSquare‘s achievement badges as a way of motivating users to check in to location-based services and Mozilla’s promise of outcomes-based badges in lieu of diplomas, we ed-techies went a little nuts for gamification this year. In… Read more →
As long as I’ve been interested in WordPress for Education, CUNY Commons has stood as the example of what’s possible when you mash up WordPress, WPMU, BuddyPress, and MediaWiki with some special, custom goodness. Built on open source tools, it has enabled the dedicated team at CUNY to build it into exactly the tool their community needs. I have been… Read more →
This is a great article from OnlineCollege.org that gives detailed directions on how to start a Personal Learning Network. Since my own posts on PLNs resonated with so many, I wanted to pass this on: Through social networks, email, video, and online chats, learners can connect with and learn from a wider range of people than ever before, yet building… Read more →
With the news that Google Apps for Education will be integrated with Google+ in a few days, it’s time to start thinking about how social media and collaboration can be a reality for schools.
If you are trying to create a branded online identity, it helps to have a consistent username across all of the major sites. With NameChk.com, you can search once and see if your favorite username is available on 159 different social media sites. Just enter the username you want in the search bar and it will give you a graphic… Read more →
In Cultivate Your Personal Learning Network Part I, you learned to find and organize information that will teach you, challenge your ideas, and help you stay on top of interesting new developments in your areas of interest. The second part of the Learning Loop is the “Outputs” stage. Here you will need to get in the habit of adding value to… Read more →
(This post is part of a series called “The Connected Class Community”). A popular reason for exploring gamification in online learning is because we want to increase student engagement with the content. Games are nothing if not engaging, and the very best games can give educators deep insights into how to get and keep users’ attention. After all, video game… Read more →
(This post is part of a series called “The Connected Class Community”). The Golden Apple is the most cryptic and strange of all of these ingredients. Not surprisingly, it’s also difficult to explain. I think the idea will make sense after a couple stories… The Golden Apple is an object or symbol that reminds the course community members of the… Read more →
(This post is part of a series called “The Connected Class Community”). One essential part of human communities has always been a central meeting place– a location where the community comes to engage in conversations that are bigger than one-on-one interactions can offer. I call this space The Commons and I believe that online communities need to meet this human… Read more →
(This post is part of a series on online learning communities called “The Connected Class Community”). The purpose of these posts is to explore the vital components of an online learning community using abstract, timeless qualities. For most of human history, information was stored in books, copied by hand, guarded by a tiny few literate scholars, and inaccessible for those… Read more →
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