Academia and Social Media

Ramon Thomas

Macro-Cycles from The World is Flat:

In this landmark book Thomas Friedman outlines 3 great eras of globalisation:

Globalisation 1.0: 1492-1800 a period where the world shrank from a size large to a size mediumGlobalisation 2.0: 1800-2000 a time when multinationals were the dynamic force driving global integrationGlobalisation 3.0: began 2000 and characterised as a time when individuals have new-found power to collaborate and compete globally.

Given this you can assume Globalisation 3.0 = Web 2.0 / Social Media

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_is_Flathttp://www.thomaslfriedman.com/worldisflat.htm

The DCI is a gathering of African digital citizens - bloggers, netactivists, digital rebels, hacktivists, media professionals and academics - who use new media to deepen democracy and development.

This years conference theme is the Emergence of the Digital Citizen and will focus on ideas and discussions around African identity on the web, social networking, activism, journalism and digital rights as well as the business, marketing and innovation of Web 2.0.

Were lining up speakers from around the world to facilitate discussion around these issues. Along with formal panel discussions and presentations, DCI will host a series of workshops that will help equip and empower participants with the skills they need to exploit their right to communicate using free and accessible new media technology.

We urge you to take part because, at its heart, this is what DCI is all about: keeping the conversation going about Africas role in the new media revolution. It is a brilliant networking opportunity that allows cyber patriots to examine issues around the powerful tools that allow us to participate and make content.

TED (Technology Entertainment Design) is an annual conference held in Monterey, California and recently, semi-annually in other cities around the world. TED describes itself as a "group of remarkable people that gather to exchange ideas of incalculable value". Its lectures cover a broad set of topics including science, arts, politics, global issues, architecture, music and more. The speakers themselves are from a wide variety of communities and disciplines and have included such people as former US president Bill Clinton, nobel laureate James D. Watson, Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales and Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page. The TED Conference also has a companion conference, TED Global, held most recently in Arusha, Tanzania. Read my business blogging of this conference:http://netucation.co.za/tag/tedglobal2007also seehttp://www.ted.com

Blogs at UCT is a pilot service hosted by the Centre for Educational Technology.

Reading a new blog called Educlib has drawn my attention a community of bloggers at University of Cape Town. The main page links to all the staff members hosting blogs with this service, and you can subscribe to either the individual blogs or an aggregated feed of the latest posts. This is similar to a blog community at Dickinson College, although Dickinsons seems to be populated mainly by students. Offering an aggregated feed from a community of bloggers is not only convenient for subscribers who may be interested in the community in general, it also enables discovery of new blogs. Source: http://syndicateblog.petersons.com/wordpress/index.php/blog-community-at-the-university-of-capetown/

iTunes expands podcast service (2006):

Apple Computer Inc has introduced "iTunes U", a nationwide expansion of a service that puts course lectures and other educational materials online and on-the-go via Apple's iTunes software. Apple has been working with 6 universities on the pilot project for more than a year and expanded the educational programme this week, inviting other universities to sign up. Internet access to college lectures is nothing new, but listening to them any time, anywhere on portable gadgets is a more recent phenomenon of the digital age. The University of Missouri had already been offering podcasts of lectures through its school network before it signed up with Apple last summer as a pilot school.

Making learning easier: The market dominance of Apple's iTunes Music Store and iPods, which helped spawn the podcast movement, also was key. "Our students are digital natives. We seek to meet our students where they are, and iTunes is the interface that most of our students are already familiar with," Politte said. Apple's free, hosted service offers universities a customised version of the iTunes software, allowing schools to post podcasts, audio books or video content on their iTunes-affiliated websites. The iTunes-based material would be accessible on Windows-based or Apple Macintosh computers and transferable to portable devices, including Apple's iPods. The service lets institutions choose the audio and video formats they want in producing the content. Universities can also control how they want to limit access to the online materials - to restricted groups or open to the public. For instance, Stanford University, which joined the pilot programme last autumn, gives the public free access to not only some lectures but also audio broadcasts of sporting events through its iTunes-affiliated site.

'Students contribute greatly to Apple's sales': Universities can also choose to let students - and not just faculty - upload material to the site. The University of Missouri, for instance, is using iTunes U as a communication vehicle, letting students post their work on the site for quick feedback from professors.

Yale Netcast Available on iTunes

Yale University has launched a netcast featuring Yale faculty as well as distinguished campus visitors. The netcast, available for free through Apples iTunes, includes a variety of topics discussed in panel discussions, public lectures and interviews. New talks are being added each month so check back often or subscribe to the netcast.

If you are unfamiliar with iTunes, go to the Apple website for helpful hints and instructions. If you already have iTunes on your computer, click here for the Yale netcast.

Facebook has 32 groups for NMMU alone. UCT students have created over 437 groups. WITS has over 500 groups.

Librarians Find New Uses for Facebook

Facebook applications have been all the rage since the social network started letting people add accoutrements to their profiles this summer. But librarians have expressed concerns that theyre being prevented from designing their own scholarly applications for the site.

Still, there are plenty of Facebook add-ons that librarians might find helpful, and iLibrarian is selecting its top 10 of the genre. In the first post of a three-part series, the blog profiles Facebook apps like Librarian a tool, designed by a library student, that lets users vote on the value of reference resources.

The eGranary Digital Library provides millions of digital educational resources to institutions lacking adequate Internet access. Through a process of garnering permissions, copying Web sites, and delivering them to intranet Web servers INSIDE our partner institutions in developing countries, we deliver millions of multimedia documents that can be instantly accessed by patrons over their local area networks at no cost.

Why the eGranary Digital Library?Many of the developing country universities, schools, clinics and hospitals with whom we work have no Internet connection. Those that are connected to the Internet have such limited bandwidth that they cannot offer free Web browsing to the majority of their staff and students. Bandwidth in Africa can cost up to 100 times what it costs in the U.S., so for some organizations a slim Internet connection can consume the equivalent of one-half their operating budget. Even for those individuals who have the wherewithal to pay for Web browsing, the experience can be frustratingly slow -- it can take hours to download a single audio file. How Does the eGranary Help?The eGranary Digital Library addresses these issues by moving a large assortment of educational Web documents onto the subscriber's local area network (LAN) so that the documents can be made available to everyone within the institution freely and instantly. We "store the seeds of knowledge" inside the institution where they can be accessed even when the Internet connection is broken. In a sense, we say, "If you can't come to the Web, we'll bring the Web to you!"

Connexions is a global repository of educational content that can be adapted and updated by new authors. The whole collection is freely available and students and learners can explore all the content. Connexions is pioneering, along with other projects such as MIT OpenCourseWare and the Public Library of Science, the idea of open educational resources that scholarly and educational content can and should be shared, re-used and recombined, interconnected and continually enriched.

Subject matter: Connexions contains educational materials at all levels from children to college students to professionals organized in small modules that can be connected into larger courses. Material is authored by people from all walks of life. A large amount of content is created by university professors, but the collection also contains very popular music content created by a part-time music teacher.

Connexions popular material is translated into many languages, aided by the open-content licensing.

Copyright: To ensure the legal reusability of content, Connexions requires authors to license materials they publish under the Creative Commons Attribution License [1] (presently, version 2.0). Under this license, the author retains the right to be credited (attributed) wherever the content is reused. The author grants others the right to copy, distribute, and display the work, and to derive works based on it, as long as the author is credited.

Connexions

Create > Rip > Mix > Burn

Intellectual Property (Creative Commons)

Quality control (Lenses)

Sustainability > Value

Connexions welcomes authors, teachers, and learners everywhere to:- Create: to author new educational materials and contribute them to a globally accessible repository;- Rip: to customise, personalise, and localise the materials;- Mix: to mix the materials together into new collections and courses- Burn: to create finished products like Web courses, CD/DVD Roms, and even printed books

Reuse: Connexions employs a 2-pronged approach to encourage OER reuse. First, rather than organising materials at the course or textbook level, Connexions takes a modular, Lego approach. Smallish Lego block modules communicate a concept, a procedure, a set of questions, and so on. Connecting several modules together into a collection creates a Web course, a textbook, or a curriculum that can be easily updated by adding, subtracting, or modifying modules. Breaking the course materials into discrete modules drastically reduces the time commitment required of authors and instructors, who can now write a high-quality module or weave a customised course in an evening or weekend.

All material is encoded in a common, open, and semantic XML format. Since XML encodes what the content means rather than how it should be presented (displayed), modules are multi-purpose and flexible. They can displayed as an individual Web page, woven seamlessly into many different courses, converted to PDF for printing, or even processed through a speech synthesiser to accurately read material to the blind or illiterate. Mathematics encoded in content MathML can be copied and pasted into tools like Mathematica to experiment with formulas; similar mark-up languages exist for chemistry formulae, musical notation, and many other domains.

Laurie Butgereit, a computer programmer, is part of a project called Math on MXit, currently hosted by the Meraka Institute (CSI).. The project is designed to give high school students quick and easy access to a tutor to help with questions in mathematics. Call her on (012) 841-3200

It has been an instant hit with learners, mainly because it is cheap and uses a cellphone as a communication tool. Where an SMS would cost 50c or more, messages sent via MXit cost as little as one or two cents. Math on MXit latched on to the fact that virtually every teenager owns a cellphone as a medium of communication. MXit is an instant messaging system that runs on cellphones (like MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, ICQ or Skype without voice). Once this is done, learners are able to ask tutors maths questions. These questions are routed to a tutor who is online during specific hours to help provide answers, says Butgereit. The service was available for only three hours a week but, because of its growing popularity, it is now increased to eight hours a week after school. But the tutor does not do homework, says Butgereit. The tutor only guides the learner into working out the problems. To avoid abuse of the system by social misfits who could use the facility to lure and molest children, Math on Mxit has introduced some safety features. These include asking learners to use fictitious names when they register and barring tutors from making contact with participants outside of the projects scope. Tutors names, gender, race and age are also concealed they are simply called dr. math. The participants are, however, required to give their cellphone numbers so that when a learner asks a question he or she can be identified by that number, but more importantly, to ensure the response goes back to the correct cellphone.

Snippet from MXit: Learner asking a math-related question:(14:30:32) unknown-9: hw do u work out the area of a circle(14:30:36) dr. math: Hi, do you have the radius of the circle?(14:32:06) dr. math: If you have the radius of the circle, then the area is pi times radius squared(14:32:08) unknown-9: 8mm(14:32:41) dr. math: so pi x 8 x 8 the result will be in mm squared.(14:43:12) unknown-9: okay thanks.

Contact Details: Ramon Thomas

ramon@netucation.co.za

Tel. 011 4331034 or 082 9407137

www.netucation.co.za

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