Teaching and Technology News from Around the Web

This week Henry Jenkins of MIT Media Labs blogged about the new competition created by the McArthur Foundation to promote innovation in the area of new media and digital learning. Meanwhile, C.J. Pascoe is already thinking of how teens are replacing public spaces like malls, with virtual hangouts. In a similar vein, Heather Horst writes about Coming of Age in Networked Public Culture, describing how teens are increasingly introduced to the world outside their family and school through social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace.

In a related story, parents are now screening their children's potential roommates through Facebook. Librarians are also getting involved with Facebook, through the creation of their own library related Facebook plugins. I guess they figure they mights as well bring the library to the students, since the students aren't going to the library.


As school gets started this Fall, lots of educational bloggers have been providing roundups of Web 2.0 tools for students and academics. Academhack provides us with another list of useful mashups, Firefox plug-ins, and other online tools. He also writes about tools for working with PDF's.

Jenkins also provides a long description of the welcome and orientation activities taking place this Fall at MIT's Comparative Media Studies Program. We might notice some similarities to our own activities and find some inspirational ideas in their program.

Scott Leslie of EdTechPost points out that most faculty he talks to still don't know what the creative commons is. We might think about doing something about that.