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.

In the News: What's Happening in Teaching and Technology this Week

Although there are still a few weeks until the quarter is underway, for most everyone else in the nation, this week or next is back to school. Media outlets are in a frenzy to produce interesting back to school articles. From NPR we get a reminder of the culture shock that some new college students experience: Away to College, and a New Culture. The Chronicle of Higher Ed and many other educational sites notes that Firefox is releasing a special edition: Firefox Releases New 'Campus Edition' Web Browser.

If you haven't checked out Zotero (which is a plug-in included in the Campus Edition of Firefox) you should. It is produced by The Center for History and New Media and George Mason University. Zotero is similar in function to Google Notebook, but in my mind, easier to use for serious research. Read/Write Web's recent post, Web 2.0 Backpack: Web Apps for Students provides a round up of web based tools for students. My personal favorites are yBib and EasyBib, which assist students in properly formating their citations. (If you give your students proper instructions, there really is no excuse for them to turn in sloppy bibliographies.)

For Fun: Here's a new website that combines wikis and mindmapping, creating a new way for visual thinkers to navigate the web: WikiMindMap.