What is RSS?
This video clip (about 10 mins.) provides a practical introduction to RSS without going into all the technical details:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2154007197186326820Introduction to Social Bookmarking
I put together this talk to explain in layman’s terms the technological framework and rationale for social bookmarking. This was my first attempt at creating a QuickTime video from an enhanced podcast episode.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3934368635322966760The enhanced podcast episode [.m4b] that this video was created from can be downloaded here or simply by subscribing to my enhanced podcast in iTunes.
The slides for this talk can be viewed here.
The Horizon Report: 2007
The 2007 edition of the Horizon Report – issued by the New Media Consortium and the Educause Learning Initiative serves as a research-oriented collection of emerging technologies which are deemed to have an impact on higher education in the near future. To identify the relevant technologies, first, key trends in higher education were reviewed. The following six trends emerged:
(1) The rapid change of the environment of higher education refers to declining budgets, rising costs, fewer student enrollments, increasing demand for distance education and the rather new competition from the for-profit sectors.
(2) Increasing globalisation allows students to access more resources and to meet more perspectives. Additionally, skilled workers from Asia influence the way we work, collaborate and communicate.
(3) Although the so-called digital natives grow up with continuous access to the internet, information literacy should not be taken granted. Especially, the skills of research, evaluation, and critical thinking are missing.
(4) Due to the possibilty of digital expression of scholarship and the trend towards more collaboration, the standard of peer-reviewed paper publications will decline. Instead, other models of academic review and faculty will slowly emerge.
(5) Accordingly, the question what constitutes an expert in a field has to be reconsidered since a trend towards mass amateurization and collective intelligence can be identified.
(6) The views of students and faculty what should be considered technology are also increasingly different from each other.
Notable “new technologies to watch” for 2007 include:
(1) User-generated content (ie: blogs, wikis, podcasts, photostreams, etc.)
(2) Social networking
(3) Mobile phones
(4) Virtual worlds
(5) New scholarships and emerging forms of publications
(6) Massively multiplayer games
Download the entire report [pdf] here
Web 2.0 Zeitgeist, 2006
Dion Hinchcliffe provides a brief history of the Web and summarizes the current trends of Web 2.0. He includes this diagram he created to help illustrate the development of the Internet over the past three decades.
Digital Literacies & Emerging Educational Technologies
Alec Couros created a useful wiki on digital literacies & emerging educational technologies. He includes resources on blogs, wikis, video sharing, aggregators, social networks, digital literacy and more.