Welcome and Introduction
Welcome to the AcademicInfo Blog. My name is Michael Madin and in 1998 I created AcademicInfo as an online directory of educational resources freely available on the Internet. As a student of comparative religion at the University of Washington and later as a technical services specialist at the Gallagher Law Library also at the University of Washington I witnessed the lack of quality directories of authoritative educational Internet resources and created Academic Info to fill this void.
Moving the Ivory Tower to the Web (Part 1)
Is the Web becoming the medium of choice for learners, and will teachers and finally administrators ever follow suit? George Siemens has discussed the idea of a world without traditional courses and he articulates three main components or requirements for online education:
Moving the Ivory Tower to the Web (Part 2)
With the rise of open learning, the time to think about the move to an online model is now. We have seen organizations in other sectors that are decisively moving to the web doing well. A good example is iTunes which usurped many existing music retailers. Organizations that only partially moved to the open Web have done less well, as witnessed by Barnes & Noble which is really a bookstore with a web presence. Compare that to Amazon which is a pure web-based book seller.
The end of social networks, already?
I've been facilitating an online course called Work Literacy that has about 700 members participating. Our first week focused on social networks and how they could be used for learning. We used Ning, a free hosted platform, for our main point of online presence and then discussed other social networks, including Linked-In and Facebook. Of course, one of the major points of discussion was that you have to learn how to use each network and not all of your contacts are on each network.
A Gentle Hand
On our Work Literacy project we have been discussing Web social media tools and how they can be used for training and education. Several groups have been created within the course of over 700 members and one of these is educators. Bill Graziadei has been very active with the group and showed how you can create a Glog, which is a mash-up of various Web tools and creates a personal portal that can also be used as a road map for students. Here is piece of Bill's glog:
Recommended reading: the cluetrain manifesto
This seminal book, by Rick Levine, Chris Locke, Doc Searls and David Weinberger was first printed in 1999.
Recommended reading: naked conversations
This book, by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel is often seen as the unofficial sequel to Cluetrain. Once again, this isn't really a book about learning. It's a book about the way businesses engage with their customers, but the parallels are there for those who care to see them.
academic infoCreated by: Mike Madin 1998 | Last updated: 02/09/2012