Aiya101

Both a humorous and critical commentary of Twitter, Ben Walker’s song “You’re no one if you’re not on Twitter” makes a number of points about the variety of viewpoints on Twitter.

The “Twitterverse,” certainly, has its fair share of “rubbish,” as Walker says. But I still maintain that its this “rubbish” that creates community. The last [...]

I attended a forum last week at USC in which Niall Sclater presented on Personal Learning Environments (PLEs) and the Future of Learning Management Systems. He made a point that I think has been missing from many discussions on PLEs - his laptop is his PLE. That’s where he creates, organizes, and connects to all [...]

I was recently in a conversation about how best to ease techno-skeptic instructors into using technology for teaching and learning.
Thus far my strategy has been:

Explain why using technology for learning isn’t new
Tell them why they should care
Talk about pedagogical theories
Introduce some technologies
Demonstrate how people are using specific types of technologies for teaching
Show feedback and statistics [...]

Common Craft’s “In Plain English” videos are one of my favorite sources for explanation of Web technologies to the less-than-savvy (maybe even grudging, confused, or terrified) Web user. Their simple style of moving paper around on a whiteboard is inviting. It’s like a Sesame Street version of Investing for Dummies (I’ve read that book and [...]

I promise this blog isn’t dead. It was just…hibernating…while I moved across the country.
This blog is now coming at you from Sunny California. It’s particularly pleased with the weather and its new design. It’s thinking about taking up surfing. But, mostly, it’s thrilled to be back on the…bits…and is looking forward to hearing from you.

The past few days I’ve been poking around social networks. Wikipedia lists 124 major social networking sites. I belong to five of them:

LinkedIn (where I connect with colleagues)
MySpace (where I find old classmates)
Twitter (where I read and post minutia…and you can follow me)
Geni (where I try to get my family to use the Internet [...]

The more I read about personal learning spaces, the latest information architecture, social networking, and education, the more it seems that these fields are converging around the same set of concepts: personalization, customization, self-expression, affirmation, socialization, and navigation.
LearnHub is a great example of how these concepts can be combined for learning. Featured in TechCrunch yesterday, LearnHub [...]

Oh, MIT. You and the bleeding edge.
Today, MIT’s Technology Review published Adapting Websites to Users–an article about a marketing experiment to increase Web sales by customizing content delivery to user. How? You might ask. By analyzing a user’s first few clicks on the site, matching it with a prescribed cognitive style and then selecting a [...]