Tim Handorf of BestCollegesOnline.com sent this to me, and asked me if I’d post it. It’s a great resource for links for teachers wanting to use social media tools in the classroom. It looks really good!
Thanks for the link, Tim!
Here it is:
Top 100 Tools for the Twittering Teacher Updated for 2012 – Best Colleges Online.
It’s been rather exciting in the last week or so for me. Much like being in Times Square where there are so many lights and sights and sounds that one can’t possible keep up with it all in one outing.
Last week was a big week for me. My much-publicized webinar that was hosted by Adobe was presented last week. It went by so fast that it almost feels like a dream! But now I have evidence that it really happened, as Adobe just published the recording of the webinar presentation on its Technical Communications Suite -OnDemand Seminar website today. I’d been waiting all this time to comment about it, but wanted to have the link first.
You can find my webinar–now an Adobe OnDemand seminar here:
(There is a sign in at the Adobe site, but it’s free.)
I need to thank Maxwell Hoffman for his guidance in the process. He gave me a lot of fantastic advice and things to think about, as well as some great editing of the drafts for the slideshow that accompanied the talk. If you ever have the chance to work with him, you will definitely enjoy yourself and learn from a master.
I also need to thank Adobe and especially Parth Mukharjee for the opportunity of a lifetime to do this. It was Parth who read my posting here and contacted me through Twitter to make it all happen. Thank you, Parth! Another Adobe “shout out” to Saibal Bhattacharjee as well for his assistance in this process. I have to say, all I did was use my voice, and to know that people at Adobe were listening, well, that feels rather great, and again, I appreciate this fantastic opportunity. I was already an Adobe fan, but this experience made my loyalty to the brand even deeper. I would readily welcome the opportunity to do another webinar or any other opportunities that Adobe might bring my way. 🙂
I also can’t forget to thank Mr. Mobile himself, RJ Jacquez, blogger of The m-Learning Revolution blog. In the past few months, this former Adobe evangelist has become my friend and a mentor, and I felt that before I took on this endeavor, I needed his blessing. (I didn’t really need his blessing, but it felt right to talk to him about it first.) He definitely supported me and encouraged me to take advantage of this webinar opportunity, and I’m glad he did. So, thanks RJ. You da man. 😉
And then there are the other friends from all walks of my tech comm life that attended–many thanks for your support as well!
I’m proud of the work I did for this presentation, and I hope that anyone who takes the time to listen and watch it will get something helpful out of it, and learn something. I will never claim to be an expert on anything, but as this entire experience has taught me, it is worth it to try new things out by doing and not be afraid to use your own voice now and then to express yourself. You never know what good things might happen. 😀
(Update 9/17/2015 – The links to the webinar have been updated as Adobe has archived the presentation’s location on their website.)
Today’s entry from the TCGM grad school archives is from April 2010, when I was still a tech comm fledgling. Note the reference to Walter Issacson towards the end of the entry. His name might be more familiar to us now, as he is the official biographer of the late Steve Jobs, and whose book came out just after Jobs’ death last fall. I have always been a history geek, so it was fun to try to make this connection back then (and I still stand by it!)
So what do you think…would ol’Ben here have been an m-learning advocate? Knowing his love of communication and technology, as well as his avid promotion of literacy and education, methinks he would’ve totally supported it!
On a night when I finally felt mentally and physically exhausted enough to take a break, I found my husband channel surfing on TV. (Now that we have an HD-TV, he’s on it a lot more than he used to be.) Among the channels that he does like to watch– and I do too, is the History Channel in HD. Last night, I think the show was Modern Marvels, and they actually had the whole episode dedicated to the works of Benjamin Franklin. Now, I’ve always had a slight soft spot in my heart for Ben Franklin, ever since I was in about third grade, and read my first biography about him, and knowing that he had strong ties to Philadelphia, which is the city I most associated with when I was growing up (even though I lived halfway between New York and Philly, Philly has family and that was the “culture” I was oriented around.) This was recently revived with a trip to the Franklin Institute with my son.
Anyway, I didn’t catch the whole show, and of course, my husband would be channel surfing during commercials, but from what I was catching of the program, which was towards the end of the episode, they were talking about Franklin being ahead of time on many levels–which he was–and how he was a big player when it came to eighteenth century communication and science. We know that Franklin was the one who was a newspaper printer, a philosopher, a statesman, a politician, and a scientist. But the thing that ties all those other elements of this post-Renaissance man is that he was a writer. He was a prolific writer, in fact, writing everything from the contents of the Pennsylvania Gazette, to books about philosophy, and writing letters and documents that helped to form the United States and its diplomatic ties. He also opened up the first public library in the United States, specifically the Library Company of Philadelphia, whereby patrons could join for a small fee and share the books in the library, for the purpose of learning and being able to exchange ideas.
The author Walter Issacson, who wrote a biography about Ben Franklin, was one of the commentators, and he was saying that if Ben Franklin lived in this day and age, he’d be loving it! With this being the digital age of email, computer communications, cell phones, Twitter, etc., Franklin would’ve been totally in his element, as he was all about the latest in science and communication, and for a guy in his time, he was on the cutting edge of such things. Part of a segment I saw talked about how Franklin was the first one to help devise the concept of watermarks and other security devices to protect the manufacturing of money, some of which are still used today. It was also mentioned that if Franklin had a new way of doing something or a new invention, he always shared his ideas and how he did them, with the exception of this currency security printing method, understandably. So, that makes me think that perhaps with all the cool inventions and discoveries he made, and considering that he was both a scientist AND a writer, that sharing that information made him the first American technical communicator.
What do you think? It’s a pretty good theory, anyway. 😉
In one of my graduate school courses, we are studying the theories and practices of social media. We’ve been looking at social media in terms of the following:
Each student in my class was assigned to work on a multimedia project regarding one of these terms. I chose to look at participatory culture, but in a different way than how it was presented in my coursework. In the coursework, the examples given were those related to the netizen and the precariat, showing how political movements or social movements started as part of a participatory culture, and then there would be a segueway into a political action, much like how Facebook and Twitter were being used for the political revolutions in the Middle East in early 2011. For me, I decided to choose a different route, something that was truly more of a cultural change.
I see the mobile learning revolution as just that–a revolution. Interested e-learning and m-learning professionals are mobilizing through social media to bring the concept of making changes in how m-learning is presented on smartphones, e-readers and tablet computers to make learning concepts even more learner-friendly than ever before. Current thought among this group is that now is the time to take advantage of making changes in instructional design as well as formatting to use these devices to their fullest potential. So, many ideas are being shared, and the “movement” is growing.
Since I am a person who has been getting more deeply involved due to my own personal interest, I chose to use this idea for my social media class project, and demonstrate how I became part of this particular participatory culture. Below is my presentation:
http://cdn.screenr.com/public/1.7/flash/screenr.swf
(If you can’t see this presentation, you can also go here to see it.)
Hope you like it! Please comment below and let me know what you think.
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