How Africa Tweets and Implications for Academic Research

I was recently reading the report entitled How Africa Tweets from the Portland Communications, which can be downloaded here. It is a very ambitious effort with both quantitative and qualitative segments that provides some rich data. In 2011, Portland and Tweetminster conducted a study to see how Twitter was being used on the African continent. […]

Taking stock of social media: lessons learned from a botanical database

The last post I wrote on the use of DISQUS for crowdsourcing academic data has led my wandering brain to this one, a post taking stock of close to two years’ worth of effort in social media. What I did do that worked; what I didn’t do that worked. What I did do that didn’t […]

Open Badges and the Impact of Potential Employees

Based on some feedback I am getting on this post on Open Badges and Rewarding Learning Online, I got to thinking a bit more on how this could be expanded/revisited to suit the professional sector. Quick review: Open Badges is a Mozilla and Peer 2 Peer University project for awarding badges (like a Facebook or […]

Curation, reduction, and haiku: less is more and the art of disciplined destruction

See the full gallery on Posterous I was thinking a bit on short-form writing as a means of curation, well specifically about Twitter as an exercise in curation. There is a lot of evidence to suggest that curation is an expression of learning and knowledge construction. That we shape our systems, our knowledge constructs, and […]

Complexity, learner as cobbler, or why I love mash-ups

Just finished making my way through The Future of Learning from Steve Wheeler on Slideshare (see below) and thought it an excellent overview of the trends in learning overall and some possible technological advancements that could contribute to those trends. Very good and worth a look.  Wheeler is Associate Professor of Education at the University […]