Terry Anderson reflects thoughtfully on Fred Stutzman’s post on egocentric (e.g. Facebook) and object centric (e.g. Flickr) social softare. Anderson deliberates the same thing that has puzzled me for a long time: how to get students active in the online side of blended learning. He also presents a term new to me: ESS (educational social software). Read the rest of this entry »
When we think about what social media concepts or even in some cases concrete applications have to offer – especially compared to traditional online learning, P-O-P come to mind: They allow learning by more concise and meaningful participation in horizontally functioning communities, move the ownership of the learning environment towards the users, and make a sense of community, belonging and presence felt in online spaces with visible activity and visible expertise. Read the rest of this entry »
Joseph Pisano introduces his favourite music freeware in a blog series at Mustech.net. He includes the new Finale Notepad, sequencers and music utilities, such as metronomes. All music educators should check those out! Browse down the blog to find them all.
Facebook broke through in Finland this late summer/early fall after an article about its popularity elsewhere in the country’s largest newspaper. I registered out of curiosity in October 2006, but received my first friend request in August 2007. After that it has exploded. Nearly everyone I know who is a so called knowledge worker, or in other ways works in front of computers is in Facebook. Yes, it seems that people use it more in between work than during spare time – if they have any. In my FB, most people actually are my friends , co-workers or my students. I have received only a few invitations from people I have not been involved with in recent years. It is nice to see what many of my friends are up to, but on the other hand, status updates etc. do not seem very interesting. Read the rest of this entry »
Listphile is yet another interesting new and free Web tool. It allows users to build databases in a wiki-like environment collaboratively. Actually, it combines the functionalities of databases and Wikis. You can choose from different types of lists, including image galleries, numbered text list, lists of people, atlas, simple text and image and lists with embedded videos. You can also create a customized list. And of course, these pages can then be embedded to your web page or blog, since it supports rss.
I ran into a very interesting podcast lecture by professor Paul Draper from the Queensland Conservatorium Research Centre. It is an excellent recap of what has recently been going on in the field of music industries, music technology as well as music education (- or what could/should be going on in the field of music education). Draper is the head of Music Technology department, and they have set up a great site featuring podcasts of lectures, concerts, studio projects etc. They also have an online radio.
