Much of the text below is excerpted from Jane Hart’s web sites.
“Jane Hart is an independent consultant, speaker and writer. She is an internationally known specialist in the use of social media for learning and working.” I’ve linked to some of her “best of” lists elsewhere on this site; you’ll find a few similar links towards the end of this post.
“Jane … recently established the Social Learning Centre to focus exclusively on how to encourage and support the use of social media for continuous collaborative learning.” It includes a “range of special interest groups for ongoing, continuous updates and discussions on specific social learning topics.” If you’re interested in these groups, you’ll need to register at the site. I joined the groups “Social Media and Education”, “Google applications for learning”, “Google+ and Learning”.
Here are some recent collections she’s put together:
Social Learning: Key resources from January
Here is my pick of 10 articles about social learning since my last posting just before Christmas. I have listed them below in chronological order, and also added a short quote from each of them to give you a flavour of what each is about. If you want to read further articles you will find many more that I have saved in my 2012 Reading List.
Top 100 Articles of 2011
This is my 4th Annual Top 100 Articles list.
From nearly 500 links to articles, blog posts, slideshows, reports and (this year also) infographics that I saved in my 2011 Reading List, here are the 100 that I enjoyed and/or impressed me most in 2011. This year I’ve added a quote beneath each link to give you a taster of what it is about. As you will see for me this year’s reading has not been about social media tools per se, but how they are impacting personal, professional and organisational learning practices and behaviours.
Top 20 Tools 2007-2011
Combined results from 5 years of “Top 100″ lists. I found the ordering interesting. Twitter, top of the list for the last 3 years, came in 9th (was 43rd in 2007). YouTube, in second place the last 2 years, came in 7th. The top 3 places went to Skype, WordPress and Google Docs – all in the top 15 for 5 years running. In 4th place is Delicious, in the top 4 for 2007-2010, but dropped to 24th place in 2011.
Collaboration 1: Collaboration is the key influence in the quality of teaching
One of seven posts about collaboration and why it nearly always fails to deliver results, inspired by Morten T Hansen’s Collaboration. [I've pulled together all seven posts in a PDF, Collaboration & Quality of Teaching.]
The quality of the teacher is the number one factor in the improvement of an education system, collaboration is the key factor in improving the quality of that teacher.
Collaboration helps increase academic success, yet most collaboration doesn’t work. The Microsoft-supported ITL Research revealed in a large-scale study:
“Innovative teaching happens more in environments where teachers collaborate. In schools where teachers report more frequent collaboration with one another on teaching practices, innovative teaching scores tend to be higher… Teachers told us that collaboration can be an important mechanism for sharing teaching practices and for mutual support toward improving them.”
Anecdotally, this has also been the prime driver in the continued growth and success of the TeachMeet movement since 2006, and EdCamps since then, providing environments in which teachers, for whatever reason, feel comfortable sharing. We’ll explore over this series of posts what makes collaboration work sometimes, and fail others.
All highly recommended.
I got a pointer to Spartan Guides, a treasure-trove of organized links to web sites useful in education. The home page lists the most popular guides. Each of the guides has dozens of categories, which then often break down to sub-categories. Each final page has lots of information. For instance, the New Tools guide includes Digital Storytelling and Google Docs and Apps among it nearly 50 sub-categories.
