Tag Archives: media

Social Networks Around the World – Trends in Social Media

December 21, 2009 – 2:17 pm

This map published on TechCrunch recently just makes me wonder if we are doing the right thing when using social networking to reach our customers, learners, partners.

It seems to me most of our “campaigns” in social media tend to focus on Twitter, Facebook and social networks that are popular here in the U.S. With an increasingly global audience, should we start to reconsider where and how we offer our content out there?

Map of Social Networks in the Worlds

Map of Social Networks in the Worlds

GlobalWebIndex.net’s Survey:

View more presentations from Tom Smith.

A visual representation of how Internet users actually use the social media can be found here.

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Watch Le Web Live December 10 2009

December 10, 2009 – 8:29 am

About Le Web:

“The real time web is taking the world by storm! Twitter has grown exponentially in one year with an extremely simple service that does only one thing: keep you in touch with what your friends are doing, in real time. Facebook entirely redesigned its most important assets, its home page and opened its feed to third parties. Given the growth of the Twitter and Facebook ecosystems with thousands of applications and new uses, startups as well all major players are adapting their services to compete in this environment. There was the static web, the social web and now here comes a new web: the real-time web.”

Broadcasting Live with Ustream.TV

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Social Media Revolution – Evolution

August 17, 2009 – 7:40 am

Let’s think about the impact these emerging technologies can have on Education, on learning, on other fields (not just marketing)… not sure “revolution” is the term, but definitely an “evolution” of the way people communicate. Technology is more than ever shortening distances, including the distance between learners and content, subject matter experts AND, maybe more importantly: other learners, creating best practice communities in a matter of clicks…

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Learner vs Participant

October 2, 2008 – 12:36 pm

The term learner bears a sense of a passive individual that is merely a receptacle for Instruction and information. In light of this assumption, one would presume that another word or another view of the “learning as a process” to take place. Most everyone has some to contribute to this process and, aside from situations in which individuals need instruction for imediate information, for more long-term knowledge retention learning needs to be views not only as a process but as a participatory process. Even if an individual will go through “instruction” alone, ideally, the learning process starts then and continues as this individual partakes in conversations, formal and informal situations in which that knowledge is applied, learners new nuances to that information from others, funds new applications for that information as s/he collaborated with other “learners” (please read all you can about Constructivist epistemology and some applied theories such as social learning).
Therfore, if learning is an ongoing participatory process, maybe those in the field of Education should see the learners as “participants” in learning constantly together. Not that this is a call for a different word, bit for the view that consructivists have had for a while and that now social media makes it easier to achieve by creating participatory environments.

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Metcalf’s Law and Semantic Web?

June 26, 2008 – 1:12 pm

Interesting post trying to adapt Metcalf’s Law to the Semantic Web context. They are looking for feedback.

http://blogs.sun.com/bblfish/entry/rdf_and_metcalf_s_law

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Social Media Assessment and Learner Progress Tracking

May 29, 2008 – 5:44 pm

Something that has bothered me is that, while the adoption of social media (Web 2.0 tools like blogs, wikis, social networks and so on) depends on a paradigm shift and require a new way of thinking “learning”, how can we assess learner progress in a modality of tools in which user-generated content can be so scattered throughout different tools? I know you might be thinking as you read: “But these are new tools, they require a new way for evaluation, progress tracking and certification…” just like I said above. But the problem is that the adoption of the tools seems to happen at a faster speed than the attitude change toward learning assessment and certification!

Instructional Designers, instructors, learners are using social media more and more to enrich learning experiences and more research is needed concerning assessment and progress tracking in this context.

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Open Source Social Network Engines

May 10, 2008 – 1:39 am

No-one is impressed with the words “social networking” anymore. We used to have to explain to new comers what “Myspace” or Facebook implied. Now everyone can have their own social networks online with relatively no cost using open source solutions that I think deserve some attention:

1- www.elgg.org -> free and open source initiative. Very customizable, still need som work done, doesn’t have many of the standard features you would expect from a social network. Large developer base might bring important improvements over time.

2- www.drupal.org -> not exactly built for social networking per se, but has an enormous plugin database that can bring extra functionality, including the possibility of creating Digg-like video/news/websites/etc. aggregator that requires votes by community members so content is published.

3- http://update.peopleaggregator.org -> Myspace-like social network engine. Integration with OpenID. Still pretty “rough”, but has potential. Demo: http://www.peepagg.net/

4- www.boonex.com/products/dolphin -> more focused on “dating” but allows for customization. Many plugins have to be “purchased”, though.

5- http://www.barnraiser.org -> I can’t tell you much about it (not many communities powered by “aroundme” right now). It is open source.

6- http://civicspacelabs.org -> Drupal as a social network. Has free options for non profit organizations.

7- http://appleseed.sourceforge.net -> not much information on the website and no demos available. Open source.

8- http://lovdbyless.com -> new open source social network engine that has a lot of potential. Ruby on Rails. Some nice features and integration with Youtube and Flikr out of the box.

9- isocial – http://sourceforge.net/projects/socialnetwork -> not much info.

10- clonesumating -> should be a clone of “consumating.com”, which has been down for quite a while now. Quite a few features.

11- ozcode – http://sourceforge.net/projects/ozcode -> an ozmozr.com clone. Lets you build networks around feeds and friends.

12- http://insoshi.org -> brand new, lots of work to be done. Good for simple networks.

Also, http://www.mahara.org -> not exactly “social networking”. Good ePortfolio with some social networking around it. I don’t understand why people pay for some ePortfolio providers out there (you know what I am talking about). :) Just an example of how open source and free (as in no money or credit card necessary) can offer great features that are comparable to commercial products. :)

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