My daily readings 01/17/2008
apophenia: The Economist Debate on Social “Networking” Annotated
tags: education, learning, network, social
Educational pedagogy has swung over the years between focusing on individual-centered learning, group learning, and peer-to-peer learning. If you take a peer-to-peer learning approach, you are inherently valuing the social networks that youth have and maintain, or else you are encouraging them to build one. These networks are mediated and reinforced through SNSs. If there is pedagogical value to encouraging peers to have strong social networks, then there is pedagogical value in supporting their sociable practices on SNSs.
This not to say that technology doesn’t belong in the classroom. Information access tools like Wikipedia and Google are tremendously valuable for getting access to content and should be strongly encouraged and taught through the lens of media literacy. Email, IM, or other communication tools can be super useful for distributing content to the group or between individuals or even providing a channel for group discussion (in-class or out). Blogging tools and group sharing tools are also quite valuable. Having to produce for the group instead of the teacher can work as a powerful incentive; most youth don’t want to be embarrassed in front of their peers and pressure to perform can be leveraged to the teacher’s advantage. But why social network sites? To the degree that they support blogging and group sharing, sure… but that’s not the key point of them at all. They key features that make them unique are: profiles plus visible, articulated and surfable friends’ lists. I simply don’t get why these are of value in the classroom.
Friends In Feed - Distributed Social Networking Annotated
tags: no_tag
- Create an Identity — Start by creating an identity for
yourself. You choose what name you use and what content you make public,
including your list of friends. Host the identity on your own server
or have someone do it for you (like email). - Find your Friends — Find others that are using Friends In Feed
and request a connection to them. - Share — Upload content to your identity and Friends in Feed
tells your friends about your activity while leaving the internet-at-large out
of the loop. - Explore — Browse your friend’s identities using your own
identity to log in. Your friends don’t need to give you yet another password in
order to let you in. - Customize — The code is open, the data in your hands. Make it
do what you want.
Visualizing Regular Expressions at Oliver Steele Annotated
tags: no_tag
This is intended to demonstrate the implementation of regular expressions. If you want to learn how to use them instead, I recommend these references instead:
- Regular expressions - post by joel
The “pattern” shows the regular expression. Click on it to set another regular expression to match against.
