If textbooks and other learning materials are free and openly licensed, this fundamentally transforms the relationship of learners to their content

Who doesn’t, on some level, want to get off Twitter, build a tiny house, and move to the unwired northern woods

while others were angry and hurt by how the real-world constructions of identity seeped into the track and prevented their full participation.

we’re aware of the risks that we take when we, as academics, venture to speak out on hot-button issues

A “public” has no product, and there’s no call to work it all out here; but if we are committed to thinking about the digital world as a space that values diversity, minority viewpoints, and nondominant forms of expression, we need to make sure that the conversation is ongoing and open.

the public only works when the public is empowered to speak in ways that the structures that contain that public might not endorse or facilitate

But what I think we could work for is the slow and deliberate carving out of a public digital space: not a fantasy space separate from our fucked-up world of haves and have-nots, but one that insists on the critical naming and challenging of silencing, exclusive, cruel, and oppressive structures.

“the people you choose to connect with and learn from.”

#edchat

“growing a personal learning network.

The flipped teaching method — a blending of direct instruction with constructivist learning activities — can be integrated across many curriculum areas.

Increases student engagement

Google Docs.)

Screencasts are an effective way to share ideas, deliver content, and obtain student feedback

Keep the screencast no more than 10–12 minutes.

The majority use MySpace (65%) with Facebook (37%) being the second mostpopular site, and many students belong to more than one network

an online social network site (SNS) is a ‘‘web-based service that allows individuals to (1) construct a public or semipublic profilewithin a bounded system, (2) articulate a list of other users with whom they sharea connection, and (3) view and traverse their list of connections and those madeby others within the system’’

MySpace (MS)

‘The cruelest irony of this public policy [No Child Left Behindlegislation in the U.S.]is that students who need to be prepared the most at school for an online age ofinformation, those who may not have Internet access at home, are precisely thosewho are being prepared the least’’

print-based literacies, 21stcentury skills(Partnershipfor 21stCentury Skills, 2008) and digital literacies of online reading, writing, andcommunication

‘‘generationaldivide’’

‘‘threat to societal values’’

“mindless blogger.”

We must teach students greater sourcing skills

Basically socially complex texts are authored by opposing forces discussing an issue with equal passion and often mutual disdain.

. They seemed to hold more information in their working memories that they could later mold into new meanings.

The students who could manage multiple tabs, navigate search engines, and move between multiple sources did better.

manipulate and mold information to achieve a higher goal”

New and more complex skills and practices are required to read in online environments.

Just 2% of code separates us from our Chimpanzee brethren.

There are things you can do with sound that you cannot do with graphic substance, either easily or at all; not even imitate all that successfully graphically.

Words have their histories

I am attracted by “Grille”; I am aware that I am particularly drawn by the “e” on “Grille”.

the “social” in “Social Semiotics” draws attention to the fact that meanings always relate to specific societies and their cultures, and to the meanings of the members of those cultures.

from the perspective of multimodality, which deals with all the means we have for making meanings – the modes of representation - and considers their specific way of configuring the world

from the constellation of mode of writing and medium of book / page, to the constellation of mode of image and medium of screen

It may be a small designation to make, but I see a great deal of difference between the act of creation, and the sustained, informed, evaluative elements embedded in construction.

Construction asks our students and teachers to focus on the power and patience employed during work process…and not just the final resultant work product.

Creation can be viewed simply as the act of producing, or causing to exist.  Construction is the building or assembling of an infrastructure.

our understanding of construction and creation needs to be broad enough to allow for change in the future.

Working online is a fluid experience which calls for flexible learners.

while making it easy & flexible enough for teachers to make this work happen in their classrooms.

the creativity, composition, and design skills students need

online collaborative inquiry, and online content construction 

Yet Schrier was surprised by another phenomenon: the young people took the game’s representation of historical evidence at face value, acting as if all of the information in the game were authentic.

that game players seek to identify and exploit the rules of the system in order to beat the game.26

Ex-panding access to computers will help bridge some of the gaps between digital haves and have nots,

Some cities, such as Tempe, Arizona, charge users a fee

Children and youths do indeed know more about these new media environments than most parents and teachers.

Beck and Wade conclude that gamers were more open to taking risks and engaging in competition but also more open to collaborating with others

even if sometimes only through the “second lives” offered by massively multiplayer games or online fan communities.

young people who create and circulate their own media are more likely to respect the intellectual property rights of others because they feel a greater stake in the cultural economy.13

Informal learning communities can evolve to respond to short-term needs and temporary interests

While formal education is often conservative, the informal learning within popular culture is often experi-mental.

affinity spaces,”10 and explores why people learn more, participate more actively, and engage more deeply with popular culture than they do with the contents of their textbooks.

Our goals should be to encourage youths to develop the skills, knowledge, ethical frameworks, and self-con-fidence needed to be full participants in contemporary culture.

Yet these activities become widespread only if the culture supports them

black hole that consumes resources that might be better devoted to traditional classroom activities (in the more critical version).

Historically, we have valued creative writing or art classes not only because they help to identify and train future writers and artists, but also because the creative process is valuable on its own; every child deserves the chance to express him- or her-self through words, sounds, and images, even if most will never write, perform, or draw professionally.

The study also does not include even more widespread practices, such as computer or video gaming, that can require an extensive focus on constructing and performing as fictional personas.

The Pew researchers found no significant dif-ferences in participation by race or ethnicity

a media creator is someone who has created a blog or Web page; posted original artwork, photography, stories, or videos online; or remixed online content into their own new creations.

Indeed, many of these youths were frustrated with school; some dropped out

—learning how to campaign and govern; how to read, write, edit, and defend civil liberties; how to pro-gram computers and run a business; how to make a movie and find distribution

the Firefox Web browser was born

Heather Lawver was 14 years old. She wanted to help other young people improve their reading and writing skills, so she established an online publication with a staff of more than 100 people across the world.

The Sims Online

I’ve met les-bian, gay, and transgendered teens who extensively share to appear straight so that people don’t ask about their sexuality, and I’ve met abused teens who tell extravagant stories about their lives so that no one asks what’s really happening at home.

Chris-tina, a mother from New York, explained her reasoning. “I do not believe teenagers ‘need’ privacy—not when it comes to the Internet. I track everything my kids do online. I search their bedrooms too. I’m the parent—I’m not their friend.”

“subtweeting,” to refer to the practice of encoding tweets to render them meaningless to clueless outsiders

journalists often referred to this application in the same breath as sexting or the sharing of inappro-priate sexual images.

Teens do think through the social cost to what they post, but they don’t always get it right

Linda Tripp’s decision to record Monica Lewinsky’s confession and paparazzi using long-range cam-eras to capture celebrities from afar.

perhaps this young man is simply including gang signals on his MySpace profile as a survival technique.

I came to realize that, taken out of context, what teens appear to do and say on social media seems peculiar if not outright problematic

Many teens complain about parents who look over their shoulders when they’re on the computer or friends who copy and paste updates and forward them along.

it’s often hard to remem-ber that viewers who aren’t commenting might also be watching

Because social media often brings together multiple social con-texts, teens struggle to effectively manage social norms

because he wants to have control over a given social situation

Turkle was critical of some people’s attempts to use fictitious iden-tities to harm others,

ree people of the burdens of their “material”—or physically embodied—identities, enabling them to become a better version of themselves

they are whimsical responses to sites’ requirement to provide a login handle

Facebook was the primary place where friend groups collide. Other services—like Tumblr or Twitter—were more commonly used by teens who were carving out their place in interest-driven communities.1

relished the anonymous norms of the site

teens responded to social media sites’ requests for information by providing inaccurate information that actually contains meaningful signals about friendship and sociality.

Instead, they’re simply refusing to play by the rules of self-presentation as defined by these sites.

In doing so, they ignore teens’ privacy while undermining their struggles to manage their identity

given and what is given off. In other words, what we convey to others is a matter of what we choose to share in order to make a good impression and also what we unintentionally reveal as a byproduct of who we are and how we react to others.

They may want to be seen as cool among their peers, even if adults would deem their behav-ior inappropriate.

Teens who try to manage context collapses by segregating information often suf-fer when that information crosses boundaries

They have long seen revealing clothing as an indica-tor of teens’ rejection of privac

The idea that teens share too much—and therefore don’t care about privacy—is now so entrenched in public discourse that research showing that teens do desire privacy and work to get it is often ignored by the media.

Mean-while, technology executives like Facebook’s founder Mark Zucker-berg and Google chairman Eric Schmidt reinforce the notion that today’s teens are different

generational disconnect

What’s at stake is not whether someone can listen in but whether one should

she thinks that everything online is bad, and you seem to get it, and you’re an adult.

privacy is always rooted in context