Howard Reingold webinar and books

Writer Howard Rheingold will be giving a free webinar on Thursday March 22, at 8:30 am. This is a Horizon Connect webinar launched by the New Media Consortium, "featuring thought leaders, game changers, and innovators who are making a difference right now in the world of educational technology."


Rheingold will discuss his new book Net Smart: How to Thrive Online. This is a great opportunity to learn how to more strategically think about and apply digital media in your own work.
   
He describes his book - “How can we use digital media so that they help us become empowered participants rather than passive consumers? In Net Smart, I show how to use social media intelligently, humanely, and, above all, mindfully.
 
 Mindful use of digital media means thinking about what we are doing, cultivating an ongoing inner inquiry into how we want to spend our time. I outline five fundamental digital literacies, online skills that will help us do this: attention, participation, collaboration, critical consumption of information (or "crap detection"), and network smarts.”
 
He will also be giving away 5 books during the talk. RSVP on the Facebook page event and learn more about the March 22 webinar and the book give-away.

Pinterest - Sharing the Visual Internet

As much as social networking can suck your time, it can also bring some relief from information overload on the internet. Smart friends on Facebook can be good filters for discovering the news that are worth reading, links worth following and cat videos worth watching.

Something interesting has been happening with the ways that news and information are organized and distributed via social networks. Scholars refer to this phenomenon as folksonomies, where knowledge is organized and presented by collaborative activities of internet users rather than media professionals as gatekeepers of information. The merits and dangers of such information management are, of course, up for debate.

Meanwhile, there is a new social networking tool that is used for organizing images - Pinterest - but not just images. It's a visual bookmarking site that lets you place and share information visually, through categories that are created by users. Pinterest reflects the growth of visual culture and finally lets us map knowledge with pictures, not just links or words. It is an organizing method that can be a useful teaching resource.

While sites like Flickr let users organize and share photographs, Pinterest keeps the images attached to the context of their websites. The Ed Social Media article does a good job of explaining how Pinterest works and among some higher ed examples, links to various visual categories (boards) created by the University of Denver. Libraries are also leading the way in the adoption of this technology. Here are 20 examples of how libraries are using Pinterest to organize information on the web, including collaborative work with patrons, collecting learning materials by themes, showcasing digital collections and displaying book covers.

Along with visuality, the social networking aspect of the site is what makes it really useful. You can follow other people's visual bookmarks (pins), look at the categories created by other users and then repin their finds onto your own boards as categories that make sense to you. For example, you can take a look at Tiffany Ford's science curriculum ideas, pick a project that interests you and repin it on your own board under a category that fits your interests. If you are teaching a biology class, you can call your board "biology lessons" and pin other examples along the same theme.