How Online Education Is Changing the Way We Learn [INFOGRAPHIC]

Over the past decade or so, the Internet has become a huge source of information and education, especially for those who might be short on time, money or other resources. And it's not just crowdsourced data collections like Wikipedia or single-topic blogs that encourage individual learning; huge corporations and nonprofits are making online education and virtual classrooms a very formal affair these days. From the first online classes (which were conducted by the University of Phoenix in 1989) to the present day, when online education is a $34 billion industry, more and more students are finding new life and career education opportunities online. Check out this infographic from OnlineEducation.net about how the world of online learning has changed and grown over the years. Click image to see larger version. [source: Online Education] Top image based on a photograph from iStockphoto user flyingdouglas.

Online Community Management Links Roundup 10/06/11 - Community Management | Blaise Grimes-Viort Here is the roundup of links relating to Online Communities I saved on delicious.com or retweeted for the week ending 10th of June 2011. Enjoy! Community Management Is NOT Digital Cold Calling Initiating Discussions: How To Help Your Members Overcome Their Fear Of Starting Discussions Everyone That I’ve Banned is Innocent; I Ban People Because They Disagree With Me Top TEN – for the Community Weaver “To Do List” Community Manager – Guardian of the User Experience? Conducting a simple Facebook page ethnography Five features for a successful online community The Negative Comment Conundrum A Community Manager Gets Community Managed Adoption? Need a Social Media Strategy? How to contact the administrator of a Facebook Page “Community Manager” Confusion Online Community Management Lessons from Dr. I *liked* you on Facebook, so why are you ignoring me? Treat your new community like a startup Approval Shouldn’t Trump Interaction Make it harder to join your online community 10 Tips for New Community Managers

Open Content Licensing for Open Educational Resources Jason Calacanis: "Blogging Is Dead" & Why "Stupid People Shouldn't Write" "Blogging is largely dead." "There are a lot of stupid people out there ... and stupid people shouldn't write." "There needs to be a better system for tuning down the stupid people and tuning up the smart people." Serial entrepreneur and publisher Jason Calacanis has never been opposed to saying what is on his mind. In fact, it is the characteristic that has helped him rise to the top of the Internet publishing world. Web 3.0: The Age of Expertise "You have to have a deep understanding to be a blogger," Calacanis said. Calacanis thinks that Web 3.0 will be the "Age of Expertise." "The concept of journalism is going away," Calacanis said. Calacanis brings up the idea of local news as something that people do not care about. "People bring up the edge case of the local town meeting," Calacanis said. The blog itself is not going away. "People and their blogs will continue," Calacanis said. That is what Calacanis is starting to do with Mahalo. On Mahalo vs.

Explorable Explanations Bret Victor / March 10, 2011 What does it mean to be an active reader? An active reader asks questions, considers alternatives, questions assumptions, and even questions the trustworthiness of the author. An active reader tries to generalize specific examples, and devise specific examples for generalities. An active reader doesn't passively sponge up information, but uses the author's argument as a springboard for critical thought and deep understanding. Do our reading environments encourage active reading? Explorable Explanations is my umbrella project for ideas that enable and encourage truly active reading. This essay presents examples of few initial ideas: A reactive document allows the reader to play with the author's assumptions and analyses, and see the consquences. An explorable example makes the abstract concrete, and allows the reader to develop an intuition for how a system works. 1. Ten Brighter Ideas was my early prototype of a reactive document. drag The way it is now: Analysis:

MIT Scientist Captures 90,000 Hours of Video of His Son's First Words, Graphs It In a talk soon to grab several million views on TED.com, cognitive scientist Deb Roy Wednesday shared a remarkable experiment that hearkens back to an earlier era of science using brand-new technology. From the day he and his wife brought their son home five years ago, the family's every movement and word was captured and tracked with a series of fisheye lenses in every room in their house. The purpose was to understand how we learn language, in context, through the words we hear. A combination of new software and human transcription called Blitzscribe allowed them to parse 200 terabytes of data to capture the emergence and refinement of specific words in Roy’s son’s vocabulary. Unreal 3-D visualizations allowed his team to zoom through the house like a dollhouse and map the utterance of each word in its context. In a landscape-like image with peaks and valleys, you can see that the word “water” was uttered most often in the kitchen, while “bye” took place at the door.

EPUB Really IS a Container "It's OK for libraries to put things in their EPUB books." That's what Bill Kasdorf, a member of the EPUB Working Group, told me last week at the IDPF Digital Book 2011 Meeting. He checked with EPUB Revision Co-Editor Markus Gylling to make sure. It may seem an odd question if you don't know a few things about EPUB. The EPUB specs define a lot more than just a file format. OCF uses the ubiquitous ZIP format to wrap up all a book's resource files into a neat, transportable package. There's even a reserved name for a file to contain book level metadata in OCF: META-INF/metadata.xml, as well as another file for rights information, META-INF/rights.xml. The new EPUB revision is coming fast. Although Amazon still uses the aging MOBI format on its kindle devices, it seems only a matter of time before the infrastructure accumulating behind EPUB pushes them into the embrace of the IDPF. EPUB 3 comes with lots of goodies. Libraries face a similar dilemma.

Short logic (Groupon IPO: Pass on this deal) How to Use Barcodes at Conferences (and Why You Might Want To) Audiences for oral presentations and poster sessions at academic conferences often want more information about a particular topic. One way to provide this, obviously, is to create printed flyers or brochures and hope that you’ve brought enough copies for everyone who’s interested. But what if your printed handout doesn’t make it all the way back on your audience member’s trip home? During the 2011 Digital Humanities conference at Stanford University (currently underway) some people are making use of QR codes, a specific kind of two-dimensional bar code (also known as a matrix code). For example, Peter Organisciak gave a talk entitled “When to Ask For Help: Evaluating Projects For Crowdsourcing,” and on one of his presentation slides–as you can see in the photo at the start of this post–he displayed this QR code: Those of us in the audience with smartphone apps that can read (and interpret) QR codes were able to snap a picture using the camera and then visit the associated page online.

500GB wireless harddrive for iPad and iPhone users iPad and iPhone users rejoice! Seagate recently released one of the world’s first wireless harddrives, unleashing seemingly unlimited storage for your mobile device. Sold for $199.99 at Amazon. Via Bless this Stuff. More cool gadgets. eText: Is It Ready? Are We Ready? eText | Viewpoint eText: Is It Ready? Are We Ready? After spending a significant portion of the past two years researching and "test driving" eText in the many formats and sources that currently exist, I have come to a number of initial conclusions about the nature and application of eText in higher education (the educational level to which I limited my studies and investigation). I've seen that most of the possible implementation strategies for eText seem quite logical and are based on existing technologies that have been available to the higher education community for some time. What are some of the attributes of eText, and what are the related issues institutions looking into eText are considering? A Universal eReader Software Platform: The adoption of an eReader software platform that supports any eText that has been either converted from existing hardback textbooks or created by aggregating digital content from any source, is critical.

Tech Stocks: Groupon Is Effectively Insolvent I'll start by tipping my hat to Andrew Mason. He caught social mood just right, creating a coupon/local/flashmob hybrid business model at the perfect time, and has created the fastest-growing company on a revenue basis in American history. That being said, it's operating like a Ponzi scheme that needs constant infusions of cash to stay afloat as it's hemorrhaging money. We'll start by looking at the balance sheet, which is typically a waste of time for hypergrowth companies. SEE ALSO: Groupon is Overstating Revenue by 140%, Should Voluntarily Postpone IPO LIVE DEBATE (6/7/2011) : The Groupon IPO with Conor Sen The income statement is even worse. They lost $49 million in Q3, $313 million in Q4, and $102 million in Q1, with revenue leaping from $185 million to $396 million to $644 million, so it's incredibly difficult to have any idea what Q2 will look like let alone what the business will look like 6-12 months from now. There are all kinds of questions about the business.