Blake: Work Priorities

One educator shares her experience learning about Second Life, a virtual world with distance education potential. Part of her journey included meeting Sarah Robbins of Ball State University, who is indeed teaching within Second Life.

[listen here]

also, check out these links:

• NMC Campus Observer
• SecondLife Research blog

Will Richardson, author of the http://www.weblogg-ed.com blog, talks about politics, web 2.0 tools and what this all might mean for civic participation among young people. The topic came after Will wrote about Barack Obama’s networked site.

Will noted that Obama is using social tools for political purpose, giving people a feeling that they are part of a larger conversation and directly linked to the campaign and other supporters. In different examples, John McCain is apparently using YouTube to connect with voters, and Howard Dean began blogging back in 2003-04. Attempts to connect to voters (by way of these tools) are going mainstream.

[Listen]

I thought this piece might be of interest to those of us who depend on our media and messages making their way around and getting heard at NEA headquarters as well as to affiliates, etc.

Increasingly, email is becoming less effective for sharing substantial amounts of content; especially when what we're trying to do is foster a kind of connectedness that encourages creative/constructive action.

For example: Although I enjoy reading the Directors' Reports, I'm not so crazy about getting them via email. Email is about immediate communication. At the end of every week, my inbox overflows with hundreds of emails that really "should be" read, but...

... because of ETS inbox size limits, travel, meetings, travel, meetings, expense reports...

... they get deleted.

It would be great to test a new tool and a strategy that could support the following specific NEA activities.

How we manage:

1. Director Reports
2. State Affiliate Strategic Planning (SharePoint)
3. Connect Feedback to John Wilson

Personally, among the social media tools I use at NEA, I have found blogging to be extremely effective and a very big time and money saver.

[Read "Tools for Social Media"]

Lawmakers' MySpace profiles demonstrate DOPA's lack of sense, critics say

From eSchool News staff and wire service reports

Lawmakers who voted for a bill to force schools and libraries receiving federal funds to block access to MySpace and other social-networking web sites on their computers are among those who have created personal profiles on a special section of MySpace dedicated to the 2008 presidential election. The apparent contradiction points to the difficulty faced by lawmakers and educators as they try to protect children and teens from the dangers lurking in cyberspace--and it underscores the problems that can occur when lawmakers, many of whom have a limited understanding of internet issues, seek to legislate behavior in the Information Age.

By Jayne O'Donnell, USA TODAY
Tue Mar 20, 8:23 AM ET

Eager to connect with teen and twentysomething shoppers, retailers are focusing on the mobile devices that are never far from their hands - or ears.

"They are the early adopters and the influencers," Roman Tsunder says of teens targeted by cellphone marketing campaigns from his company, Access 360 Media. "The youth markets will show adults how it's done."

RA delegation elections will be cast online this year by members of the Kentucky Education Association.

By JONATHAN D. GLATER, NYT

The telephone number looks like any other university extension. And when students call with questions about financial aid, the recorded voice at the other end says, “Thank you for calling Texas Tech University’s Student Financial Center.”

But what is remarkable about the center is not so much that it is actually located hundreds of miles away from Texas Tech’s Lubbock campus. It’s that the people giving advice are not university employees at all — instead they work for Nelnet, a company that made more than $68 million last year off of student loans.