Social Blogging

AOL UK today announced the beta launch of its new homepage available at http://www.aol.co.uk/newhomepage that will let consumers access multiple e-mail accounts and social networking services from a single online destination.

The German man who murdered a student after becoming obsessed with his girlfriend on the internet may have failed to distinguish between the virtual world and reality, an academic said today.

Live teaching and learning marketplaces are a new emergent set of online exchanges where independent teachers and educators can easily share or sell their know-how with those looking for it. Independent guides and experts can deliver live and recorded lessons using a full set of web conferencing and e-learning components.

Photo credit: Wong Sze Fei

From video conferencing to document and presentation sharing there is no shortage of features enabling passionate and talented teachers to spread their talent and know-how to an audience of eager learners.

These new online learning and teaching exchanges offer for the first time the example of a distributed and un-ininstutionalized educational venue that offers plenty of opportunity for learners while offering independent knowledge experts a qualified venue to share and commercialize their expertise without needing to be hired by a university.

If you are wondering how can quality of teaching be guaranteed in such an environment, the answer lies in an effective mechanism, adopted by most of these teaching marketplaces, whereby students themselves are allowed to rate their own teachers.

The other advantages that these online learning and teaching marketplaces offer, are many, both from a learners and teachers perspectives.

For learners:

• It’s cheaper than enrolling to a university course or going to a private teacher.
• You are not limited inside pre-packaged learning paths, but you can rather follow your interests and cultivate your passions.
• You can learn at your own pace, wherever you want, and finding the time which is most comfortable for you.
• You don’t have to get through an exam or test to prove that you are learning something. You are self-responsible for your education.

For teachers:

• You can sell your own instructional material and share your knowledge with other passionate peers.
• You can teach from the comfort of your place, earning money and limiting the costs of teaching to your Internet connection fee.
• You get in touch with a far larger audience than the students you could physically meet.
• You are not subjected to any institutional rule or approach in the way you teach, and you’re greatly facilitated to use live interaction and multimedia content with your students.

If you want to explore in greater detail these new emergent online teaching and learning marketplaces, I have prepared for you a list of the most interesting live teaching platforms out there, complemented with a comparative table which compares each service main features:

• Live classes: live audio / video conferencing integration
• Social evaluation: connection and mutual evaluation between learners and teachers
• Content distribution: redistribution and sharing of lessons outside the learning platform
• Advertising: ads displayed on free version
• Premium price / features: first price level to access extended features

Here all the details:

Visit our special section for complete election coverage . Joseph Iniguez is exactly the kind of voter many advocates of civic involvement had hoped would emerge in the post-2008 election world.

With nearly 70 percent of people online claiming they “care” about what is happening in their town or city, MSN is launching a new version of its local offering, MSN City Guides , that will help users stay in the know, when they’re on the go.

In an effort to make sharing news with friends quicker and easier, gjfreepress.com has released a new function on article pages called “ShareThis.” ShareThis allows readers to easily post links to articles on dozens of social networks and bookmarking sites.

Tapping the Internet - including personal Web searches, news reports, blogs, chat rooms and social networking sites - is fast becoming a way to get a complete, up-to-the-minute view of public health threats, say researchers from the Informatics Program at Children’s Hospital Boston in a Perspectives article published Online First by The New England …

P2P:- Is social advertising site Fa$ebook deliberately blocking private emails? It is, says Wired .

Media literacy is the process of accessing, analyzing, evaluating and creating messages in a wide variety of media modes, genres and forms. It uses an inquiry-based instructional model that encourages people to ask questions about what they watch, see, and read. (Source: Wikipedia)

Photo credit: Jason Rhode

Inside this Media Literacy Digest:

• Social-Networking Research a Higher Priority? - My concern with the growth of social networks relates to how they are incorporated into education.
• What Is Content Worth These Days? - Blogs, wikipedia, podcasts, open educational resources, and numerous other developments have shown that content - while valuable for learning - has limited economic value.
• New Realities in Higher Education - Ray Scroeder has started a new blog devoted to articles / news related to current challenges in higher education.
• New Technology Supporting Informal Learning - The classroom is a model that communicates what is known; the lab, in contrast, is a model that explores what is not yet known.

If you are passionate about technology improvements and the way they are opening new scenarios for both educators and learners, this weekly digest may help you to make sense of the disruptive changes that are right behind the corner.

Here all the details:

The free app, dubbed Facebook, can be downloaded from the Windows Mobile Web site, or directly from users’ mobile Web browser CALIFORNIA, USA: Microsoft Corp .

Some Facebook accounts that were hijacked in phishing attacks last week were used to send out spam on Thursday that directed people to a Web site hosting malware, according to the social networking company.

Just about everyone has some sort of social networking profile, but if you’re like many people, you’ve come across a situation online that you don’t know how to handle.

The highest-risk sex offenders will face limits on their Internet access under a bill the Minnesota Legislature voted unanimously to send to Gov.

Registered sex offenders in Texas would have to list their e-mail addresses, cell phone numbers and any Internet IDs to law enforcement under a bill moving its way through the Legislature.

Tracking and monitoring your incoming links can provide you with great and valuable insight into which sites, social media and other web traffic sources are sending you the best and most qualified visitors for your web site. But how do you go about analyzing those incoming links in an effective way? Which one of those traffic sources is better? Social media, search engines, organic links on other sites and blogs?

Photo credit: hypermania

To evaluate the effective traffic potential of most of the typical web traffic sources, Pavel Israelsky, a young web publisher from Israel, has taken the time to systematically analyze the main traffic sources sending people to his site, including forums, blogs, web directories, instant messengers, social media sites and even emails.

The goal for Israel was the one of understanding which one of these traffic sources brings in more traffic and consequently which should be the traffic source on which to spend the greatest amount of energies. Though these results do not represent general trends and data applicable to all types of sites or blogs, the story of how this analysis was setup and run can help those with less experience in tracking online data in getting a glimpse of how you can actually go about collecting such data and make that information help you understand better how and where to focus to increase your web traffic.

Can you get relatively more traffic from Twitter or from your signature at the end of your emails?

Here all the details: