In addition to a counterintuitive organizational scheme, integrated commercial systems have a built-in pedagogy, evident in the easiest-to-use, most accessible features. The focus on presentation (written documents to read), complemented by basic “discussion” input from students, is based on traditional lecture, review, and test pedagogy. This orientation is very different from the development of knowledge through a constructivist, learner-centered, or inquiry-based approach, which a number of faculty use successfully in the classroom. In constructivist pedagogy, the instructor’s role is to provide a rich learning environment, which often includes extensive social interaction, self-assessment, and independent projects. These techniques are better supported by Web 2.0 applications or by learning management systems that encourage such pedagogy at the novice level. The more a CMS promotes traditional pedagogy, the more likely it will limit faculty creativity—and flexibility and creativity are the foundations of academic freedom and good teaching.

Source: EDUCAUSE Quarterly

I am using Twitter Charts to monitor statistics from my 2 Twitter accounts.

1- emapey stats, my Twitter networking activity with members of my College 2.0 Ning Network.
2- emapey2 stats, my Twitter networking activity with other educators.

These Twitter Stats show that nancito, enpatagoniasur and Sabridv are, so far, my Twitter best friends. I even used Twitter to teach nancito and enpatagoniasur how to use del.icio.us for networking, and with Sabridv, we all met in an online flashmeeting video conference to discuss Web 2.0 in Education

Other valuable Twitter friends, are so far, gsellart, murcha, n2teaching, NicolaA, bwatwood, AngelaMaiers.

I am grateful to them for offering to me their support and friendship via Twitter.

It was Baxter Tocher who alerted me, via my emapey del.icio.us network , about this Twitter Stats tool.

College or university is a central institution of the current post-industrial society. Therefore, the effect of aging on the adult learner and implications for educators will be examined in that context. The focus here is on the adult that has had life experiences and has often been referred to as a non-traditional student in the higher education setting. The age range for this type of student is extremely wide and, for the most part, includes adults over age 25. Demand for adult education is supported by research that suggests a twenty year old today can expect to make six to seven job changes over the course of a working career. Often, these vocational changes lead to additional adult learning out of necessity. Several times public policy does not adequately address the needs of older, working students. Public policies on higher education are established to serve the younger student, who comes directly to a university after high school and studies full-time

- Adults Motivated to Return to College
- Adult Learning Styles - Patterns in Adult Learning - How Adults Learn
- Principles of Adult Learning
- The Role of Aging in Adult Learning: Implications for Instructors in Higher Education
- We can do Better at Helping Working Adults Continue their Education

These posts by Michael Martinez should help new edubloggers Build a New Community and Develop Web Friends and Allies

These are the best posts I have read, so far, about how to start to network to build your own community

The Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education are a popular framework for evaluating teaching in traditional, face-to-face courses

You can read how these Seven Principles are used to evaluate good practice in online undergraduate courses:
- TLT Group
- The Technology Source Archives
- Journal of Online Learning and Teaching
- JALN 
- Learning In a Flat World

Angela Maiers and Pat Hensley both posted their list of the 26 keys (or ABCs) to Student Engagement

Information overload? Not anymore. Single Page Aggregators are the new wave of web 2.0 portals and directories. Instead of aggregating web sites, the Single Page Aggregators track the feeds from those sites.

Until now Popurls and Original Signal only tracked a few popular topics. Recently Alltop covering a much broader range of topics, was launched by Guy Kawasaki, who wants to change the world by aggregating RSS For The Masses .

Alltop will certainly appeal to those who need an easy way to follow many topics or don’t use yet a feed reader.

I have my own Single Page Aggregator at emapey | FeedRaider where I can quickly scan the feeds from the Education sites I follow. You can create yours too. Now, by using Alltop, I can also follow feeds in many other topics.

emapey | FeedRaider and Alltop are both part of my PLE (Personal Learning Environment)

Finally, I was struck by how difficult it felt to accept much of what I was hearing because, and this is something that is really concerning me (seriously), few if any of these folks had the network creds to be “trusted.” Now I know this is an admission that is going to get me in trouble, and it likely should. But it is also a consequence of being rooted so deeply in this network. It’s not that I distrust their “traditional” creds out of hand, but it’s almost like for me, these days, if you’re not doing at least a little bit of social, networked learning and publishing that I can tap into and track and engage with, I’m just not as inclined to buy in when you’re talking about reforming education with or without technology.

Source: Weblogg-ed

The biggest problem is how few of our educators still cannot relate to this description. They are neither networks unto themselves or nodes of a larger system, and they understand little about what it means to be either in a world that is more globally interconnected. And our students are not only left without models of what it means to be networked, they also get relatively little content that is contextualized through the network. So network literacy, the functions of working in a distributed, collaborative environment (Jill Walker), is an important aspect of learning and education that precious few of our students get a chance to practice. And it is only by practicing these skills, whether teachers or students, that they can truly be learned.

Source: Weblogg-ed