WebedtecH

ZIPSkinny.com is a neat little site that lets you enter a ZIP code and get immediate demographic information. It could be very useful for social studies, sociology, business classes, etc. I think my favorite part is the ability to create an embeddable widget for a web page:

Video: Twitter in Plain English | Common Craft – Explanations In Plain English

Question – does this explain how you can use Twitter to build your personal learning network or does that need to be a sequel?

Techdirt: Is An Online Study Group Cheating?

Vincent Clement writes in to let us know that that a student at Ryerson University in Toronto is facing expulsion for setting up an online study group for his chemistry class using Facebook. The school is saying it wasn’t so much a study group as it was a place for 146 students to cheat and share answers (though, it’s only blaming the student who ran the group). Students at the university are reasonably up in arms over the matter, as they don’t see how it’s any different than a traditional study group. Of course, the whole thing seems a little bit silly. As we discussed almost exactly a year ago, people working together to collaborate is an important skill in the real world, and what some people consider “cheating” these days seems a lot like the type of collaboration that kids are quite used to doing online, and which should serve them well later in life.

We can view this quite easily.  The school doesn’t have a clue.  I look for this action to be retracted rather quickly.  If not, then anyone who knows chemistry should join his study group and give these guys a hand.

Atomic Learning is offering a free series of videos about blogging using Blogger through the month of February.  This is a great opportunity to learn something new or brush up your skills if you’re a Blogger user!

I’ve gotten into some interesting discussions lately about what should and should not be a part of an “educational network” alternative to the “social networks” of sites such as Facebook and Ning. Now this isn’t saying those sites couldn’t be the platforms for constructing an educational network, but before we do we need to understand what should be part of the network. I’ve created an posted a basic survey on the topic (seven questions, pretty painless) I’ll leave active until the end of the day on Thursday. I’ll have the results with me at EduCon 2.0 in Philadelphia and publish them to the web just after that.

Complete the survey here.