Weekly Reader

The Surprising Identity of Each Social Network
"Facebook boasts the largest and richest demographic, Twitter has a surprisingly young user network, and 68 percent of Instagram's users are women. Each social media platform has cultivated a unique identity thanks to the demographics of the people who participate in the network. Some platforms are preferred by young adults, who are most active in the evening, others by high-income professionals, who are posting throughout the workday." -- Nick Bolognia, Social Media Today, 10/15/13

Digital Badges in the Classroom
"The open badge movement has stemmed from the independent learning and massive open online course (MOOC) frameworks of empowering and motivating learners to complete noncredit academic work, either from a distance or at a self designated pace." -- Alan Reid and Denise Paster, Inside Higher Ed Career Advice, 10/11/13

A Refreshingly Simple Guide To Twitter for Teachers
"Teachers are on Twitter every minute of every day. There are daily hashtag chats where educators from around the globe collaborate, share interesting tidbits, and make lifelong connections never before possible. There are people with tens of thousands of followers who are viewed as thought and opinion leaders. It’s a minute-by-minute pulse of the education world. It’s exhausting. It’s overwhelming. It’s hard to imagine where to start." -- Jeff Dunn, Edudemic, 9/18/13

How to Archive Your Favorite Tweets
"We recently heard the great news that once again we can start using If This, Then That (IFTTT) to archive the tweets that we favorite. The problem is, how do you archive those tweets that were favorited during the period that IFTTT wasn’t working, or if you’re like me, you never started using IFTTT to begin with?"-- Skallerup Bessette, Prof Hacker, The Chronicle, 9/10/13.

Fostering the Reciprocity of Learning
"In the July 10, 2013 post, I shared some ideas about learning with students precipitated by an article that made an interesting distinction between “doing for” students and “learning with” students. The post generated some good responses and prompted Aron Reppmann, a philosophy professor at Trinity Christian College in Illinois, to send me an email. “I think you have your finger on something that’s often missed in debates about professors’ posture toward students: namely that to say that we learn with and from our students is not necessarily to say that we are always learning in the same way as our students.” -- Maryellen Weimer, Teaching Professor Blog, 9/4/13