Yesterday was an exceptional day because an Ashley in Twitter committed suicide after leaving clues in her Twitter stream and Tumblr account.

I had at least 50 teens retweeting the news in a short space of time and it was something that actually trended where the tragedy occurred.

Ashley Tan, @ashley is now trending in #Houston trendsmap.com/us/houston—
Trendsmap Houston (@TrendsHouston) February 01, 2012

Two things got reinforced: Twitter is not dead among teens and people need to take what happens online more seriously.

Cyberwellness is not just about protecting the less experienced from harm that comes from without. It is also about protecting them from the harm from within.

When I posed the question “Where do we lie?”, I meant two things. Where we are positioned and where the untruths are.

Let us not kid ourselves: Statistics and visuals obscure details and inconvenient truths!

I found this video by a group called Finite Films on Gizmodo. It is an example of crowdsourcing ideas for short movies.

Here is Gizmodo’s summary of what Finite Films does: “You go to their site, send them a constraint for their next short film, they pick their 21 favorites, you vote them. The top 7 define the next short.”

I can imagine this happening in education. Imagine getting learners of all ages more involved in selecting what and how they learn.

Some might argue that this might only work with older learners, typically those who are working and need training or professional development. But I think we should not underestimate kids.

Sugata Mitra did not when he experimented with “hole in the wall” computers in India. Blurb at TED: Sugata Mitra’s “Hole in the Wall” experiments have shown that, in the absence of supervision or formal teaching, children can teach themselves and each other, if they’re motivated by curiosity and peer interest. [Previous reflections on Mitra's work]

For an extreme form of crowdsourcing, watch the Independent Project.

Video source

It is a small crowd in this case, but the principles of crowdsourcing apply: Shared interest, crowd input and selection, common platform, ownership of content and tasks, and some form of collaboration at all stages.

We already have something like this operating on a larger scale. It is called Wikipedia.

Video source

I have featured mobile-made videos at least once before.

These videos illustrate the shift in power: To the devices (mobile phones) and to those who know how to take advantage of the devices (the creators).

Personally, I would not miss Facebook much. I am more of a Twitter person.

But I do appreciate how Facebook is major player in the social learning system.

Jeff Jarvis questions the need for lectures and seems to foretell their death. Ironically by being a sage on the stage.

But he is not lecturing. He is storytelling. And most good TED talks are stories, not lectures. Storytelling is not going away. Lecturing might. In fact, it should and for all the reasons Jarvis mentioned.

If lectures need to persist, they could be shared lectures like the ones in YouTube or iTunes U. Jarvis put it best when he said: Do what you do best and link with the rest.

Video source

How many creative people does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

If the video above is any indication, the number is irrelevant. Creative people might not screw in lightbulbs.

Sometimes you need creative people to come up with unorthodox solutions to problems. Sometimes creative people come up with solutions to problems you did not know exist.

Sometimes they are creative to entertain. Yet other times they serve no purpose other than to just be creative.

My reaction to reading Edudemic’s How Technology is Changing Education as We Know It was mixed.

If education is made up of two main elements, teaching and learning, then I think that technology has done much to change learning but little to change teaching.

One of the key affordances of technology is providing access to resources. A learner does not have to wait to be taught. He or she can teach himself or herself if there is enough access.

On the other hand, teaching has not evolved much. It is still delivery-oriented instead of experience-oriented. Ask most learners to draw or describe a classroom and you will see what I mean. The fact that we even associate teaching with a classroom shows that there has been little change (this Swedish school bucks the trend).

The sad fact is that most classrooms today still limit access via technology. Teaching takes precedence over learning. Without this access, teaching can prevent learning.

This video is not only an introduction to the talent at the Centre for e-Learning (CeL), it is also a demonstration of what I like to call a “decision tree” video.

This type of video takes advantage of YouTube’s annotation tool to add “hotspots” at any point in a video that link to other videos. In the video above, you get links to the CeL team videos near the end of the video. At the end of the team videos, you get links to the videos of each team member.

While we used this video to showcase the talents in CeL, the same technique could be used provide users with choices in scenario-based learning. We will be working on one such video soon.

Many thanks to Choo, our tech-admin for the idea to shoot the promotional videos, to Niko for marking up the videos and to the rest of my department for being good sports. You can tell we are not actors, but we are good at our day jobs!

Sometimes you get interrupted. Sometimes you get mad. Sometimes you go with the flow.