Sorin Adam Matei
Analysis, research, maps, and essays from Sorin Adam Matei.
We live in a world of things. Those who make the things define the way we live our lives. Their decisions impact not only our trivial needs, such as spending a night on Facebook checking the status of our friends. Technologies that…
In Spring 2015, together with my colleagues, Michael Smith, Abrar Hammoud, and Davin Huston I developed a multidisciplinary learning experience whose main goal is to help students acquire competencies related to problem formulation, design thinking, ethical and critical thinking, advanced persuasive speaking,…
The map below and the KMZ file of Lost Flight MH370 , summarize in real time the story of the search and hopefully eventual finding of lost flight MH370. Come back often or bookmark this page to get the latest geographic news. Or…
State of the art research and development on online collaborative technologies. An excellent recent summary: We review a representative selection of systems that support the management of collaborative learning interaction, and characterize them within a simple classification framework. The framework distinguishes between…
What is known (and unknown) about computer supported collaborative learning? This chapter summarizes two decades of research on computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL). We first review the key idea that has emerged, namely the fact that collaboration among peers can be “designed”,…
An article about group design and selection collaborative learning. This study investigates whether instructor-formed heterogeneous groups produce a more effective CL environment than student self-selected groups by measuring individual academic performance and perceptions. Results indicate the presence of…
An absolutely fascinating article on how leaders modulate and stimulate learning in online environments. If fits in nicely with the Jigsaw model of teaching and learning. The growth of online learning has exposed fundamental gaps in our knowledge, both theoretical and pragmatic.…
This is a learning module for the class Contemporary Social / Mass Media Theory taught at Purdue University bySorin Adam Matei Knowledge gap hypothesis proposes that more information does not always mean a better informed public, or at least that not all members of…
What if we allowed the authors and the reviewers of academic papers to interact with each other and, horribile dictu, to know each other’s identies. This PLOS paper believes that we would get better reviews and better papers. Citation: Leek JT, Taub…
88 percent of women, versus 84 percent of men appreciate their college education… Apud Resource Shelf and Pew Internet. Half of all women who have graduated from a four-year college give the U.S. higher education system excellent or good marks for the…
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Italy’s deeper troubles magisterially analyzed by the Economist…. Italy is indulgent towards its children in some ways—it is not unusual for them to live at home until they are in their 30s—but hard on them in others. “A typical Italian family these…
“News” from The Associated Press via Report: Students don’t know much about US history.
Next fall I will teach the Online Interaction Seminar at Purdue University. The class is listed as 47566 – COM 63200 – 001 and it will meet on Tuesday – Thursday from 1:30 pm to 2:45 pm PM. This is a fun…
Cover via Amazon The Center for New Media and History at George Mason University announced last month the launch of a new Word Press extension, Anthologize, which will bring academic print and online publishing together. The idea is quite simple. Publish a…
Y Fu Tuan, one of my favorite thinkers, on our greatest educational challenge… How might we label ourselves in the 21st century? To risk a broad generalization, I say we are either ethnics or globalists. As ethnics, we hold on to certain…
An ambitious Social Netwok Analysis site… The World Wide Web (WWW) has changed how humans interact; for some scholars, we now live in the “Age of the Network”. As online populations grow and the quantity and quality of interactions improve with new…
According to this paper, programs that are most central in the hiring network (in terms of outdegrees or indegrees?), are the most pretigious. The winners are below…. This research examines the prestige of doctoral degree programs in communication based on a network…
This piece, which is available online, has become an instant classic… Billions of people participate in online social activities. Most users participate as readers of discussion boards, searchers of blog posts, or viewers of photos. A fraction of users become contributors of…
Image via Wikipedia The Dataverse Network is an open-source web application supported by Harvard University, which offers a free and flexible framework for dataset citation, curation, and management. It allows researchers to deposit their datasets and to share them with persistent, unique…
Over the last few days my project, Ubimark, which turns print books such as Around the Word in 80 Days into user interfaces for the web through the magic of 2d or QR codes, has been covered by a number of very…
In a larger lecture classroom, it can be impossible to facilitate participation with even a few students – and infinitely more impossible to get an entire class of a couple hundred to chime in as well. And if you have students who may be…
One clip shows a girl interpreting math terms as dance moves. Another features a guy flying a small remote-controlled elephant helicopter that he made around his backyard. Are these just random YouTube videos? Not quite. These videos are actually submissions students made…
University of Illinois has only received 7% of its state budget allocation and the interim president announces that its professors will be furloughed (a form of salary cut or partial unemployment). It is a move on a par to UC’s catastrophic budget…
Image by dewfall via Flickr New York Times reflects on an emergent turn toward higher emphasis on “skills” in American colleges. Is this desirable? Should we abandon philosophy departments? How about math? THOMAS COLLEGE, a liberal arts school in Maine, advertises itself…
A roundup on the University of California fee raises by the New York Times. Although the respondents’ own agendas make the answers at times less than enlightening, they are symptomatic for this day and age. The University of California, which has already…
Drinking, socializing, a way of life in coed dorms… In the past 30 years, coed college dormitories have gone from rare to routine, with nearly all students who live on campus now sharing housing with members of the opposite sex. But a…
Comparing 3D-Earth Viewers – November 2007, Volume 21, Issue 11 – Archive – GIM International, the global magazine for Geomatics A 3D-Earth viewer enables navigating through the virtual environment and can be easily downloaded from the internet. How might this rapid development…
Comparing 3D-Earth Viewers – November 2007, Volume 21, Issue 11 – Archive – GIM International, the global magazine for Geomatics A 3D-Earth viewer enables navigating through the virtual environment and can be easily downloaded from the internet. How might this rapid development…
University of Richmond has invited an extraordinary group of researchers and practitioners to brainstorm on the most likely path history related visualization will take in the future. The main goal is to map the road that will lead to the next platform…
Student Expectations Seen as Causing Grade Disputes – NYTimes.com – Annotated tags: student, expectation, grade inflation, entitlement “I tell my classes that if they just do what they are supposed to do and meet the standard requirements, that they will earn a…
Student Expectations Seen as Causing Grade Disputes – NYTimes.com – Annotated tags: student, expectation, grade inflation, entitlement Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
HowStuffWorks “What is an IP address?” – Annotated tags: ip, address Out of the almost 4.3 billion possible combinations 2 to the power of 32 – post by somatei HowStuffWorks “How Domain Name Servers Work” – Annotated tags: DNS If you are…
HowStuffWorks “What is an IP address?” – Annotated tags: ip, address HowStuffWorks “How Domain Name Servers Work” – Annotated tags: DNS User talk:Chanur – MediaWiki Iphone skin tags: iphone, skin The Internet Domain Name System Explained for Non-Experts – ISOC Member Briefing…
UCLA Digital Humanities & Media Studies tags: digital humanities, ucla, manifesto, education, web2.0, app, ideas, technology Queeky – Social drawing! – QUEEKY – Social drawing tags: web2.0, queeky, tools, community, draw, web, Graphics, design Personal Branding 102: How to Communicate & Maintain…
2009 Horizon Report » Technologies to Watch In the first adoption horizon we find mobiles and cloud computing, both of which are already well established on many campuses — and still more organizations have plans in place to make use of these…
Teaching and Learning with Technology Conference 2009 tags: no_tag Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century According to a recent study from the Pew Internet & American Life project (Lenhardt & Madden, 2005), more than one-half of…
The Fedora Project: An Open-source Digital Object Repository Management System tags: fedora, repository, project, lor, library, learning, object, lol old bailey online – Google Search tags: no_tag Cirip.ro / manafu / Foloseste cineva shortText.com… tags: no_tag The Plagiarism Checker tags: plagiarism, writing,…
Interesting take on Social Media in Education.. From Knowledgable to Knowledge-able: Learning in New Media Environments | Academic Commons My own experiments in this regard led to the creation the World Simulation, now the centerpiece of my Introduction to Cultural Anthropology course…
Notre Dames de Reims – Google Search tags: no_tag Cathédrale Notre Dame de Reims by kevin51340 – Google 3D Warehouse tags: no_tag World Heritage Centre – World Heritage Heritage is our legacy from the past, what we live with today, and what…
Following a story on the Chronicle of Higher Education Wired Campus Blog I’ve run into YouNoodle.com a social networking site for entrepreneurs and educators. Lots of mashups and some interesting applications. The site still needs some improvement and the communication tools improved,…
Visible Past, the project I talked about on this blog a couple of times has caught the eye of the Chronicle of Higher Education. Here is a little videocast they released through their Wired Campus blog.
Submitted by Colleen E. Brown on November 26 to the On-line Interaction and Facilitation Seminar, Fall 2007, Purdue University, Dr. Sorin A. Matei via the I Think Blog (http://www.matei.org/ithink) Introduction The need for group membership, social support, and information gathering are part…
Submitted by Robert N. Yale on October 15, 2007 to the On-line Interaction and Facilitation Seminar, Fall 2007, Purdue University, Dr. Sorin A. Matei via the I Think Blog (http://www.matei.org/ithink). Abstract This essay posits that virtual communities are successful to the degree…
One of the most interesting resources for virtual reality modeling and research in archeology. Specific link to archeology About Intute: Arts and Humanities What is Intute: Arts and Humanities? Artifact and Humbul, two of the hubs of the Resource Discovery Network RDN,…
My 435 students came up with a number of ways of improving the Purdue website. The ideas run the gamut, from cloning YouTube to, well, to “Less is more”. Enjoy
I found your blog while tagging my blog with SC06. I noticed that you were interested in finding the slides to Kurzweil’s keynote at SC06. I too was looking for them and found a couple of his slides on wikipedia and I…
What is Elgg? (It’s being used at MIT.) Described by its founders as a ‘learning landscape’, Elgg provides each user with their own weblog, file repository (with podcasting capabilities), an online profile and an RSS reader. Additionally, all of a user’s content…
Please bear with me as I try to communicate my thoughts. I’m quite ill today, so what I write might be slightly difficult to understand. I’ve been groping for a big, fat concept for our site, and maybe somebody can find some…
Larry Sanger, Wikipedia’s confounder, is at it again. He decided to “fork” Wikipedia, that is to create another flavor, which includes more editorial control, of the famous online encyclopedia. I am part of the project, called Citizendium, and I hope to be…
A thought on our discourse on television. Many people felt that TV was not an interactive medium – rather it was a passive medium that broadcasts messages. It made me think about the history of education. Traditionally, modern education has been broadcast…
After interacting with Noshir Contractor this week and going through the readings on communication networks and new forms of organizing, if you’re interested in more on this subject, you might want to look at the (interdisciplinary) workshop he is presenting in Bloomington…
The social shaping of knowledge through collaborative authoring tools I grew up in a household with a set of encyclopedias prominently displayed in the family room and frequently used as a resource– for our education, to consult during family discussions about issues,…