Weekly Learning Technology Digest... 22

Image from JP Photography, under a
CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 license

Now, I know that you'll probably be thinking about the weekend or watching the Olympics, but you know what... stuff still carried on happening where learning technology's concerned.  And because it's Friday, it's time for me to share the juicy bits of lovely from this week's selection!

• The first link might help to demystify some of that muzziness around the concept of 'MOOCs' - it's 20 questions (and answers) about MOOCs from Dave Cormier and there are lots of interesting nuggets in this article.  
• Another link to take a look at is the 2012 Horizon Report from Educause / NMC and it looks at the things that are coming up - from stuff a year away to things that will hit in 4 to 5 years.   If you're working with learning technologies now, the trick is not to keep your head down but to look up and see what's headed your way and plan ahead.  This report is great for that.
• I also saw an interesting video from 'Hacking Society' which records a discussion on how we visualise the web's hidden economies
• A nice new development which is currently being rolled out is video chat face-to-face with Hangouts in Gmail and it mainstreams further some of the excellent features in Google+ which is good to see.
• Talking of changing tech, it's easy (very easy!) to knock PowerPoint, but did you know that it's been 25 years since it arrived on the scene?  A real game changer from the boardroom to the classroom and the fact that's it's installed on 1 billion machines worldwide is just mind blowing!
• Another long in the tooth Microsoft product - Hotmail - is about to be relaunched as 'Outlook' 
• With all new tech comes risks - and a great little article on Social media and the elephant in the room needs reading to ground how we're using social media in a little reality.
• And for a little more social media how about the Updated survey of Russell Group Universities' use of Researcher profiling services  from the always excellent Brian Kelly at UK Web Focus?  The comment that 'use of popular social media services by researchers could enhance access to the researchers’ research outputs if links to their outputs were provided from the services' is an interesting one and it provides an interesting picture of the use of such services across some of the UK's research-intensive universities.
• There seems to be a lot of stuff about social media kicking around this week and In the Facebook era, students tell you everything continues the theme.  The awkward relationship between the student giving out too much information and then sending 'don't go there' signals is amplified by their ease with revealing their personal selves online.  A really interesting article.
• The final link is a reminder that University students demand a 'real relationship' with tutors which appeared in an article in The Guardian voicing concerns from the NUS about the quality of contact hours.  A thorny issue - but maybe technology can help here too?  

And that's that!  As ever, if there's something worth a note for the week which I missed, do drop a comment off for me below.

In the meantime, enjoy the Olympics whether you're watching them in person or on the TV... and if you're not doing that, have a great weekend anyway and I'll see you next week.

Sarah