Everyone in the college world is focused on basketball so I thought it would be a good time to tell you about a course on Lifestreaming currently being taught by Dr Thomas Ho at Indiana University – Purdue University Indianapolis. You can find the course description and objectives here where you can see that 25% of the course grading is based on contributions made via students Lifestreams.
The course is about helping guide students to use social media and other services to help build a “personal brand”. What I also found interesting is that not only are the students levaraging the services but so is the professor. He has created a Twitter account for the course and has encouraged the students to use a specific hashtag to help students identify and filter contributions for the course.
A blog has also been created for the course using Tumblr where students can leave comments discussing posts. Lastly, a FriendFeed room has been created that aggregates these and several other feeds from services used for the course. One of the feeds available is for an audio podcast of the courses. This is a nice addition that lets you take a peek into the activity between students and professor of the course.
The course appears to be more involved than what your post suggest, as the syllabus indicates to course to be how IT professionals can utilize these “emerging technologies” and put the knowledge gain to good use.
As you say 25% of your grade comes from your posts to your lifestream, but it seems that Dr. Ho is using the lifestreams as a simple way of seeing a students collected information from all the Web 2.0 sources. It's like he's saying “Hey, I need you to have a lifestream so I don't have to hop around 15 difference services to see what you are contributing to the class.” It's more interesting that the lifestream is no longer a way for someone to gather information conveniently in one location, but as this tool that Dr. Ho is utilizing.
I might be missing the point of the course, but that's what I gathered. 🙂
Thanks so much for the post!
I hadn't thought of @cit499 as a course on PERSONAL “lifestreaming” because I've been so pre-occupied with the COURSE lifestream (or should I call it a “learnstream” 🙂 As you can see from the recent blog postings, I think that I may finally be close so I'm glad that you didn't post until now because the last week has made a big difference.
By the way, I don't want to seem “picky” BUT could you please change the post title to “indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis” because it isN'T an IU course (it's a PURDUE course) It's very “complicated” 🙂
You are correct that the students' personal lifestreams make it possible for me to “grade” them, BUT it's turning out that the personal lifestreams give me marvelous opportunities to engage them as I hope to see on http://bit.ly/cit499studentlifestream
Mark is also correct that I am an advocate of “personal branding” (is it time to bring @danschawbel into this conversation?) as one can see from MY personal brand: http://DrThomasHo.com and this Squidoo lens: http://squidoo.com/onlineidentity
Previously, I have tried to help my students to build THEIR personal brand, BUT this earlier effort http://www.epsilen.com/grp/8562 demonstrates that they (and I as well) didn't “get it” YET! 🙂 I am much happier with this semester's effort and I am hopeful that the students are “getting it”
In the meantime, keep an eye on the COURSE lifestream: http://bit.ly/cit499lifestream because that's developing “a life of its own”
This is SO EXCITING! 🙂
I have posted about this post in the CIT 499 blog:
http://blog.cit499.info/post/88571472/were-bein…
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I really enjoyed your post about college. I will have to come back again to read some more of them.
Esthetic college has designed programs for students which enhances their potentials. The college is student inclined. Every discipline is carefully carved.Take a careful survey before the plunge.
Thank you
http://www.centennialcollege.ca/estheticsprograms
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