Serendipity35

I am prepping for my fall graduate course in social media at NJIT and I'm looking at my list of  book titles for outside reading on social media, and some related digital design topics. The original list of titles was crowdsourced on this blog and updated  2 years later. The latest additions are based on outside reading by myself and recommendations from the last group of students who took the social media course. New suggestions welcomed.

1. The Social Media Bible: Tactics, Tools, and Strategies for Business Success - Safko


2. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide by Henry Jenkins - web 2.0 technologies and trends in the context of participatory culture.


3. YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture by Jean Burgess and Joshua Green


4. Social Media for Social Good: A How-to Guide for Nonprofits - Heather Mansfield


5. Social Media: Dominating Strategies for Social Media Marketing with Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn and Instagram


6. What Would Google Do? - Jeff Jarvis


7. Googled: The End of the World as We Know It   Ken Auletta


8. The Art of Social Media - by Guy Kawasaki & Peg Fitzpatrick


9. Power Friending - Amber MacArthur


10. 101 Social Media Tactics for Nonprofits: A Field Guide - by Melanie Mathos & Chad Norman


11. Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations - Clay Shirky


12. Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies  Josh Bernoff and Charlene Li


13. Social Media Marketing All-in-One For Dummies - by Jan Zimmerman & Deborah Ng Yes, there's a "dummies" book for SM too


14. Building Social Web Applications: Establishing Community at the Heart of Your Site -  by Gavin Bell


15. Social Media Explained: Untangling the World's Most Misunderstood Business Trend - by Mark Schaefer


16. Socialnomics: How Social Media Transforms the Way We Live and Do Business - Erik Qualman


17. Designing for the Social Web - Joshua Porter


18. The Young and the Digital: What the Migration to Social Network Sites, Games, and Anytime, Anywhere Media Means for Our Future - S. Craig Watkins


19. Designing Social Interfaces: Principles, Patterns, and Practices for Improving the User Experience by Christian Crumlish and Erin Malone - best practices for starting a social website with a focus on design focus


20. The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom by Yochai Benkler - though not a text on social media, law professor at Yale University, Benkler has made the entire book available for free download and a few chapters are very good at generating thoughts about the emergence of social software  http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/wealth_of_networks/


21. Six Pixels of Separation: Everyone Is Connected. Connect Your Business to Everyone. - Mitch Joel - a business focus on using Net marketing, especially. free tools and services


22. Shel Israel - Twitterville


23. Chris Brogan and Julian Smith - Trust Agents


24. The Huffington Post Complete Guide to Blogging


25. David Meerman Scott's New Rules of Marketing & PR


26. Paul Gillin - The New Influencers


27. Brian Solis and Deirdre Breakenridge - Putting the Public Back in Public Relations


28. David Kirkpatrick The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company that's Connecting the World (Jan 2010)


29. Tim O'Reilly and Sara Milstein -  The Twitter Book


30. The Zen of Social Media Marketing - by Shama Hyder


31. Bob Garfield  -  Chaos Scenario


32. David Meerman Scott  - World Wide Rave


33. Adam Penenberg' -  Viral Loop


34. Enterprise 2.0  -  Andrew McAfee ~ Web 2.0 for the enterprise


35. Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation - Tim Brown


36. The Whuffie Factor: Using the Power of Social Networks to Build Your Business - Hunt


37. The Cluetrain Manifesto - though ten years old, this book on the networked marketplace probably makes more sense today in its observations about how the Internet continues to change business.


38. Visual Thinking by Rudolf Arnheim - probably more in the art and visual design world, but his premise that all thinking is basically perceptual and the ancient dichotomy between seeing and thinking, between perceiving and reasoning, is false and misleading.

Khan Academy has teamed up with the College Board (creators of the SAT) to create personalized SAT practice for anyone, anywhere.

In March 2016, the SAT is changing and now students can prepare for the new test on Khan Academy—for free.

Khan Academy gives students personalized practice recommendations and instant feedback on how they’re doing. If they’re curious, we also have a short video about the new SAT to help them get to know how the test is changing.

- 4 official full-length practice tests, plus study and test-taking tips

- 8 diagnostic quizzes to pinpoint your areas for practice

- Thousands of practice questions, video lessons, and hints

- Get constant feedback and progress so you know where you stand

 see www.khanacademy.org/sat

Overview of the Official SAT Practice: Sal walks through using Official SAT Practice on KhanAcademy.org, which we built in partnership with College Board (the creators of the SAT).

When I had first seen the College Board and Khan Academy announcement that they were forming a new partnership, I liked that the free test preparation is being offered in conjunction with the Boys & Girls Clubs of America. I think that is also important in giving access to the resources for students who might need more support or access to the Internet or computers. 

It is not a revolutionary approach to use diagnostic tests to determine skill level in each section of the SAT, and then direct students to different lessons that review fundamentals a student might have previously missed in school. When I was tutoring high school students 1:1 or in a small group for the SAT 35 years ago, I did the same thing using books, paper and pencil, When CD-ROMs became the way to review for the test, it added the computer's ability (a bit crudely) to send students to the types of questions they were getting wrong. Drill and practice. 

The next phase was to move that online, and the computing power increased dramatically. So did some of the predictive ability of the program to monitor student weaknesses. Khan's  service also takes in data from students’ PSAT and SAT scores and tailors the tools offered to teach skills students may have missed on the assessments and prepare them for the next round of testing.

David Coleman, CEO and president of College Board, is also looking for some positive PR for the test. The approach here is to try to ensure that students will not only be more prepared for taking the SAT but for college in general. That latter goal (also echoed in the Common Core State Standards that Coleman helped build) is one that has not been associated with the SAT in recent years. 

The SAT has been more on the defensive recently with many admissions officers at colleges saying that high school grades are a better indicator of a student’s success in college. The ACT has also risen in popularity as an alternative to the SAT.

“Our aim is to level the college assessment practice field,” Coleman said in a presentation, and Salman Khan, founder and executive director of Khan Academy, said his team had access to the new SAT design and were able to tailor their tools to best help students succeed while preparing for the test.

I hope the partnership with the Boys & Girls Clubs of America is only the first of more connections they make. I don't view it as a negative on schools that more "schooling" is occurring outside the traditional classroom, but as a positive that more resources are being offered to supplement what is being done in classrooms.

 

The Internet may seem like "a series of tubes"* to you if have discovered that there is a YouTube EDU, a YouTube for Schools, YouTube for Teachers and even a School of YouTube. So many tubes.

YouTube EDU is a sub-section of YouTube that contains educational content.

YouTube for Schools is a network setting used most often in K-12 schoools that, when implemented, allows a school to access the educational content on YouTube EDU while limiting access to non-educational content on YouTube.com.

YouTube.com/Teachers is a how-to site that shows you how to use YouTube in the classroom.

YouTube for Schools brings the power of video to classrooms for free with some filtering available. Learn more here. It gives that selective access a broad set of educational videos on YouTube EDU and to select the specific videos that are accessible from within your school network. 

If you don't have a Google Account for your school, you can sign up for free here, but DO NOT sign up for YouTube for Schools using your personal account.

The School of YouTube is a new venture that YouTube says is part of their desire to make you "listen, laugh and give."  It opens this week.

Plenty of people use YouTube videos to learn as part of their Personal Learning Network. I just used a video to fix the carburetor on my lawn mower. You may have found a video on how to use a program or how set up hardware. This informal learning is a larger part of our learning experience than ever before.

The School of YouTube (like the ALS ice bucket challenge) is an attempt to raise funds in a new way. YouTube says that the school's curriculum is "uncomplicated, comes without annoying classmates and has only one easy assignment. And that assignment is that when you are done watching a
video, you must donate money to Comic Relief. Money raised from donations will go towards helping give kids an education across some of the world’s poorest countries."

The videos will feature some of YouTube’s most popular stars learning or teaching something new every day. According to a video that YouTube has released, the YouTube stars will perform a variety of tasks from figure skating to salsa dancing, baking a cake to landing a plane. The lessons will be uploaded on YouTube from September 8-12.

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*  "A series of tubes" is a phrase used by then-United States Senator Ted Stevens to describe the Internet. It was part of his opposing network neutrality on June 28, 2006. The phrase took on a life and was widely ridiculed, especially because Stevens headed the committee charged with regulating the Internet.

edu-apps.org is an open collection of learning apps that can be used in your classes.

The apps are built on LTI which is "like Facebook apps or Google widgets, but interoperable between lots of edu tools. Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI)® is a specification developed by IMS Global Learning Consortium. The principal concept of LTI is to establish a standard way of integrating rich learning applications (often remotely hosted and provided through third-party services) with platforms like learning management systems, portals, or other educational environments. In LTI these learning applications are called Tools (delivered by Tool Providers) and the LMS, or platforms, are called Tool Consumers." 

The edu-apps site is run by Instructure and its contents are available on GitHub under the MIT license. The official IMS LTI site is available here. The tools listed should work in most systems.