moot, a skinny 21-year-old college student and hacker prodigy who looks about 16, runs a website out of his parents’ basement called 4chan, an adults only bulletin board where just about anything can be posted—with the exception of advertising. Oh, and anything that violates local or US law, or any complaints about 4chan of any kind. Under rule number two is a reminder that if you are under the age of 18 you need to “discontinue browsing immediately.” Since moot launched 4chan in October 2003 with his mother’s credit card, obviously he’s spent a fair amount of the time in-between breaking his own rules.
moot describes 4chan as “a simple image-based bulletin board where anyone can post comments and share images.” Because people can post anonymously—the comments and images–and subject matter–can get pretty raunchy. It has a simple, alphabetical (but coded) format with content that leans toward anime and Read more…

This article in Gamasutra: Industry News – “Games for Health: Why You Should Care About Virtual Worlds” (May 13) is about using games to develop higher level reasoning skills in health education. One of the four examples is nursing instructor John Miller, who has been developing a Second Life virtual emergency room for his nursing students at Tacoma Community College. Students create an avatar that interacts with avatar patients created by Miller. These ‘patients’ have symptoms that nursing students solve in the safety of a virtual world.

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posted by Sidnee

In light of the COM 529 guest speaker Shelly Farnham’s discussion of Facebook last Thursday, and class comments about social media’s generational appeal, I ran across this Time.com article: Suffering From Facebook Fatigue?

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posted by Sidnee

Although the Chronicle of Higher Education article doesn’t mention the Flip specifically, some instructors (mostly early adopter technology geeks) are making use of social media to make difficult concepts easier for their students to understand. “Film School” highlights some intriguing uses for video technologies in college coursework that instructors are using to provide learning support outside the regular classroom / textbook learning format. Some of them are quite fun, and show how instructors can reach today’s visually oriented learners by taking advantage of current technology.

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posted by Sidnee

Heard on NPR this week: A collaborative story is being created by middle school students from across the globe using Twitter.com. Each student is using the same account to contribute their 140 (or less) characters. Contributions are copied and pasted into a Google blog maintained by Mr. Mayo–the teacher who thought this up? The original idea of ‘Twittory stories’ – one story being written by many voices using Twitter technology – came from Cameron O’Reilly of The Podcast Network, according to Many Voices.

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