EduGeek Journal

I have been chewing over the brief article at The Chronicle about how a study found “No Link Between Social-Networking Sites and Academic Performance.”
Eszter Hargittai, associate professor of communication studies and sociology at Northwestern, suggests that the benefits of social-networking sites may cancel out the distractions they pose.

Here is a newsflash people: [...]

As a disclaimer, I use Facebook. I don’t hate it in any way. But all of the problem FB is having over privacy make me ponder where the Internet is heading. The more I think about it, the more I am concerned that Facebook might be making the web less social.
When we started this site, [...]

I was pondering future trends last week while watching the evening weather forecast.  Forecasting while watching a forecast?  Anyways… We were in for a possible round of severe weather that week. The news anchor put up a map of “storm spotters” – a network of people that would call in from their homes and tell [...]

Like many people, I read the New York Times story about the FaceBook Exodus last week.  I then laughed at how silly it was and moved on.  But then I started seeing this article linked to every where… from many people thinking it actually had a point.   It kind of shocked me how few people [...]

Somewhere, deep in the bowels of the Google Bat Cave, I bet there is a very closely-guarded vault that only a few people have access to.    Inside this vault is a document that everyone from Microsoft to FaceBook to yours truly wants to get their hands on.  Some object or map or piece of paper [...]

I remember hearing about Posterous when it first came out.  It was nice, but at the time didn’t really stick out above all of the other social sites coming out at the time.  However, I took another look at Posterous when a student in a class I am adjuncting featured it in a project.  What [...]

Every time I start talking about Twitter, I get the same response: “Why would I want to read short messages about what someone ate for breakfast?”.
You wouldn’t – but that is the wrong question to ask.  It is the same as asking “Why would I want to watch TV when there are soap operas on [...]

In the current Web 2.0 world, many have predicted that “trends” will have a very short life.  Many have written off Microsoft already because they already had their five years of dominance.  MySpace and FaceBook have had their day and will die out soon, according to some.  Twitter never really caught on in the mainstream [...]

Yes – I am as surprised as you that I waited this long to get an iPhone. You can revoke my geek cred if you like – but I had bills to pay. However, the old cell was dying, I really wanted to upgrade to some kind of smart phone, and the iPhone ended up [...]

We all see many trends, new web sites, and Buzzwords floating around the EduGeek-o-sphere. Most of them I just let pass because I don’t think they are going anywhere (of course, I might comment on something hoping to build buzz for something that I still don’t think will go anywhere but is still so cool [...]