How students use technology

I'm on a spring break mission trip with nine students and one other adviser to Chicago to study firsthand interfaith relations. I may (or may not) reflect on the interfaith mission in my personal blog. Here, I would like to chronicle how we're using technology, especially how the students are using it on their own.

• One of the students has given up Facebook for Lent, and has lamented that more than once.
• On the bus and on the train, texting takes place.
• Someone had a compass app on their smart phone to tell us which way to go when the bus dropped us off a few blocks from the stop.
• Map apps were helpful in finding our way around a new city, and a very large one at that.
• A student brought his laptop so he could finish a paper that was due on Friday.
• The Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) has a mobile site and a mobile app that helped us plan our day travels.
• Google image search was used to show pictures of a tamarind tree while we tried dried tamarind pods for the first time.
• A girl used her phone to record our rehearsal when we were spontaneously asked to join the choir. She then shared it with several of us through multi-media text messages.
• Phone cameras were used a lot to take pictures of the town and the team. The pictures will eventually make it to Facebook.
• Using the Chromebook I brought, I was able to see pictures of the ball my daughters went to yesterday, pics they had uploaded to Facebook.
• I'm using that same Chromebook to post these observations to Blogger, utilizing the church where we're staying's WiFi network.

How do you observe your students using technology?

Honoring the 'Social' in Social Media

Today, being the first of April is observed as 'April Fool's Day' in the United States and elsewhere. After only a few keystrokes I've learned that the holiday was first mentioned by Chaucer in 1392. That's a long history of pranks!

In the Internet Age we continue this tradition utilizing the social media of our time. For example, Google has 'launched' Gmail Motion, even inserting a link to it in the Gmail (and BishopMail) gear menu. YouTube features the 'Top 5 Viral Pictures of 1911' and lets you watch any video in 1911 style. I watched the beginning of a video on the current social media revolution--that I had shared in a workshop yesterday--in this redux rendition. Talk about anachronistic cognitive dissonance! I'm sure other sites are having similar fun today.

And we love to share such fun via social media. The top 5 viral pictures of 1911 video has already been viewed nearly 400,000 times and it's not even 4:00 EST. That's the power of social networks: connecting people, spreading the word or the meme. One consultant described it as word of mouth on steroids.

When I had a personal blog several years ago, I would change the theme and title and publish bogus posts on this day. Those posts were some of my most popular. This EdTech at OWU blog is relatively new and not well known, but I look forward to it becoming more conversational and less monological. In that spirit, the spirit of social media, I invite your comments. What are your favorite April Fools pranks of the Internet Age? What are your favorite stories of the human impact of Web 2.0? (Stories of Twitter Revolutions in Northern Africa most welcome!)