I just wanted to share that I will be joining the faculty of the School of Information and Library Science at the Pratt Institute in Manhattan. There I will be focusing on research and teaching, particularly in the area of emerging information and communications technologies in education, museums and libraries.

I am very excited to be joining the Pratt. Some interesting things about Pratt SILS is that it is the only ALA accredited program in Manhattan and is the oldest, continually accredited ALA program in the US. Some of the interesting things going on at Pratt SILS is they just started a Dual-Degree, MSLIS & MFA Digital Arts program. There are also a number of study-abroad programs, including ones in London and Florence.

I am very flattered that Meety was nominated “Best Technology Design” at the CSCL 2009 conference in Rhodes, Greece. The mention is in the conference program. The conference is in 2 weeks, and I will not be attending (as much as I would like to). Hoping it will win!

The Teachers College Educational Technology Conference 2009 was great fun. Below are the slides from our presentation titled, Designing an Online Social Network: Lessons Learned, which presents some research on the implementation of the Building Healthy Communities Social Network.

I realized my blog was getting a bit neglected, so I thought I would share the slides from my dissertation defense, which I passed but now need to make a few revisions here and there. I think I may have went a little long (it is only supposed to be 10-15 minutes, and I think I may have went for 20-25). Oh well, but here they are:

I am pleased to announce that the Building Healthy Communities Social Network is being rolled out to 15 schools in NYC, Philadelphia, and New Jersey starting next week. The Social Network is a collaboration between the EdLab (moi), the Center for Technology and School Change (Ellen Meier and Caron Mineo), and The After School Corporation (TASC). The program runs on a curriculum that was developed by Children for Children, and support for rolling out the program comes from NJ After 3, Education Works and TASC. Funding comes from the Corporation for National and Community Service, which is the branch of the federal government that supports AmeriCorps and Learn and Serve America (which this program is a part of).

One of the challenges associated with this project was designing/developing a social network site that can be used with young children (the program is for kids grades 3-8). This is the first time I have tried to develop something for children; everything I have done in the past was designed for adults. We will be doing some research on how social networking tools contribute (or don’t) to creating a learning environment that promotes healthy behaviors by kids. Hopefully we won’t find that the kids get frustrated with the site and start eating more junk!

Below you will find my slides from the EdLab Seminar on January 14, 2009. Enjoy!

I will be presenting at the EdLab Seminar on Wednesday, January 14 at noon. Please come by the EdLab if you’d like to see me put on a little show.

I recently completed a review on the book, Opening Up Education from the MIT Press. If interested, you can read the review in the Teachers College Record by clicking the link below:

Cocicolo, A. (2008, December). Opening Up Education: The Collective Advancement of Education through Open Technology, Open Content, and Open Knowledge (review). Teachers College Record. Retrieved from http://www.tcrecord.org/content.asp?contentid=15458.

I am heading to Orlando next week for the EDUCAUSE 2008 conference. If you’re at the conference, come visit our lighting round/poster session titled:

When MySpace Meets D-Space: Building a Personal/Institutional Repository

I thought I would share this paper I’ve put together on an experimental project that uses speech recognition in the classroom. Enjoy!

Using Speech Recognition Technology in the Classroom: An Experiment in Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning

ABSTRACT:
This paper will report on a design and development project that aims to enrich face-to-face classroom contexts using the latest developments in information and communications technology. The Meety project, when used by students in a classroom with laptop computers, captures the verbal utterances of the classroom context and uses it to supply real-time information resources to the students in the classroom. Students have the option of contributing to the information resources and rating the utility of the resources supplied. This project discusses the design and development of the project as well as a simulated trial to test its efficacy.