Oh no!  Someone let the cat out of the bag – using Facebook too frequently saps your intelligence and degrades your academic performance.  OK, maybe not an exact translation of Dr. Karpinski’s recent study out of Ohio State University, but it’s not as far off as you might think.

According to this recent study,

“Facebook is frequently used by 85 percent of undergraduate students; and 52 percent of graduates. Furthermore, Facebook users, who usually studied between 1-5 hours a week, had GPAs between 3.0 and 3.5; as against GPAs between 3.5 and 4.0 of the non-users, who generally devote 11-15 hours a week to their studies.”

While Dr. Karpinski avoids drawing a direct correlation between Facebook usage and academic performance, her data suggest that the amount of time students spend on Facebook versus homework impacts GPA.  Go figure.  Which begs the question:  Is Facebook anything more than an online watered-down version of the public square?  And more specifically, would the closest real-world metaphor for Facebook be the library or the mall?

The real-world mall experience is primarily about community– a place where stores instantiate the public square to move product.   In the case of Facebook and many other web 2.0 sites, it’s hard to not see the parallel. When was the last time you found a better deal on something in a mall compared to Amazon.com (holiday deals aside) or some other online retailer?

I know, I know, everyone is doing it– Facebook is one of the most visited websites on the planet, but, pushing a product?

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Popularity: 88% [?]

If visual media is king within the world of online instructional technology, then one of its most loyal subjects would be Pachyderm. Pachyderm was developed back in 2003 by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, New Media Consortium and the Institute for Museum and Library Services. Since then, Pachyderm has grown up into a full-fledged collection of different templates and features that allow you to incorporate video, text, audio and graphics into a multimedia presentation. Since Pachyderm’s formative years were spent in the world of art museums, its true strength is conveying visual meaning, oftentimes at the expense of how text is rendered. This is partly evidenced by the small font, text fields and reductionist-like menu structures available in the template-based navigational schemes. But, don’t hop off the elephant quite yet.

Pachyderm Logo

Did I mention that you don’t need to be a multimedia developer to create a relatively sophisticated Pachyderm multimedia presentation? And don’t fret quite yet about the aforementioned limitations; a new version of the software with significant enhancements is making its way around the corner soon.

Truth be told, when I produced my first Pachyderm presentation I realized that a Flash-produced equivalent of my one-day-long Pachyderm project would most likely have taken much, much longer; and keep in mind that I develop multimedia for a living. Of course, if I had used an authoring tool like Flash, I would have had much more flexibility to introduce different types of objects in a more customized presentation. However, most of the assets, i.e. images, videos, that I placed in Pachyderm felt appropriate for the environment since the Pachyderm end product is tightly organized around a uniform look and feel and the constraints that exist in the tool seemed reasonable. In a world where most educators simply don’t have the money to hire a multimedia developer, Pachyderm fits a definite need for educational communicators and students.

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Popularity: 74% [?]