In a study funded by the U.S. Department of Education, Evaluation of Evidence-Based Practices in Online Learning (PDF), online learning was broken down into three types: expository (learners receive information via digital means), active (learners build knowledge by manipulating online tools), interactive (learners build knowledge through collaborative interaction).

Online learning certainly doesn’t mean the end for teachers, Mashable notes.  “Online learning tools are just like any other tools in a teacher’s bag of tricks: what matters is how they’re applied.  The instruction of good teachers will be made better by the proper application of web tools, while bad teachers won’t necessarily be made better by utilizing online education methods.”

Appropriate use of the tools at the teacher’s disposal will maximize the learning impact of education for students, separating good teachers from bad ones. “The major difference between teachers of today and teachers of the future is that in the future educators will have better online tools and will require better specialized training to learn how to utilize them properly.”

Online learning environments can produce results that are just as good or better than classroom learning.  We can expect it to be used more often to enhance face-to-face learning and where classroom learning is infeasible due to lack of funds, or desirable because of convenience.  Teachers will need to continue to adapt and learn to employ future technologies.

I have been on a Twitter binge lately, trying to learn how to use it correctly and discovering a number of tips, mostly on the basics.

One area I neglected until I found this site was how to use Search effectively.  “Twitter can serve as a tool for tracking and finding the most current, new and innovative content and tools on the web,” says makeuseof.com, and their tips show the way.

1. First create a search on a topic of interest to you.  Don’t make it so general that you get tens of thousands of results.
2. Now narrow the results to get only links if you wish, by rerunning it and adding the words filter:links. (note the colon)
3. Narrow the search further by getting rid of spam and results you don’t want by adding to the query the topics you don’t want to show up and any Twitter spammers, with a minus sign before each of them.
4. If your search results contain a lot of Retweets, filter them out by adding -RT. (minus sign before RT)
5. Once you have the perfect search query you can subscribe to its RSS feed by clicking the “RSS feed for this query.”  Go back occasionally to refine it.

I ran a test search on VoIP, filtered it to get only links, winnowed out Retweets and some twitterers whose tweets I didn’t want to see, and finally selected the RSS feed for query (which I chose to add to my Google Reader).  It was a bit of a hassle, but worth it to get just what I wanted.  Now I can easily see future tweets on the topic.  As I was refining my search I got a message that 19 more results had been received, along with a link to refresh the search.

Google Maps has another upgrade, although small, to make it even more useful.  You can now switch seamlessly between Maps and Street View when you’re looking for an address.

When you search Google Maps you’ll find an option beneath the search result to go to Street View which takes you a street-level view with a marker right at the address or place you searched for.  From there you can use the usual Street View tools to zoom around and look at the surroundings.

You also get a “Search nearby” feature which then takes you back to Maps to see other places.  Click on any of them to go back to Street View and see that location relative to others in the area.  In the image below I searched for Majestic Bay Theater and then did a “search nearby” for a coffee place.

There is a nice video demonstration that shows how it works.

Here’s some tips for using Twitter to advantage in higher education from DIOSA Communications.  I’ll list them briefly; see the post for details.

1.  Don’t use Twitter for traditional marketing messages. Build community.
2.   Don’t use Twitter for RSS or publish “News” unless you call your Twitter profile “News.”
3.  Have Twitter accounts for various departments.
4.  Be nice, thankful, reply and retweet.
5.  Follow everyone who follows you.
6.  Use “Favorites” to organize the chaos and feature your most important Tweets.
7.  Provide value, not chit-chat.
8.  Don’t tweet only your own content — f it is a good read or a good resource, pass it along.
9.  Send messages, but not via auto-responders.
10. Limit your Tweets to 5 or 6 per day.
11. Get professional training on how use Twitter.  (Or, my advice, at least read the many style guides, and tips on Twitter.)

Google Maps will now show you live traffic conditions on arterial roads when that information is available.  I count myself fortunate to live in one of those ciites because I have just about given up on freeway travel and regularly use arterials to get around in Seattle.

Just go to Google Maps (which is free), zoom-in on the city you’re interested in, and click the “Traffic” button in the upper-right corner of the map.  As you zoom in closer to an area of interest, both arterial roads and highways will show current traffic conditions through color-coding.  The colors correspond to the speed of traffic relative to the speed limit of the road.  “Green is free sailing, yellow is medium congestion, red is heavy congestion, and red/black is stop-and-go traffic.”

How does Google Maps know about traffic conditions?  They use anonymous data from those who have Google Maps for Mobile and turn on the “my location” feature of of their GPS-enabled mobile phones.  If you’ve heard of “crowdsourcing,” this is an example of it in action.  Read more about how this works here.  Increasingly mobile phones either come with the feature built in (such as the T-Mobile MyTouch) or it can be downloaded and used.

If you have Google Maps for Mobile, you can see the same traffic data while you’re on the road (stuck in traffic?) and add to it, too.  The information could improve your morning commute, your trip through town when major sports or other events are scheduled, or just help get you to the airport on time.

“Your phone sends anonymous bits of data back to Google describing how fast you’re moving.  When we combine your speed with the speed of other phones on the road, across thousands of phones moving around a city at any given time, we can get a pretty good picture of live traffic conditions.  We continuously combine this data and send it back to you for free in the Google Maps traffic layers.  It takes almost zero effort on your part — just turn on Google Maps for mobile before starting your car — and the more people that participate, the better the resulting traffic reports get for everybody.”

Just came across this lovely — Twiogle.  Since I find myself using Twitter (for better or worse) more each day, the ability to search Google and Twitter at one go looks useful. You can add it to your search bar.

Enter your search term, “Twitter tips” in the image below, and get Google results in the lefthand column and Twitter results in the right.  For ease in fitting the display to this post, I have scrunched (technical term) the two columns together in the image.  And speaking of Twitter tips, my current favorite resource is Twitter-Tips.

I mentioned in an earlier post that I am starting to use Facebook (FB) more.  It is an uphill battle as far as I am concerned because I find the site a poor user experience.  What a clumsy interface!  But it is such a popular social networking place that one can hardly afford to ignore it.

So I have been on the look-out for information on how to use the site effectively and efficiently.  This post from ReadWriteWeb offers some good tips.

You’ll want to let your Facebook friends know what you are doing frequently to maintain good relationships.  Facebook calls this ‘updating your status.’   The terms FB uses seem stilted and arcane to me, but whatever…

Hopefully you will also hear what your friends are doing frequently.  If you have a lot of them, you might find it helpful to group them in what FB calls ‘lists,’ such as “family,” “work friends,” “organizations,” and so forth, so you can filter messages and see the ones you most want to when you are short on time.  It’s pretty easy to do this:  look for the ‘create lists’ link in the left hand column.  You will first have to click on ‘more.’  Did I mention clunky interface?

Brightening up your profile with photos and videos will be appealing to your friends.  It was when some of my FB friends began adding photos that I started to pay more attention and to really enjoy using the site.  Now I need to follow their example and upload some photos of my own!

It’s worth taking some time to explore the many options FB offers.  There is a “Share Bookmarklet” which you can put in your Bookmarks tool bar in order to easily share a link (including videos and music) without opening FB.

There are thousands of apps you might enjoy using.  I notice that many of my friends take quizes, play games, and so forth.  The best tip here is to find apps that best suit you.  You can search the directory for keywords of interest to you.  I joined a “fan” site for one of my favorite TV shows.  I recommend it for those who 1) don’t have enough people they know to talk to about their passion, or, 2) are doing a sociological study.  It’s been fun – and crazy.

I used to do quite a bit of screencasting and was happy to have Camtasia Studio to allow me to do a number of functions.  But these days, I’m only likely to need a simple (and preferably easy) app.

Screenr just launched yesterday.  It is a free app that runs inside your browser (nothing to download!), with the twist that when you are finished recording you can send your video directly to your Twitter followers.  Before you send your screencast to Twitter, you can review your recording and add a description, says ReadWriteWeb.

You don’t have to send your video to Twitter, but for a lot of users, this will be the main reason to use Screenr. “The integration with Twitter also goes one step further, as you can re-tweet a screencast right from within the application and when you leave a comment, you can also choose to send it to Twitter as an @reply to the author.”

You can also embed your video in a blog post, upload it directly to YouTube, or download it to your desktop for more editing.  Check out the Screenr home page for a short video tour and a number of examples of screencasts that users have created.

Screenr has a lot of competition.  We have mentioned Jing here before.  All screencasters have a similar range of features, but with Screenr it is extremely easy to record a video and share it with your Twitter friends.  If you don’t already have a free Twitter account, this is a good time to get with it.

I was attracted to this Mashable post about how to update Facebook from other sources.

Although I’ve had a Facebook account for quite awhile, I pretty much ignored it until recently.  Neither had I felt any compulsion to get on the Twitter bandwagon.  Then, in circumstances I won’t bother to describe, I started to get interested in both.  Now I have incorporated both sites into my routine, although I don’t necessarily update or tweet on a daily basis.

I’m finding that many of my Facebook friends are sharing interesting experiences and photos these days, and people whose daily activities I like to hear about are using Twitter; some are doing both.  Combined with my recent acquisition of the MyTouch and some future travel plans, I had reason to begin looking for alternative ways to use both Facebook and Twitter when I am away from my home computer.  Enter Mashable.

The post includes ways to update Facebook from Firefox, from Twitter, using text messaging, and from several Facebook-provided mobile options.  Depending on how you look at it, you have multiple options to keep up your social connections, or, you will find it even harder to break away from them.

It’s no longer a secret that Google is developing an entirely new infrastructure for its search engine.

“For the last several months, a large team of Googlers has been working on a secret project: a next-generation architecture for Google’s web search.  It’s the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions.  The new infrastructure sits “under the hood” of Google’s search engine, which means that most users won’t notice a difference in search results.  But web developers and power searchers might notice a few differences, so we’re opening up a web developer preview to collect feedback.”

Google specifically states that its goal for the new version of Google Search is to improve its indexing speed, accuracy, size, and comprehensiveness, notes Mashable, whose early tests show the new version to be faster and perhaps capable of real-time results.

That’s a good thing for Google since Facebook launched a real-time search engine and bought FriendFeed the same day.  And of course, the recent search deal between Microsoft and Yahoo, has put Bing into more prominence and in a position to steal market share from Google.

Mashable says that “Facebook’s blockbuster acquisition of FriendFeed was a lob squarely across Google’s bow.”  FB has 250 million registered users, of which 30 million update their status at least once per day.  Microsoft’s Bing powers web search results on Facebook already, creating the possible development of real-time, social web search results finding their way out onto Yahoo!

“Facebook has a knack for taking the technologies geeks love and adapting them for mainstream audiences.  They did it with the news feed (FriendFeed), photo tagging (Flickr), link sharing (Delicious).”