While both Tufts University and Tufts Alumni have started using Instagram to document life at Tufts, it’s always nice when students, staff, and visitors share their experiences of campus through social media. Here are a few great Instagram images we came across with the tag #Tufts. Feel free to follow the school’s accounts - TuftsUniversity and TuftsAlumni - and don’t forget to tag your photos so we can check out your time at Tufts!

Creating masterpieces in the dining hall #tufts @kaitlynhodgman

My school has the cutest mascot <3 #tufts #jumbo

#jumbo #tufts

@ECquidditch children playing at #tufts #playground #swings #akidatheart

In honor of @areyouwhoyouwanttobe, let's spend today in and around #Davis #square. #medford #Boston #Tufts #TuftsUniversity #subway #red_line #T #theT #MBTA #train #sign #map

Entrepreneurs Kenny Cohen, A14, John Brennan, A14, Simmone Seymour, A14, and Mark Timmerman, A14, are responsible for the creation of a new social networking site with a differentiating selling point. Their website, called Navlit, is meant to create an environment where people can interact socially on the web while still tailoring their interactions to specific social groups – family, employers, or friends, for example. Don’t want to your friends to see that embarrassing baby photo your mom posted but still want to be connected to your parents back home? Navlit solves the issue for you by allowing you to manage your different groups and share specific information with each group. In their own words:

We believe that group collaboration on the web is broken. Up until now, groups didn’t have a place on the Internet to call their own, and individuals didn’t have a place on the Internet to manage their groups. We know what it means to be a part of many different groups, and we also know that more often than not, you only want to share something with a particular group. With Navlit, you’ll have a space to navigate privately between the different groups (or “fires,” as we like to call them) that define you.

Still in the beginning stages, Navlit is currently running in private beta. You simply need an email address to test it out, and those with .edu email addresses will get preference. Visit the site here.

Tufts Korean Student Association (KSA) is more than just a campus culture group – their Big Brother/Big Sister program involves them with the Boston community as well. On a monthly basis, members of KSA are paired with children from Korea who have been adopted by American families for a day of cultural activities, crafts, food, and even, in the case of this video, Jedi training. Check out the video below for a fun look into the program and visit their website for information on how to get involved.

The Thoughts from Places video project was created by New York Times bestselling author John Green in an effort to bring more writing to a generation of YouTube users. On his blog, he writes:

So the idea is this: Thoughts From Places will be a series of 100 visual essays, each exploring an encounter with a place and the people we meet there. Sometimes these places will be very small (my old high school, a bison range in Montana) and sometimes they’ll be very big (Munich, London). We hope you enjoy the series (and that you’ve been enjoying it, even if you didn’t previously know it was A Thing).

Sarah Ruckhaus, A14, ran with this idea and put together this video of Tufts and Davis Square.

Sam Sommers appeared as one of the speakers this past week at TEDxSomerville, a nonprofit dedicated to the spread of new and riveting ideas, and had the pleasure of being accompanied by his very own theme song.  Performers from Do Not Forsake My Darling, which includes Tufts librarian Sophia Cacciola, were hired to be the house band for TEDxSomerville, and created mini theme songs for each of the speakers.

The lyrics to his song reflect the theme of Sam Sommer’s book Situations Matter: Understanding How Context Transforms your World:

Hang around with the right crowd
Hang around in the right town
You are what you eat, you are who you meet
says Sam Sommers, context is everything
says Sam Sommers, context is everything

You can listen to Sam Sommer’s demo of the talk below.

The 2011-2012 EPIIC symposium, a four day event that took place from February 22 to 26,  was comprised of lectures and panels discussing various aspects of this year’s subject, “Conflict in the 21st Century,” and was put on by the Tufts Institute of Global Leadership. While tickets to the full symposium could run up to $75 a pop (the price was largely discounted for Tufts students and alums), the IGL made it possible to stay in the know no matter where you were, both during and after the symposium. You can scroll back on their twitter account to check out great EPIIC quotes or see their Flickr albums for photos of the many events and speakers.

Imagine if, in high school, you had the option of communicating with your teachers through text messages. Though the idea may raise some questions, Peter Levine, director of CIRCLE and research director of the Tisch College of Citizenship, spent some time with OneVille, a community research and action project in Somerville, Massachusetts, discussing tools to foster communication between high school students and their community. Together they went over the pros and cons of the application of this idea in an alternative school for students who had been expelled from, or opted out of, the main public school:

They  used Google Voice as the texting service, which meant that the messages were archived. Having an archive creates advantages for the students and teachers (they can go back and see what they wrote), and it enables research. It may also have some disadvantages. Among other things, it creates a record that may have to be disclosed to parents under certain circumstances.

We reviewed anonymized transcripts of teachers texting students to wake them up; students disclosing health problems and depression to teachers (and explicitly preferring to communicate by text as opposed to voice); and a traditionally angry teenager thanking his teacher by text. Clearly, the medium affected relationships and power hierarchies, although not necessarily in a uniform way. Whether the changes were educationally beneficial is one big question. Another question is what would happen if the experiment moved from a small, alternative school to a regular high school in which each teacher briefly meets more than 100 kids every day?

View the story “If you could tell EVERYONE one thing, what would it be? #wonderwednesday” on Storify]

Fencing? Motorcycling? Ballroom dancing? The hidden talents of our Jumbos are many.

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We asked our Twitter followers to share some silly reasons to come to Tufts. Their witty responses are worth a chuckle or three.

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