If we keep arguing about the little stuff and not the ideas, it will take a long time to get from where we are to where we need to be in education. The idea of PLN’s is taking people from places of isolation to places of expanded thinking. We cannot keep saying no to everything without offering alternatives and expect things to change on their own. Rather than spend time arguing semantics, we need to address real issues.
TEACH APPLICATION NOT APPLICATIONS
the evidence critics use to attack the Web could be used to argue that we shouldn’t even walk down a city street as the cognitive load is far too great for our brains to handle
NEW forms of media have always caused moral panics: the printing press, newspapers, paperbacks and television were all once denounced as threats to their consumers’ brainpower and moral fiber.
So too with electronic technologies. PowerPoint, we’re told, is reducing discourse to bullet points. Search engines lower our intelligence, encouraging us to skim on the surface of knowledge rather than dive to its depths. Twitter is shrinking our attention spans.
But such panics often fail basic reality checks.
The Twittersphere is an odd and uncanny place. It's something like having fairies at the bottom of your garden. How do you know anyone is who he/she says he is, especially when they put up pictures of themselves that might be their feet, or a cat, or a Mardi Gras mask, or a tin of Spam?
At a CALI conference a few years ago there was a presentation by a law student (U. Cincinnati, I think) who went beyond the idea of distributing outlines of his classes on-line: he took his class notes, the readings, etc., and created his own podcasts - audio files that he distributed on-line - that consisted of his own lectures/discussions of the material covered in his classes. He was essentially creating his own on-line courses based on what he was learning in class (and he said he had 50,000+ people downloading and, presumedly, listening to these podcasts). BUT, before his first year of law school started, he met with each of his professors and told them of his plans - he wasn’t asking PERMISSION because he already had a good idea of what the law in this area was - and only one of his professors had any qualms about it, and, ultimately, there were no efforts to stop him from what he was doing and by now, I think, he probably has an entire law school education’s worth of podcasts on-line.
Having these outlines on-line just changes the scale of what our students already had available to them: the internet long ago made the exchange of all manner of information and data much easier. And, yes, this is probably why more students these days may seem to anticipate your lines of discussion and questions in class but, again, its really just a change of scale from fifteen years ago when students had to physically exchange floppy discs containing course outlines that they had written or that they had obtained from upperclassmen.
Brian Huddleston
In ten years, computers will only be a small percentage of how we use our web. We’re going to be accessing it from nearly every device and appliance we own.
we should be willing to fire our communities every once in a while. We should look at those people providing comments and theories in topics we care about. We should look at them and see if they are really the ones that will guide us into our future. We should look at them and see if they are holding us back.
This is exactly why I am not sure finding old friends on Facebook is a good idea. While it may be fantastic to make contact with people from your past, you are reconstituting a community that you fired at one point or another. You are surrounding yourself with people who may no longer yield any new benefit for where you are headed. They are people that made sense for a given time and space. Trying to recreate that time and space is counterproductive for the one you exist in now.
Ben Wilkoff
If someone approached me even five years ago and explained that one day in the near future I would be filtering, collecting and sharing content for thousands of perfect strangers to read - and doing it for free - I would have responded with a pretty perplexed look. Yet today I can’t imagine living in a world where I don’t filter, collect and share.
More important, I couldn’t conceive of a world of news and information without the aid of others helping me find the relevant links.
Nick Bilton, New York Times
[M]edia bosses haven't quite absorbed the full implications of what the web has done.
They are having a hell of a time monetizing it because it is too vast, too borderless, too fluid to carve out property on it. It's like trying to make a profit in a communist state. And yet its essential nature - its open source, link-friendly, conversation of humankind democratic spirit is what makes it different from the past - and so appealing to libertarian-inclined chaps like myself. Sealing an online product off from the core online experience seems to me to be a medium at war with itself and a business not fully aware of the actual product it is creating.
Risk aversion is the number one reason that people and organizations fail to tap the full power of social media. People often tell me that they can't afford to make a mistake online, because any error will be just one Google search away for anyone to see, forever.
Unless you're prepared to risk the occasional mistake, however, you'll never do anything interesting enough to earn real attention or foster real conversation. Even more crucially, you'll never develop the social media fluency that comes from making, and then learning from, your own mistakes.
Alexandra Samuel
Being literate in a real world sense means being able to both "read and write" narrative in the media forms of the day, whatever they may be. Just being able to read them is not enough.
Via David Jakes at http://vimeo.com/8285771
there is something happening here that is truly unprecedented in human history. Never has there been a potential for all of us to be connected like this. And the implications are huge.
So what's social media? It's the opportunity to create shared vision. All these platforms are just the tools, but look what they enable. In the way that mass media has shaped our perceptions about culture, politics, and society, now social media also has that ability. But the message isn't traveling from them to us, top down, from the aristocrats to the plebes. It's moving from us to us.
By carefully curating the people you follow, Twitter becomes an always-on data stream from really bright people in their respective fields, whose tweets are often full of links to incredibly vital, timely information.
Back in summer 2003, there was no YouTube, no Twitter, no TMZ, no Facebook, no MySpace, no Skype, no HuffingtonPost, and no True/Slant; no episodes of The Daily Show, SNL, or any other TV show were available online; there was no 3G network in the U.S. and no iPhone, and cell phone use was about half of what it is today.
It doesn’t matter why you’re not on Twitter (or the other social media platforms). Whether it’s because some high and mighty CMO thinks Twitter (or all of social media) is a fad or if it’s because your internal departments are still trying to decide who get the job, or some other ridiculous reason – if you’re a consumer brand this is where your customers are – now. Not in two weeks or two years.
Speaking of your customers – guest who they’re talking to? That’s right – other customers – potential and current. If you don’t get involved in the conversation or at least listen to what’s going on you will be tried in absentia.
If a teacher isn't willing to be a constant learner in communication/collaboration tools of the age, are they going to remain worthy of students who are?
The future is in companies that realize that news a day old is, well, a day old. The future is in information discovery, not in hiding content.
Also see the clickable version at http://theconversationprism.com/click
