DD Shift

I am hearing the song “Hear Comes Your Man” by the Pixies.

This is my last official entry (although not my last blog entry by far).

I have enjoyed the class. I have learned alot. I wish that there were a second part of the class where I am forced to explore even more 2.0 tools. But, sadly it must come to an end.

I have made many exciting discoveries during the course. Diigo, blogging, wikis, the Academy of Discovery, articles about the advantages and disadvantages of integrating the use of Facebook into the curriculum…

My biggest suggestions (and, maybe this is the next generation of 2.0 development) is developing a sane way of managing all of these different tools in such a way that they are easily accessible, locatable and safe for our students. There are too many tools to keep track of, and I don’t have a virtual tool belt to help me organize them.

How can we make use of OpenId? If we join as educators, will that create the critical mass needed to make it a viable way of having a single sign-on for all of these tools?

Web 2.0 is fast, easy– it could be misconstrued as reflection-less. How can we build in a step of reflection before our students push that publish button? How do we promote the review of sources? How do we encourage well developed paragraphs and grammatically-sound sentences? What is the appropriate means of citing articles in a web forum? Is a link enough? Or, do we go with a standard MLA or APA way of citing works? What makes sense in this environment?

As always, I’m interested in looking at “real” studies that examine the effectiveness of using these technologies in this classroom. I have no interest in jumping on the Prensky bandwagon (nor are my administrators) without more concrete evidence first.

I am hearing the song “Dancing Queen” by Abba.

Here is a quick review of Ning. Actually, it’s not so much a review of Ning itself, but really a review of the “education” network that has been created with Ning.

As Metcalfe once said about telecommunications networks: a network is only as valuable as the number of nodes on the network. Although there are now thousands of people who participate in Ning’s educational social network, there isn’t a high enough concentration there of “my kind” to make it worth my while to join.

I am a technology coordinator, a teacher of computer science and technology. I did a quick search in the forums looking for topics that would fit the things that I do in classes, and I didn’t come up with anything. I browsed through the groups, and I didn’t find anything immediately useful for my situation.

I could join and encourage my colleagues to join, but we already have our own networks. I belong to iSkoodle which is a social network where I exchange ideas and concerns with colleagues in the same geographic area. It has been up for over two years now, and it has been quite helpful. Further, I have friends in Facebook with whom I keep in contact and exchange ideas.

At this point and time I’m operating on social network overload… I think that this will continue to be a growing problem over time for everyone. It’s a bit similar to the mid-nineties when everyone had several email addresses. At some point we reduced complexity and the number of logins. I’m going through a phase where I’m trying to reduce the number of social network logins that I have to manage. Further, I’m developing criteria by which I can judge whether or not I buy into a social network. My test:

• Which social networks should I invest time in?
• How many logins can I realistically keep track of?
• Does the social network have the “right” people?
• Does it have sufficient sufficient social momentum?
• What sort of application extensions are being developed for this social network?
• What happens to my content when I move on to the next, better social network?