A key aspect of his message is that we are preparing our students now for a future that is not very easy to describe or anticipate. He noted that we are all constructing our own learning gardens (students and adults alike) which take in many different forms of tech - including collaborative web applications such as blogging/micro blogs, social networking, RSS and data visualization. In short this means that we are all in the midst of constructing our own personal learning networks, cultivating and aggregating information as we choose. The question for me is - how do teachers utilize technology which reflects this pattern of behaviour amongst our students?
David mentioned knitterchat.com as an excellent backchanneling tool in which students can post comments related to a particular event - such as a teacher discussion about internet safety. knitterchat will search through the web's back channels and find other people discussing that self same topic - and as the tagline goes, the purpose is to stitch ideas through webbed conversations. A great free tool to get ideas flowing, and very Vygotskian.
David also pointed us towards some key web 2.0 people including Will Richardson, the Philosopher David Weinberger and Alan November, who happened to be sat in David's session one row ahead of me. He also recommend that we visit the website of Stephen Downs - who Warlick rather nicely described as an educational technology filter, shifting through the myriad of tech news so that, well, we don't have to...plus Jenny Levine and her Shifted Librarian site. David then pointed us towards a handful of sites including:
- technorati.com - excellent blog search engine
- topsy.com - similar to technorati - a twitter search site
- diigo.com - which I am now using extensively and is a cloud bookmarking service that has a social element in that other users can browse your bookmarks and tags
- cogdogblog by Alan Levine - I kid you not, look it up now
So having been introduced to so many amazing things over the course of an hour, most of the crowd were feeling somewhat discombobulated. What I would like is a tool to pull together this myriad of data, and what David recommended was a site called newswire - or google reader, both of which are RSS aggregators. What do you mean, what is an RSS aggregator? What I want to find is a web-based RSS aggregator, such as igoogle - that I can use within my own organization. Maybe something like net vibes .
In the midst of all of this I am now thinking of how we can create a professional (as opposed to personal, or rather not opposed, more complementary) learning network for GIS. To this end I have created an intranet mini-site for our ICT Development group and I am going to see if I can get them tweeting their thoughts. So the future is, well, overwhelming in many cases - for me the question is how to navigate a way through this with coherence, purpose and vision.
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