When: Saturday, Mar. 29 and Sunday, Mar. 30, 2008
Where: Grant MacEwan College Centre for the Arts, 10045-156 Street Continue reading ‘Presenting at Web Weekend: Edmonton’
Archive for February, 2008
Howard Rheingold: “Training attention” with wired learners
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In his latest vlog post, Howard Rheingold addresses an increasingly difficult problem for educators: Attention in a hypermediated age. Rheingold takes things beyond the usual “let’s debate multitasking - good or bad?” to the real heart of the matter: How to focus the wired mind?
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The many-to-many conversation model of Seesmic.
This weekend, I spent some more time exploring the content at YLive and Seesmic. While YLive allows for the immediacy of live streaming, it leaves a lot to be desired in terms of noise to signal. Seesmic, on the other is rich in maturity, civility and kindness - all qualities that build trust and community (though this could change when alpha goes more public). I could write more about the pros and cons of each but what interests me more is this: what makes for a meaningful broadcast?
I spent a bit of time meditating on this and have come up with a few strategies of my own. Read on …
Continue reading ‘How not to be a blowhard: Best practices for lifecasting’
Are you using Twitter? What do you think of it?
Do you have any ideas … about how Twitter might be used - for education, media, publishing, personal use, work, study, etc?
Having tried it in my own classroom, I’m especially interested in hearing from students, educational professionals/teachers and content producers (citizen or professional):
- Click Here to take my survey
I will publish the results of this survey at the beginning of March.
This weekend, I tried out Seesmic and YLive! with my brand new Microsoft Life cam (nothing fancy but it works - and it’s the best they had at The Source). Some are calling this “life streaming” (AKA streaming chat).
Continue reading ‘YLive! … Seesmic: I can has user controls?’
Howard Rheingold on “way-new” collaboration
Recorded in 2005, Howard Rheingold talks about the critical importance of collaboration, participatory media and collective action in shaping a better and more effective world. Great historical examples of human interdependence, cooperation, helping and other civilised behaviours that helped humans to thrive and survive through adversity - all alternatives to more destructive models that have obscured reason, ethics and the simple logic of alternatives. See a complete screencast (animated visuals with voice over) here.
I suggest we honour this talk - and items like it - with the following delicious tag: “newway”
Howard has been a formative figure in my thinking about the relationship between community and reciprocity - and how all of us can contribute to the world in unique and positive ways (if only we choose to).
Classroom2.0: Twitter, del.icio.us and participatory learning
I do not use a textbook. It is not that I dislike textbooks. It is that my textbook is the web. My textbook is YOU and ME and NOW.
Instead of a book, I add all relevant readings, videos or examples to my course delicious bookmarks.
That’s my virtual, live, textbook - licensed under Creative Commons. And students don’t have to blow 60 bucks on it either. And they can subscribe to this textbook using their favourite feed reader.
Right now v. back then
As I explained to my class, the most important stuff to know about the web is what’s happening RIGHT NOW. I may share a video or article in a couple of weeks that has yet to be written. Course readings are not mandatory - because I share most of the stuff in-class but secondary. If students are confused or if they want to dig deeper, they’ve got Youtube tutorials, how to’s and hundreds of articles and research supporting everything I’m talking about in the course.
For example, this past week, we watched Howard Rheingold’s most recent Vlog post about social bookmarking in which Howard explains stuff I have been talking about (but with more pizazz). Howard is a great teacher. I think it’s because Howard is an artist at heart - artists explore and play. Traditional academia is still very non-creative and non-playful/exploratory - it’s still very much a closed system where things have to be proven and approved before they are anointed with merit (the very definition of laggard). Thankfully, as Howard’s example testifies, times are changing.
Twitter for teaching and learning
In the spirit of Right Now teaching and learning, I decided to try out Twitter this week as a means of offering the students a back channel as well as an opportunity to learn more about emergent content delivery systems and build on their developing knowledge of RSS, aggregation and microformats (all new to them).
Continue reading ‘Classroom2.0: Twitter, del.icio.us and participatory learning’
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