Web 2.0
Okay, I have always thought of myself as fairly forward thinking and progressive educator. In the last two days I have come to feel as if I have been asleep for the past decade. I’m 40 next year and I have an mp3 player, frequent the Internet – my friends and family get me to burn disks for them and are amazed at how quickly I can do that. I buy stuff on Ebay. I, therefore am technologically literate . . . right?!?
Ah, no.
Web 2.0 or the multimedia, read-write-post-video-audio-voip thingy has set up camp in my nice little familiar world and I just don’t know how it happened. I have been here the whole time – I am a pioneer. First teacher to have Internet access in my school! Ahhhhhhhhhh. How do you keep up?!!
Thoughts?
December 15th, 2006 at 2:27 pm
I’ll be watching this blog closely as I know there will be good stuff coming from here…no pressure but….no wait it is pressure but good pressure. We need folks like you leading the way.
By the way, I’ll be your first subscriber so that’s how I keep up, subscribing to content I’m interested in and allow myself to be part of a learning network where I don’ t have to know everything or learn everything. I let my network do much of my work for me.
Welcome to the blogosphere.
December 15th, 2006 at 9:52 pm
Good day. I am also one of those people. I have been doing this blogging thing for about a year and do some dabbling with the other technologies. I got you web address from Dean and he asked me to drop by and let you know that you are not alone. I to am an administrator – Kelly Christopherson from Eston. I am 40 and have been keeping tabs on what is going on with the internet. I did see this coming but didn’t think it would get ahead of me so quickly. I realize now that it is not that I’m behind since most of the adult world doesn’t even know it’s going on but I’m not on the edge, like I have been for many years.
Having said that, I’m finding that, really, it hasn’t been that hard to get back in the groove. In fact, it has kind of rejuvenated my use of the web because, really, I wasn’t using it for much other than an online class, looking at sports and visiting ebay. Really, it had become boring. Now, I’m back creating, thinking, searching, looking and connecting with others and talking about how this might reshape how we think and talk about learning. It will mean, for many people, a changing of the educational guard, who will fight and claw to stay mainstream (Fullan, Hargraves, Dufours, etc) who see education in the same way as the past. Teachers deliver and students learn – collaboartively, with data driven ideas and curricula, looking to increase our test scores and improve learning. What they, and that whole group are missing is this whole avenue of learning. They still see it as the backalley but really, it is turning into the main strip and we’d better be ready to start driving on it regardless of what those people say. It really is hard for many of our superintendents and directors to get their heads around – they are viewing things still from the other street. Sask Learning, well, I’m not sure where they are? In just the past month, I’ve changed my view of things in many different ways and now I’m trying to figure out how to introduce some of these things to my staff so they can begin to play with them and use them. If you want to check out my blog http://kwhobbes.edublogs.org , you can read my meanderings and musing on what is going on. I’ll add you to my list to read. Welcome. Keep it up. Read, pass on any nuggets you find and be ready to reflect on what you are doing. That, I think, is the key at the start.
Kelly
January 8th, 2007 at 8:48 am
Hi! I’m a researcher on educational psychology, but also a techie, so I didn’t have the web 2.0 sneek up on me. But even then I have to admit: There’s so much going on that you can’t keep up with everything. No way.
So I have one advice for you. Follow the fields you’re interested in. And to easily follow them, use a feed aggregator. I use Bloglines(.com), because I need to follow stuff from my office desktop, and my laptop. If you’re stuck with several machines, use a web based aggregator. If you only use one, then you can either use the feed capabilities of your browser (like Firefox’s live bookmarks) or a dedicated feed reader software.
So whenever you find something interesting on the web, see if it provides a feed (RSS or Atom). And subscribe it to your feed aggregator. You can always drop subscriptions if the content from a feed doesn’t appeal to you. For example, here are the feeds I’m subscribed to right now: http://www.bloglines.com/public/tarmo (you can see the techie in me).
And, of course, you need to read the feeds regularly. But trust me, with an aggregator it only takes a few minutes, much faster than manually browsing various sites.
To start, check out the blogs and blogrolls of your colleagues, do searches on Technorati and del.icio.us with relevant keywords, and so on. Find some foothold and subscribe, it’ll expand from there on its own as you follow the links other bloggers make and find new stuff.