Learning In a Flat World

I just completed Clay Shirky‘s very interesting book, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations (2008). Shirky analyzed how social media is changing the ability of people to organize for change without overlying administrative hierarchies – a change he sees as fundamental to society as the printing press. Wikipedia is a success not [...]

There was a very interesting article by Monica Hesse in the Washington Post this past Sunday entitled “Truth: Can You Handle It?” The article starts with a well-known witty saying attributed to Abraham Lincoln: “How many legs does a dog have, if you call a tail a leg? Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn’t [...]

David Warlick was live blogging in David Gratton’s session, where he drew an interesting picture from Gene Smith of the features of social networks. David said: “The Internet has been about community all along, Usenet, forums, chat rooms, geocities Home page and webring and e-mail. To say that things have changed is wrong. What’s changed [...]

Yesterday, I started my update of the educational blogs that I follow, noting that my initial post “Education Blogs” is still relevant. Those yesterday and today are listed alphabetically and not meant to denote priority order – I find all of them relevant, and there are a dozen others that I tried for awhile and [...]

My third post when I started blogging was a list and description of the 17 blogs I was routinely following via Google Reader. After three months of blogging, what I have found is that my view of the world has certainly expanded. Between Twitter, comments on these blogs and my own here, and new aggregations [...]

Stephen Downes had a fun post in the ongoing CD Cover Meme, wherein one takes three random websites – a title, a quote, and a picture – and combines them to make an album cover (and his is great). Here’s mine (really!!!): . . (Quoting from Stephen but Instructions from David Davies): 1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random The [...]

Doing a Lunch and Learn session tomorrow on PLEs. At Jeff Nugent’s suggestion, I tailored it around my own journey this year in building my PLE. Having a little problem with SlideShare embed…so above is the presentation but click here to view. We will see which generates more conversation, my face-to-face session or this blog [...]

Michele Martin and others have suggested that we set aside the day after taxes are due as Blog Reader Appreciation Day. What a wonderful idea! As we travel down our personal roads, we often do not take the time to say THANKS!  Writing a blog is an intensely personal thing, and yet, the support and [...]

My colleague Jeff Nugent just returned from a week of fly fishing in Western Virginia, including the story of the largest trout he had ever caught – an 18-incher on Mossy Creek (picture of fish here). However, what I “caught” today was an interesting metaphor associated with his forced disconnect from being online 24/7. He [...]

I have started reading Clay Shirky’s book Here Comes Everybody this weekend. I am enjoying it, but my mind is buzzing with implications. He discusses how, in the same way that the printing press opened people’s minds and the telephone increased two-way communication, so has the new web applications altered how groups form and interact. [...]