"Predicting the future is easy. It's trying to figure out what's going on now that's hard" (Dressler, 2005)
I blogged yesterday about the role we early adopters need to play in bringing social media to the masses. Got some very thoughtful comments back from a lot of folks. In particular, Colin Warren of Deakin University in Victoria, Australia, made a follow-on post at his blog, in which he referenced Geoffrey Moore’s book Cross… Read more Bridging the Education Chasm
I did not attend NECC 2008 but I have found some of the blogs and tweets fascinating. It seems there is a bit of angst in the edublogger world by some of the people I follow and find insightful. Quite a few people were disappointed and at odds on next steps. I am probably taking… Read more Not New To You Does Not Make It Not New
We have completed two days of our TLwT Institute and are having a ball! Over the five days, we take a cohort of 18 diverse faculty from multiple disciplines on a journey of Web 2.0 exploration. During the first two days, my colleagues Jeff Nugent, Bud Deihl and I have worked with this cohort to… Read more Teaching and Learning With Technology Institute
I passed a milestone today, in that I tweeted my one-thousandth tweet in Twitter. As I thought about that fact, it reminded me that last Friday, I saw a blog post from Karyn Romeis, who said she was exploring the impact of the use of social media on the professional practice of learning professionals for… Read more The Impact of Social Media
In the Comment Challenge, Days 19 and 20, one is to comment to a commenter in one’s own blog and then go to a regularly read blog and click three links out and see where it takes you. The first was easy – I had blogged on Sunday about Parallel Universes and Sue Waters left… Read more Following Threads
If one is looking for evidence that parallel universes exist, one need only look at this past week in my life. I had the opportunity to participate in two separate faculty development activities – one on our own campus and one at the University of Mary Washington. The two activities provide an interesting continuum of… Read more Parallel Universes
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… Read more Here Comes Everybody…But When?
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.… Read more The Double-Edged Sword
Gary Stager is a noted expert in education, and I find value in his constructionist approach to online education. However, he made some comments in Will Richardson’s blog posting “Redefining Teachers as Experts” that caused at a minimum raised eyebrows in this old educator! Will was commenting on sections of Axel Bruns’ new book Blogs,… Read more Expert versus Paradigm Learning
My buddy Jeff Nugent passed me an interesting YouTube video Thursday night entitled “We Think.” It is an amazing four-minute journey through the possibilities of the semantic web. Shared ideas are the currency of the 21st Century. I went looking for more information on the creator and discovered Charles Leadbeater’s website. One of Charles Leadbeater’s… Read more The Innovation Dilemma