"Predicting the future is easy. It's trying to figure out what's going on now that's hard" (Dressler, 2005)
Workshops and articles about Personal Learning Environments (PLEs) or Personal Learning Networks (PLNs) are showing up frequently at conferences and blog postings. Wikipedia dates the first use of the term to November 4, 2004 – an eternity in computer years! I am working up a Lunch and Learn session in two weeks on PLEs, so… Read more “Personal” and Yet Not
Those who follow my blog know that I have used Many Eyes and TagCrowd to develop wordcloud visualizations of data in the past. John Krutsch has taken this concept in a natural direction and mashed up one’s Twitter feed with a tag cloud generator. Below is my Tweet Cloud: Tweet clouds have been getting a… Read more Tweet Clouds
Jeff Nugent, Bud Deihl and I were having coffee this morning and discussing our journey this past year in adopting new technologies. All three of us have gone through some interesting and remarkably similar phases in our adoption of social bookmarking, blogs, and lately – Twitter. In all three cases, we gained an initial understanding… Read more The Situational Adoption Curve
. My wife I and stepped away from technology yesterday and spent the afternoon in the Lewis Ginter Botanical Gardens here in Richmond. . It is still early in spring and the air was a bit chilly, but it was amazing to see the rich colors that were evident. The gardens have several ponds and… Read more Spring Has Arrived
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
I have to admit that I am still trying to find balance in my life with my Web 2.0 processes. Having embraced social bookmarking, social networking, Google applications and RSS feeds, it seemed a good time to jump in to the Twitter pool. So I did…following 29 colleagues who I respect and being followed myself… Read more Twitter Balance
Rae Niles, who works for Apple, was one of the panelists speaking at CoSN last week that Wes Fryer captured in his podcast. She mentioned the following anonymous post that was posted to the Abilene Kansas High School Dialogue Buzz website. It not only sums up the power of incorporating Web 2.0 tools in classroom… Read more The Digital Native’s Perspective
Yesterday while at the gym, I listened to Wes Fryer’s podcast #237 on Unleashing the Power of One-to-One Computing, captured at the COSN 2008 conference in Washington last week. Members of the panel included the moderator: Leslie Wilson, President, One-to-One Institute; Chris Lehman, Principal, Science Leadership Academy, School District of Philadelphia; Dr. Rae Niles, former… Read more Dog Years
Chris Lott posted an exceptional blog post in Ruminate on March 19th: Things I Can’t Teach. It is a short insightful posting so please read the whole thing. As Lott notes, learning is at its heart all about change. It involves being challenged, surprised, overwhelmed, taking the wrong steps, being fearful at times, but holding… Read more Is the Passion Evident?
I have posted several times about the power of using RSS feeds to make sense of the vast array of information in the World Wide Web. It appears to me that few faculty recognize (yet) just how transformational it is to move from a “surfer” of the web to one where the web comes to… Read more Aggregation Three Ways