Blog Juice for Educational Technology

Just a quick update on the Digg for educators experiment. In four days we’ve had about 2,500 views, are averaging over 110 unique visitors per day, and aggregated over 50 articles. There ave been over 100 votes for stories too, which has pushed Steven’s “Adults and MySpace” article to the top of the heap. So […]

Doug Noon posts about an interesting paper from Colin Lankshear and Michele Knobel titled “Blogging as Participation: The Active Sociality of a New Literacy” that does a nice job of framing the difference of mindeset between the traditional view of the classroom and the emerging view.
I think the underlying premise between the two mindsets […]

From the “Throw it Up and See if it Sticks Deptartment” I just put together a Digg-type site over at CrispyNews specifically for those of us who are focused on the Read/Write Web and the implications for education. Here’s how I think you could use it if you bought into it.
First, go over to the […]

Alan’s great post about del.icio.us titled “Tagging It to the Next Level” has me thinking about how to better use it as a way of tracking the reading of the community. Since you can create your own network of users based on their account names, I’m thinking I could add to my network anyone who […]

(So this is my first post using the Flock browser blog posting interface. After an hour of using it, I’m loving the browser…we’ll see how this goes.)
Kathy Sierra writes about the “Mosh Pit as Innovation Model” and I’m wondering about a “Mosh Pit as Classroom Model.” I mean, check out the Old vs. New chart […]

Jeff Jarvis posted one of those push-my-feeble-brain-to-the-limit posts last week which I think has resonance in a lot of ways. It starts with this:
In the future of media, which is now, everybody is a network. In the past, networks were defined by control of content or distribution. But now, you can’t own all distribution and […]

I think this Q and A with Danah Boyd and Henry Jenkins about the many very subtle and significant aspects of MySpace should be a must read for any of us that are concerned with the general response that schools are taking and the recenty DOPA legislation. If nothing else, it should give us some […]

Danah Boyd posted a most interesting look at the MySpace phenomenon that does a nice job of putting the whole thing in perspective. I have to say that I’ve been suprised to some extent by the “moral panic” as Danah calls it that MySpace has wrought of late. Not to say that there aren’t some dangers there, but the risks something bad happening are still extremely low. It’s all about education…

Anyway, some interesting quotes from her piece:

Adults often worry about the amount of time that youth spend online, arguing that the digital does not replace the physical. Most teens would agree. It is not the technology that encourages youth to spend time online - it’s the lack of mobility and access to youth space where they can hang out uninterrupted.

This is the sad truth of the times, I’m afraid. I know this with my own kids, that I have a niggling worry when they play outside alone that is really unwarranted. It’s too bad that you never see kids just hanging out anymore…now they’re hanging in.

Another:

The scantily clad performances intended to attract fellow 16-year-olds are not meant for the older men. Likewise, the drunken representations meant to look “cool” are not meant for the principal. Yet, both of these exist in high numbers online because youth are exploring identity formation. Having to simultaneously negotiate youth culture and adult surveillance is not desirable to most youth, but their response is typically to ignore the issue…Without impetus, teens rarely choose to go private on MySpace and certainly not for fear of predators or future employers. They want to be visible to other teens, not just the people they they’ve friended. They would just prefer the adults go away. All adults. Parents, teachers, creepy men.

Finally, this one sentence caught my attention:

Because the digital world requires people to write themselves into being [3], profiles provide an opportunity to craft the intended expression through language, imagery and media.

Hmmm…write themselves into being… What a cool way of thinking about it.

From the “Courses We’d Love to Teach Dept.” is the graduate course “Social Software Affordances” at Teachers College at Columbia. The very comprehensive syllabus says that:

Social software represents the promise of truly networked human communities extending across the online and offline dimensions of reality. But beyond the hype, a critical approach to social software is necessary in order to explore its impact and possibilities.

Students are asked to set up aggregators and blogs, and there will be a class wiki that will collect research and analysis that they gather during the semester. Among the questions they hope to answer are:

What is ’social’ about social software?

What are the pedagogical implications of social software for education?

What are the social repercussions of unequal access to social software?

Can social software be an effective tool for individual and social change?

In some less formal ways, these are questions we should all be asking even on the K-12 level.

In keeping with the “Read/Write Web Software for Educators” meme, seems Todd Slater is developing scuttlEDU.

ScuttlEDU is different in that it is designed to make tagging easier for educators. When you register for the service, you are asked to provide your grade level and subject area. When you add a bookmark, these two pieces of information become tags. You have the option of not using these tags as well.

He’s looking for test drivers, and I just volunteered. Another step toward some more teacher friendly tools for those who aren’t comfortable with the current offerings.

So text isn’t enough, huh? You want to del.icio.us-ize graphics now too? Well, try Wists! Go to a page. See the text and pretty graphics. Click on your little “Add to Wists” bookmarklet. See just the pretty graphics. Click on a pretty graphic. Add tags, description, save to your Wist account, auto post to blog. Find other people Wist-ing graphics you like. Snatch their RSS feeds. Better yet, find tag you like. Make java to add to blog code. Watch Wist pics flow automatically on page. Even better, create personalized Wishlist by Wist-ing pictures so people in ultra-capitalist society can subscribe to your Wist Wishlist feed and buy you stuff.

It’s never going to end, is it?

So you can add me to the growing list of Jots fans, a fact that is causing me a bit of angst since I really like Furl so much as well. But as Alan has said, Jots just has a cleaner feel, and it’s the best of Furl and del.icio.us in one. (I’ve never been a big del.icio.us fan, btw.) I like the bloggy look you get with your bookmarks. I like the easy tagging form and the list of tags in the right hand column. I like the RSS-ability of just about everything you can think of: users, tags, searches. Way too easy to do all of it. I like the trackback like links to people who have Jotted the same link. (The verb making industry loves the Read/Write Web.) I like that it saves a copy of the page. And I like the groups feature.

What I don’t like? I want the Jots page to open in a separate window so I can easily ALT-Tab back and forth to cut and paste. And I don’t like how everyone is adding their jots links to their blogs. I want blogs to be, well, blogs, not link lists. (There I go again, blog snob that I am.)

But that’s not enough to keep me from using it, though it may not seem like it from my public Jots list. That’s because I’m doing a lot of private saving for, um, private reasons. I’m looking forward to more and more people getting into the Jots pool…