Archive for the 'connecting' Category

Learning

Published on 27 February 2008 in connecting and learning. 4 Comments

One section of the blogosphere that is of interest to me is the teachers/educators’ blogosphere (is there a name for it?).

Just saw this post on David Warlick’s blog, on self development:

A Path to Becoming a 21st Century Literate Educator — Self Development

  1. Find two or more other educators in your school who are interested in learning and using emerging information and communication technologies. It would be of enormous advantage if you can include your schools library media specialist.
  2. Identify the appropriate person in your school or district who can provide technical support and configuration for your increasingly utilized computers and network. Bake them some chocolate chip cookies.
  3. Identify some edu-bloggers who are talking about the emerging ICTs you are considering. See the Bloggers to Learn From wiki, contributed to by a world community of educators.
  4. Delegate! Assign each member of your team some of the selected blogs to follow, and share specific posts with each other.
  5. Read, study, and discuss books about teaching and learning and the world we’re doing it in. See the Books to Learn From. wiki, contributed to by a world community of educators.
  6. Schedule regular meetings (once or twice a month) at a local restaurant, coffee shop, or pizzeria (preferably with WiFi). Meet and discuss what you’ve learned and what you want to learn.
  7. Start a group del.icio.us (A social bookmarks service) account for organizing and sharing web resources.
  8. Start a wiki for posting notes, links, and step-by-step instructions.
  9. Join one or more of the Ning social networks, such as: School 2.0, Library 2.0, Classroom 2.0.
  10. Start your own blogs for sharing your reflections on what you are learning and how you are learning it.
  11. Start experimenting in your class and share the results.
  12. Share your results with other teachers in your school and invite them into your conversation.

Start to model, in your job as a teacher, the practice of being a master learner.

Us librarians are educators, too, and could very profitably collaborate with teachers - and learn from, and with, them. I’m often amazed (and sad) when I come across colleagues who are obviously not bothering to learn anything new, and have not done so for a long time. Everything you learn goes towards making you a better librarian.

I personally would be bored out of my brain if I wasn’t continually learning and finding challenges for myself.

Disconnection

Published on 7 May 2007 in connecting. 8 Comments

When we got home on Friday night, the phone line was dead and we had no connection to The Net.

M called Telstra right away (thank goodness for the mobile) but given that it was 7pm on a Friday night, there was nothing they could do until Monday, maybe Tuesday. (Tuesday?!?! I tried not to dwell on that.)

I hadn’t realised how much we rely on The Net.

We lost all access to the simplest information. M needed to buy some computer equipment for his aunt - we didn’t know the number of the dealer, or their opening hours on a Saturday. Maybe we should keep the print phone books when they’re delivered this year. But phone books don’t allow you to browse what a computer dealer has in stock, or compare prices with other dealers…

We had to buy a newspaper to check movie screening times.

No news on demand. Waiting for the radio, or worse, the tv, was terrible. What’s happening?? I don’t care that Paris Hilton’s going to jail or that a football player’s back in town from rehab…

No access to a few things I’d saved in gmail, to read later. Sigh…

Worst of all, I had no idea what people were doing.

I lost all desire to get up early - nothing to do at 5am! - and slept in to 8am.

The weekend was very busy. We started Dutch language class (more on that later), did all the usual weekend chores (food shopping, laundry, cleaning), visited family, went to the park, took Paco to play with canine friends… So even if we’d been connected I wouldn’t have had much time to spend on the computer.

I really didn’t like the feeling of being out of the loop, though. All the old media choices that were available to me were static, limited, and utterly unsatisfactory. I felt isolated and unconnected, and that feeling was always there - even though I told myself that if anything really earth-shattering happened someone would call and tell me - I felt cut off and like I had no control over all of my usual channels. It was quite unlike other weekends where I decide to switch off and feel perfectly fine about it. Perhaps this past weekend was different due to the lack of choice in our disconnectedness.

To Telstra’s credit, their technician called just after 7am Monday morning and came over to check our line at 7:30am. It took two and a half hours, but he discovered that the neighbours’ electrician had cut our phone line right through - our line goes through their property - causing the immediate and unequivocal black-out. He fixed it, and in the process also cleaned our apparently corroded line up so that our connection is now twice as fast as it used to be. Hoorah!

Twitter (again)

Published on 25 April 2007 in Twitter, connecting and technology. 0 Comments

I haven’t been using Twitter very much these past few weeks. Just haven’t had much reason, or time to post updates. Also, the thought of posting “doing citation count”, and “still doing citation count”, and “still…” depressed me no end. I’ve much preferred to attend a conference vicariously, and learn about everyone’s hectic and interesting lives. I’ve been surprised at how much I’ve been enjoying that aspect of Twitter. As David Weinberger says: “Twitter is about the intimacy of details.”

I switched off phone updates, though, as it was very distracting to have my mobile phone constantly vibrating throughout meetings, but I might switch it on again for a while. I’ve been getting my updates via RSS, but that’s always got a slight delay to it.

I haven’t got that many Twitter friends at all (only 19!) but I don’t particularly mind as it’s still relatively easy to keep up with that number of friends. I could have more, but I haven’t added quite a few people because I didn’t recognise them at all (even after pondering their profiles) and found myself disconcerted at the thought of adding complete strangers. And yet I have added a few people who live here in Perth, whom I have not met. For some reason I like the fact that I have these ‘friends’ who live in my hometown. I suppose we do have something in common!

For a while after I started blogging, every time I wandered around the city, I looked at passing strangers and wondered if they blogged. Now I wonder if they twitter.

A bit later: M reminded me of this cartoon from Hugh MacLeod which says it all, really: