Saturday, September 30, 2006

Web2.0 Hyperlink Whirl!

What a Web2.0 hyperlink whirl! Or should that read Web2.0 hyperlink world! My head is spinning today. There is far too much content and too many great ideas and resources and initiatives for one person to take in....and I am supposed to finishing off my Podcast Bangladesh article for Terry Freedman's second edition of Coming of Age but I keep getting distracted. Maybe I should take David Warlick's lead and have the weekend away. I know that Mark Van 't Hooft is also offline for a couple of days with a non-technical recreational activity. (BTW congratulations Mark on your new book 'Ubiquitous Computing in Education'). However, before going he left us with some great links to take in including the blog of Judy Breck called Golden Swamp (great blog!) and an article written recently by Judy for the Educational Technology magazine (part of it is online) called Why is Education not in the Ubiquitous Web World Picture? Judy discusses access to knowledge and aggregation of open content for learning. She makes some wise and worldy statements, including this quote from the section 'Grateful Digital Natives':

"What would it take for established education to embrace the global virtual knowledge ecology so that learning will take its place in the Ubiquitous Web World? In terms of our historical example, it would mean education would abandon hieroglyphics and adopt phonetics. Printed textbooks, curricula with its parts related by grade level and standards would no longer be used, and every student’s connection to knowledge would be through his or her personal mobile Internet device. Students would connect their knowledge education directly into the cognitive relationships within the open content ecology. Their learning would become a seamless, ubiquitous cognitive experience within the Web world that now awaits education.
The inertia of established education has diminished little over the ten years during which the other sectors of the Ubiquitous Web World have morphed into the seamless ubiquitous experience. There has been some engagement of the global virtual knowledge ecology within some universities and colleges, especially by small and specialized academic disciplines. But traditional curricula and textbooks march on to campuses with a barely disturbed cadence year after year.
At the K-12 levels little has changed even though those classrooms are now populated by students who were born into the Internet age."

Also today I found out Jeff Utecht is celebrating his blog's first birthday. Well, Jeff, our blog's have their birthday in the same month (mine was September 5th). There seem to be many bloggers who have been doing this for about one year...what was life like beforehand?

I have also been researching updated podcasting resources and revisited the excellent site produced by Dave Jobbings and co at Recap in the UK, Podcasts for Educators, Schools and Colleges and even posted to another blog I maintain (on a more irregular basis) Podcast Jazz about this. I was delighted to discover Dave's newish blog called Anywhere, Anytime Learners and look forward to dipping into this each week.... oh no, another great blog I must read. Dave has posted about the VLE conundrum in which he states:

"The VLE is no "quick fix" to presenting good quality teaching and learning materials. Like most educational activity, there is always the need to establish a pedagogy for effective e-learning in practice.
Perhaps that is why there are more implementations of a VLE as forms of an "online content warehouse"."

In closing today.....(I am having some 'off the grid' time as well this afternoon as a member of the Dhaka Australian Club 'C' Division tennis team. Our first set of games is tomorrow night so we are having a practice session today), I am fascinated by the recent ClustrMap I have put on this blog. I have been ignoring ClustrMaps, not sure why, thought they were a bit tacky, but wow, what a great way to gather statistics and find out where you are being read....(or opened by mistake ;-)). I have had 87 visits to this eLearning blog in 5 days! The dots are in Australia, the Middle East, China, Europe, North and South America, India, Canada and Asia!

OK, that's it...I was going to find a cute picture to add to this post from Flickr.com but the whirl is too great, I'm off to tennis!

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3 comments:

ClustrMaps Team said...

"Tacky?" Aw... you've hurt our feelings... really!

If it's because of the advertising on the big maps, believe me they are really needed to help pay the big server costs that make us scaleable. *HOWEVER*, on the grounds that (1) you're in the educational world and would probably prefer zero advertising, and (2) this may help reduce our 'tackiness' score, we'll give you a free upgrade to ClustrMaps+ status, which means no more advertising and (starting in a few days) better maps zoomed in to the various continents.

Hope that works out OK (readers: no insulting us just to get free ClustrMaps+ upgrades!)

;-) CJ from ClustrMaps

ClustrMaps Team said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
ClustrMaps Team said...

Hi.. just wanted to let you know that you have now been listed on our User Of The Month Page...

all the best...

-CJ of ClustrMaps