Sorry for the late blog but I've been on a "mini-break" to celebrate my 50th birthday. My gf surprised me with a party and I've been catching up with many folks I haven't seen in years. You would be proud tho. I spent a great deal of time at my party talking about web 2.0.
I thought I was on top of things when I started blogging in class last week (look ma..I'm multi-tasking) but then flock crashed and boom...I was gone. What's most interesting about this for me is the obstacles. I've been blogging from the flock browser directly into this blog and when it crashed...it took my most recent drafts with it. Took me a while to find my way back here. Love flock but it's not without some "issues"
Great class last time. I love the conversations we have in this class. Great thought...If you blog and no one reads it, are you really blogging? "What is the sound of one hand typing" I'm intensely private (my facebook is so locked down it's pointless) so the concept of someone reading this is actually uncomfortable for me...but.......at the same time it's fascinating to read others. I really should reply more often to what I read. No one likes a lurker.
Like the luddite I am, I just brought my info on my wiki site to class. It didn't occur to me to post my wiki site finds so here's one I like.
http://www.seven-oaks.net/ScienceEd2/pmwiki.php?n=Main.HomePage
There now...wasn't that interesting. It's a link to a science education wiki space called science education 2.0.
And this leads me to my topic of the week. The learning curve. Right now I'm stuck on a bunch of technical problems (or at least my Luddite version of a tech problem) with facebook and my blog. As an example, I don't like that link above. I want something more elegant looking. I won't go into my facebook issue. I find that I spend more time trying to figure stuff out than adding content. Next week I'm presenting the browser Flock. I've been working with it for a week or two and I'm frustrated that it's not doing the simple things I want it to do. From not being as open to incorporating things I want to do, to actually doing what it says it will do. The good news is there's tutorials online, but as we alluded to in an earlier discussion, you have to filter the good from the bad. some are poor quality, some are hard to follow, and some are just plain incorrect. It's a fun experiment tho. I've been trying to sign up for all the "services" aka feeds that Flock has but then I've run into tech issues there. I spent my lunch yesterday trying to get the crop picture function to work so that I could have a picture next to my acct. No big deal but a waste of 30mins of my life futzing with a defunctioning function. once again, it's an interesting experiment in patience and time management. (two of my least developed skills)
So last week was a blast. I really enjoyed the wiki presentation b/c I think of all the stuff I've seen so far, wiki spaces have the best (or at least the most obvious to me) application to education. I think the short story exercise we did in socialtext was bloody eye opening and I've talked about it with many teachers. The way you can monitor each draft and who contributes is a very strong assessment tool. btw. I would like to officially apologize to deidre for writing over her contribution. I simply cannot be trusted to not edit others. "My name is Marc, and I'm a control freak."
Same for the Emerging tech reading. So much good stuff in a short section of what appears to be a good book. Personally I found it a great overview of what we are studying and at first I thought..."why didn't we read this on day one so I'd know what all these things were?" but actually I'm glad I read it when I did b/c now my curiosity was already peeked and I was really happy to find odd stuff like SuprGlu and mashup's defined more clearly. What really blew me away was midway down page 13 they actually answer a big question we had at the beginning of this class. How does one determine validity, reliabilitya and potential bias with user generated content. They used ebay rating system as a model for rating validity. Profile can be dynamic and increase rating. High ratings = "trusted content provider" So obvious I don't know why we didn't see it.
My absolute favorite aspect of last weeks reading was the reference to Neil Stephenson's book, The Diamond Age. For those not familiar, in this book an engineer builds a "primer" that will act as a surrogate parent/educational tool for a young girl. It's interactive and changes based on her needs. There is so much more to the story but I've been thinking about it since we started this course. In the spirit of last weeks converstion, heres the wiki page
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diamond_Age
one last thing that was cool about last week was the yahoo pipe feed that Ethan showed us. With his assistance I hooked ya'll up via pipeline and now I can see everyones blog in a quick scroll. quick click and I can open you up. Very sweet application. Now I just need to find the time to read em all.
see ya in class.
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