The EdTech Bach

Peter Rock questions Twitter’s worth as a tool and Alec Couros invited us to chip in. So here’s my 2c.

Twitter is what you make it through sensible stalking. Who you are following and who is following you is critical to the quality of your Twitter experience.

Choose people who are exploring your field of interest (Wenger’s domain?) and pertinent thoughts, tools & technologies will come flying at you at the speed of light. You’ll make new contacts through them and hear just-in-time when events (webcasts, live conferences, or f2f conferences) are happening. It’s even possible to attend F2F conferences vicariously, as the edutwitterers discovered with this weekend’s Educon2.0. Additionally your followers are an informed peer group that can provide insightful answers to your questions.

But stalk sensibly, or end up reading a lot of “what i’m having for breakfast” tweets.

To find out who is tweeting about your interests, use a Twitter search engine like Terraminds.

A very interesting post today by Injenuity, who articulated something I had been doing but didn’t really see as a strategy I was using – Viral Professional Development.

Just 3 examples of my PD which in the retrospectacles is VPD:

• Used Moodle to prepare work for a F2F workshop and then collected participants’ brainstorm ideas in a Moodle Webpage. The teachers present saw this as one way of using Moodle in the classroom. They then suggested getting the students to type in the results, in case the teacher was a slow typist or to allow them opportunity to interact with the group.
• Used Mindomo for a presentation on state of eLearning at our institution. After this, 2 teachers approached me wanting to know the tool I’d used.
• Photographed results of a brainstorm-sticky-note session, which both admin & teachers present thought really useful.

So when is your professional development viral? When it’s:

• catching – one teacher’s (or e-learning professional’s) enthousiasm spreads to others
• effective – once it attaches to the host, it really sticks, ie teachers continue using what they’ve discovered or learned
• evolving – it becomes more sophisticated as in the first example above where the teachers built on the idea.
• ubiquitous – it’s everywhere and there are many ways to catch it – during a workshop, chatting over coffee in the staff room, reading about it in the newsletter
• airborne – it can jump between institutions. With the many channels available to ed tech professionals & teachers to share their learning (blogs, del.icio.us, wikis, podcasts, videos, twitter), it’s easy for the virus to cross over.

Recently I have been looking at setting up an e-learning community of practice at our institution and think that VPD will be inherent in the CoP. A bit graphic perhaps, but I would see the CoP members as agents carrying the e-learning virus.

A little late but I decided to join the TechCrunch exercise.

This is a list of tools, sites and extensions I currently use two or more times per week. And next year around this time (and if I remember) I’ll post another list and compare the two. It should make an interesting experiment.

• Edublogs
• Skype
• MSN Messenger
• Google Search Continue Reading »

What Will Richardson is to me:

• 3 Months ago – the author of a book I’ve read many times and a blog that I follow weekly. So disappointed I didn’t get to meet him in person when he was in New Zealand in 2006. Will never get that chance again.

• 1 Month ago (post-Twitter) – a fellow Twitterer whose daily tweets on ed tech are always interesting. I now also know what his kids are up to.

• Today – someone I’ve collaborated with on a wiki.

Tomorrow Will is presenting to a large group of teachers and wants them to “walk away understanding the power of connections that can reach far beyond the classroom.” To this end he has asked his network to chip in and leave their best tip on a wiki. Read about it on Weblogg-ed and leave your bit.

• 17.36 – Added a YackPack to my PBwiki sidebar a while back, but doesn’t seem to be working as it should. Any suggestions, fellow work group members?
• 17.38 – Oh wait, just saw that I can click to talk, but can also click to go to a YackPack WalkieTalkie web channel page that was ‘automagically’ created.
• 17.39 – Wonder who’s online to trial this. Ah, J. in Canada is on Skype…
• 17.44 – J. and I yacking away on the Walkie Talkie page. Bit of an echo on her side, she says my sound is clear. Little number in right bottom corner let’s you know how many people are viewing the YackPack button and could be potential yackers. Works like a WalkieTalkie which I used to love as a kid.
• 17.46 – J. and I now also yacking away on my PBWiki Sidebar. This stuff is too easy!!!

PBwiki offers YackPack as free plug-in, no messing around with code, just click the Insert Plugin button when you Edit page. Great for working together on a wiki. You can see when your collaborators are online and yack with them. I have added a Recent visitors plug-in as well, so I can see not only how many but who’s online.

Twitter entered my online life in Nov 2007 as part of a course in emerging learning environments. My workgroup wanted to pick a ‘really out there social networking tool that you would not think of using in education’ and take it for a spin. And we chose Twitter because how educational can answering the question “What are you doing?” in 140 characters really be?

Well it turns out that not only is it educational, it is addictive. How? In a variety of ways. For instance by helping me find neat tools as today I discovered 3 new tools and Adobe AIR in the space of an hour.

Continue Reading »

Working both in WebCT and Moodle this semester, I’m discovering quite how different these environments are. More about that later. In the meantime, 2 features present in WebCT that I would like to see in Moodle.

• Group tool, where students can self-select into groups with a maximum number of slots and based on this grouping, are enrolled in the appropriate forums/chats etc.

• Replies to My Posts – in forum-based courses you are unlikely to read everything. But there are certain things you always want to read, the replies to your own posts. Having these grouped as you log in to the course is very handy. Perhaps this could sit in the My Posts tab?