Serendipitous surfing brings me to this comment by Gardner Campbell on Dave Cormier’s blog:
I’m thinking that college is now the opportunity not only to begin one’s personal library, but also to build one’s personal suite of trusted and inspiring experts. That of course is what already happens to some extent, but now it need not be confined to the campus. The campus is where the beloved local professor simply starts the ball rolling.
I like that “suite of trusted and inspiring experts” line especially. But I would add, why wait until college? A K-12 teacher can just as easily get the ball rolling for students if we teach them early on how to start building their own resource lists.
Which brings me to my own resource list at Bloglines that has been causing me some angst of late. I just can’t read all of these sources any more. I’ve tried, I really have, to keep up, but I can’t any longer. So I’ve been thinking about a major overhaul, one that organizes my feeds differently but also relies more on really focused search feeds. I’m thinking that I need to spend some time over at Stephen Downes’s site and the search sites like Technorati, Feedster and others. And I’m needing to figure out a more effective way of incorporating the information I save in del.icio.us (which I’ve started using again despite the fact that it has a very limited notes space). Now that I’ve been doing this for four years, I feel like I really need to settle in and find a best practice for my needs.
I agree Will… i think that as bloggin becomes something that is a necessary part of every professional’s life, we are going to need ways to find and sort those people who are consistently interesting, informative and provocative. Another instance of knowledge changing. We need to be able to find, sort, arrange and choose our reading. People like Stephen will become more and more powerful as they will become the people ‘choosing’ what ‘should’ be read. Imagine having a football stadium in your backyard, and have it full stacks of newspapers piled eight feet high, all of which you find interesting… that’s where were going to be soon. The FOAF, social networking stuff will be the only way out…
I’m just, as we all have talked about at one point or another, finding myself a bit overwhelmed. And I am having a hard time starting to balance the reading I do online with the reading I do offline. Sure, my blogroll is reasonably caught up, but it’s taken me two weeks to read Debbie Meier’s latest book.
I’m starting to feel like I cannot possible assimilate all the information I need to, regardless of organizational structure and new reading techniques.
(And that’s to say nothing of writing about it all…)
Thanks, Will, and I agree completely–about all of it! In the end, the feeling is like that of walking into a major research library and feeling utterly overwhelmed by the massed array of human learning. Many PhD students have stopped dead in their tracks at that point. (Almost happened to me.) There’s no way to keep up, but if the goal is not to keep up but to keep in, that may just be possible.
Given your take on the internet as a resource for someone to build a personal library of information, I’d like to point you to an app that does just that: DevonThink (it’s a Mac-app…don’t know if there’s a plan for a Windows version).
http://devon-technologies.com/
and here’s a little piece about it’s use by Steven Johnson, a writer:
http://www.stevenberlinjohnson.com/movabletype/archives/000230.html
If you don’t know about it, I think you’ll find it interesting, as well as its sister app, DevonAgent.
sps