Will Richardson

Speaker, consultant, writer, learner, parent

“I Don’t Need Your Network…” Revisiting 2009

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deletecityNow that I finally have all of my 3,700 lifetime blog posts here on one site, from time to time I want to look back on some of the ones that drew the most commentary/discussion, or ones that I just think are interesting to reflect on.

In December of 2009, I wrote a post titled I Don’t Need Your Network (or Your Computer, or Your Tech Plan, or Your…), and over a couple of weeks, it attracted 152 comments. And let me just say, the comment thread is better than the post itself. (Seriously, if you have the time…)

So what’s changed in the 6.5 years since that post went live?

Short answer: Not as much as I think I expected. I mean, aren’t we still pretty much asking these questions?

  • If at some point in the fairly near future just about every high school kid is going to have a device that connects to the Internet, how much longer can we ask them to stuff it in their lockers at the beginning of the day?
  • How are we going to have to rethink the idea that we have to provide our kids a connection? Can we even somewhat get our brains around the idea of letting them use their own?
  • At what point do we get out of the business of troubleshooting and fixing technology? Isn’t “fixing your own stuff” a 21st Century skill?
  • How are we helping our teachers understand the potentials of phones and all of these shifts in general?

The ubiquity of phone access, even for kids who come from the lower end of the economic spectrum, has arrived. In developing countries, smart phones are becoming essential tools for learning, education, business, community and almost everything else. By the end of this decade, 5 billion people in the world will own a smartphone. Does that in-our-pocket access serve as an important context for the decisions we make in our schools and classrooms?

Let me just say (once again) that I’m struck by the level of respect and civility in what at times becomes a fairly heated discussion that takes many different directions and offers many different examples on both sides of the debate. That’s getting harder to find.

And on a personal note, I think this post comes from the period when I was at my pinnacle as a blogger. The Twitter effect was just about to take root. I was starting to blog less and Tweet more, a trend that I’ve been trying to reverse in the last few months. Either way, it’s definitely interesting having an archive to look back on.

Would love to hear your thoughts.

(Image credit: Seth Doyle)

Trajectories, Not Jobs

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skydeleteSome comment threads are actually readable. (Forget ones about politics.) And some comments in those comment threads are actually enlightening and instructive. Here’s one:

Donna Brewington White:

My kids do not dream of growing up and finding a job. They dream of creating (and selling) something or starting something… My 15 y.o. son sees his popularity on Vine as the beginning stages of his future work as a filmmaker. For him it is a trajectory.

For context, White’s response was to a post by Fred Wilson on the expansion of the highly popular writing and reading site Wattpad into Wattpad Studios, aimed at connecting “entertainment and publishing executives with Wattpad stories and creators.” And in case you’re not familiar with Wattpad, that means connecting them to thousands and thousands of kid authors who create and comment and commune on the site on a regular basis. I’m guessing some of those kids are in your schools.

Bu the larger point, I think, is this. Sites like Wattpad are places where kids can write about things they find interesting or are passionate about for an engaged, most often supportive community of readers, many of whom are writers themselves. Others, like Vine, or Snapchat, or YouTube offer other mediums and other audiences for kids to create and share. For many, this is the new normal.

Except in schools.

I wonder how many of our students feel the license and agency in schools to create their own “trajectory.” And I wonder what we, and they, miss by not making that a focus of our work in classrooms.

Wattpad Studios will no doubt bring kid creators more fully into the entertainment mainstream, to amplify their passions and good works, to grow their audiences. The good news is they’re not going to wait for us to figure it out.

(Image Credit: Zachary Young)

Technology as World Language

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Over the weekend, this video came out. Take a minute to watch.

We already have tools that translate text pretty well (though not perfect.) We have apps that allow you to point your camera at text in a different language and read it in English (if that’s your language of choice.) And we have apps that translate speech through the phone.

Now we’re wearing it.

One of our big elephants in the room when it comes to schools is that pretty much all of us know that you can’t learn a second language with any real fluency or stickiness without being immersed in a culture that speaks that language. And classrooms are, by and large, not built for immersion. We spend hundreds of hours over four years of high school, and five years after graduation, we retain very little of what we learned, especially if we never had occasion to actually use that language in every day life. (A rare event for most.)

I’m not saying that learning a foreign language isn’t a great thing to do. It is. But learning it in school simply isn’t. And now, that argument gets even harder. More important than speaking a foreign language is being understood. That’s getting easier and easier.

#Gr8t Tweets

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Last night some edubloggertweeterwikiists launched a pretty cool idea for marking the best Twitter posts for the month of March. The idea is pretty simple; see a valuable Tweet and ReTweet it with the hashtag #gr8t. You can then either read them as they come through on this wiki page, or subscribe to the RSS feed from the search.twitter.com results page.

Used judiciously, this could be a fine way to track some of the most informative Tweets out there. I’ve been trying to keep the number of people I follow to a minimum, so for me, tapping into the best of the edutwittersphere in this way could be pretty helpful. It’s like a delicious for Twitter, kinda sorta. (It should also benefit those who follow like 10, 459 people too.)

I’ve always struggled (though not too mightily) with the signal to noise ratio on Twitter. Through the people I follow and with the varying amounts of time I spend on it per day, I probably average about half a dozen good links a day. While I enjoy the back and forth somewhat, I’m really looking for links more than anything, and I’ve been pretty successful at mining Twitter search for Tweets that contain certain words AND a link. Lots of ways to do it.

So, anyway, for next month at least, add your #Gr8t Tweets to the list…

The Netbook Effect

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Great article by Clive Thompson in the new issue of Wired (the paper version, so no link to the text right now) about the ways in which netbooks are changing the laptop landscape. And, at the same time, cementing the idea of cloud computing in our lives. Estimates are that netbooks will hold 12 percent of the world’s entire laptop market next year, which is amazing when you think that the Eee PC is less than two years old. And their adoption says a lot about how we think about our computers these days.

As Thompson points out, 95 percent of what we do on computers can now be accomplished through the browser. I don’t need a huge hard drive or speedy fast processors as long as I have a solid, broadband connection to the Internet. (And even then I don’t need much; I’m writing this in a Google Doc while offline on a plane to Seattle.)

Netbooks are evidence that we now know what personal computers are for. Which is to say, a pretty small list of things that are conducted almost entirely online…Netbooks prove that the “cloud” is no longer just hype. It is now reasonable to design computers that oursource the difficult work to someone else. The cloud tail is wagging the hardware dog.

Nice.

I’m looking at my almost two-year-old, dropped a dozen times, bent up MacBook Pro, thinking I’m going to need to replace it in the next few months and wondering should I go with a netbook. Better yet, should I go with like seven of them (or more) which is about many I could buy for the same cost as my Mac. Don’t get me wrong, I love my Mac. And I really want to do more video work using iMovie this year. But it would be really nice not to lug this thing around everywhere in my travels.

So I’m hoping some netbookers might chime in here. What did you buy? Why do you like it? What are you doing about the things you can’t do on it?

A Delicious Digital Footprint

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I hadn’t planned on getting my writing life in order today, but then I somehow happened on this post by Michele Martin on using Delicious to create an online portfolio. Since I have a couple of articles due out this fall (and a couple of new books in the works), I decided a good place to start getting my brain around the idea was with all of the off-blog writing I’ve done the past few years, and so, there went a couple of hours. After wading through it all, it turns out I was able to locate online 35 of the 40 or so pieces of published writing I’ve done (at least the ones I can remember.) Anyway, I gave them all a tag, and now when you pull up the associated page in Delicious, you can see them all in one quick swoop.

A couple of observations here: First, while I know there are parents who are choosing their kids names based on whether or not the domains are available, (which is ridiculuous, btw) I’m thinking it may be good to choose a tag early on. I’ve started using tessorichardson and tuckerarichardson for the stuff I post about my own kids, and I’m thinking they might continue to use that tag as they begin creating and posting their own stuff as well. Second, what I like about this is that because of the RSS feed, people who might be interested can track my work and I can repurpose it elsewhere, say on a Pageflakes page (which could also serve as a portfolio, btw.) Third, as Michele says, the easy to update part of this is really intruiging. For instance, I might want to do this whenever I read generous reviews of my book, (forget the bad ones…(0:) or when excerpts of my presentations end up online. Just create a bit of a different tag, like “willrichardsonbookreviews” or “willrichardsonpresentationclips” etc. And then, I could use the bundles function to bring them all together (or, of course, I could just add a catchall tag like “willrichardsonportfolio”.)

Dunno if this has any earth shattering significance, and I’m sure many folks are already playing with variations on this theme, but I think the ease of doing this once you have it set up makes it worth a second or third thought.

(Photo “Footprints” by andy 5322.)

PicLens…Whoa!

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Ok…so I really am searching for words as to how cool Piclens is. And I know; I shouldn’t get so buzzed by the tools. But I’m giving myself an exception here just because I’ve been fooling around with this thing for about an hour since I downloaded it and it’s like mesmerizingly fun…and useful.

It’s a Firefox add-on for Windows and Mac that finds all sorts of video and images via search from a number of different sources (Flickr, straight Google, Amazon and others) and lets you scan them/watch them through the slickest 3D interface I’ve seen yet. You can also breeze through the latest news and sports photos and videos (among others) and every photo or object that comes up anywhere in the frame is linked to the original online. (With the news stuff, a brief summary of the story comes up as well.)

But it’s the hypnotic way in which all of this works that has me amazed…just check it out.

UStream Fun

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Kind of spur of the moment I decided to UStream all of my presentations at MICCA in Baltimore, and in the midst of doing so noticed some cool upgrades, the best of which is the ability to “cohost.” (Notice the little link in the bottom left of the picture.) This may not be all that new since I haven’t played much of late, but it was fun to bring all sorts of willing experimenters from the studio audience in to play. Talked to bicyclemark in Amsterdam, a classroom teacher in Wichita, a technology specialist in the UK, and some students in Montgomery, Alabama, pictured here. The folks who were watching seemed to indicate that the sound and picture quality were pretty good, despite some spotty bandwidth yesterday. The only glitch was that when I tried to record those interviews, the “cohost” contributions didn’t stick. It was just me talking and listening, making little sense.

I have to say that UStream has become quite the eye-opener for people in my presentations. It’s definitely an interesting way of positioning the drastic publishing shifts that we are experiencing, and to give a bit of context to the “call for conversations” around them. And on a personal note, it is great to be able to watch/listen to presentations while multitasking in the background.

Now if only UStream would archive the chats…

"M" for, um…"Unread"

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Before I pull myself the last couple of steps up from my recent blogging funk, a quick item from the “Things I Wished I’d Known for the Last Two Years Department.” My major, major, major frustration with Google Reader has always been what I thought was the inability for me to mark a post “unread.” As with my practice in Firefox when I leave like 87 tabs open, by work flow is such that I just like to keep alive all the potentially good stuff I scan through when I don’t really have time to read it. The “Add a Star” feature in Reader has never done the job, and I have been staring at the stupid “Mark as Read” button (which I have never understood the purpose of) wishing I could turn it into “Mark as UNread.” No amount of staring helped.

So today, I find out all you have to do is hit the “M” key on a post to keep it active in Google Reader. I know, I know…I should have spent more time on the shortcuts page.

Not sure what it says that my life suddenly feels a whole bunch better right now. Sad, I know.

Tweaking Twitter

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I’m not following all that many people on Twitter, I know, but even with the ones I do follow there are upwards of 300 “Tweets” a day, far too many for me to get to in most cases. I like following the updates when I’m online, but I confess I rarely go back and see what I’ve missed when I’m not watching the updates flow by in Twhirl. Still, when people add links to their Tweets, I usually find interesting stuff. So, I was hoping to find a way to strip out only those posts that have links in them and at least just catch up on those, preferably in my Google Reader.

And, thanks to the many answers I got to my Tweet about this, here is the way you do it, just in case you might be interested as well.

Classroom Twitter Using WordPress

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I may be late to the this party, but the Twitterverse just led me to this fairly new theme for WordPress named Prologue which seems to create a Twitter-like blog that can be installed locally. Here is a demo to check out. And here is another, YouthTwitter.com that was put together by Paul Allison and Susan Ettenheim both of Teachers Teaching Teachers fame. Looks like more than 140 characters, but the idea is the same. And I love reading the questions and replies about how it all works, etc.

In that context, don’t forget this Twitter for Academia post to start generating some ideas of how Prologue might actually be useful. Any other ideas?

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On "The Twitterialization" of Blogging, Networks, Etc.

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On the somewhat surreal occasion of the 1,000th person to follow me on Twitter (really, how is that possible?), and since Twitter seemed to be on the tip of everyone’s tongues at EduCon this weekend, it’s probably an appropriate moment to reflect on how I’ve evolved in my thinking on this strange yet somehow important little tool.

In my session on Saturday, when I opened up the discussion on personal learning networks, the first response was simply, “Twitter”. We attempted to define it, someone mentioned “Twitter guilt” I believe, and various folks weighed in on why the did or did not “get” Twitter. At some point later that day (lunch maybe), I made the comment that it seemed a lot of profound, previously bloggable ideas were being “Twitterialized”, which, of course, I think someone Twittered. (That’s why I’m blogging about it…so there.) Case in point, when Kristin Hokanson was asking the very probing questions of the morning panel on Sunday, she started one with “In 140 characters or less…” and we all laughed.

But that idea has been sticky in my brain. I wonder if this 140 character world in which many of us spend much of our time is in some way dumbing down the conversation. And my thinking still feels pretty thin on this because for some reason Twitter just remains hard to fully get my head around, hard to peg. But here are some somewhat random thoughts, not all original btw:

*I’m thinking that in my case at least, only a much smaller percentage of those people are actually tuning into my Tweets. Even so, I know that I’m pretty much an outlier here, an outlier in all of this at this point at least, seven years into this grand network building experiment that has turned my life on its head.

*It feels like some use Twitter because 140 characters alleviates the pressure of developing and articulating ideas in a full-fledged blog post. At some point this weekend, we were talking about this from a reader standpoint and I was struck by how almost equal numbers actually liked just reading the short blurb while others missed the context. Which makes me wonder what if any affect Twitter is having on my reading.

*Twitter gets most frustrating to me when I see long lists of Tweets from people who are responding to the individuals who Tweeted them giving me absolutely no context for what the response means or is about. These usually end up being something like “@soandso That was amazing! Thanks for sharing it! This will definitely transform my classroom!” or “@soandso My mother used to say the same thing! ;0)” some of which compel me to start clicking through links to gain some understanding that usually ends up being personal or irrelevant. (Mea Culpa, I know, but I try to limit it.) There is a signal to noise ratio here that is more acute than blogs I think, and I’ve started doing some unfollowing because of it. (Not that I follow that many folks already, I know.)

*And since I only feel like I can follow a few people or risk “Twitter guilt” (and hours of my life) by not reading every Tweet, most of the people I follow are people I actually know and have met in person. (In fact this weekend I was able to add quite a few to my blogger/Twitter life list.) Btw, how do people “follow” 657 others?

*Twitter is most powerful to me when people ask questions and get quick answers and suggestions. And you see that happening all the time. It really can be “PD on Demand” in many ways.

*Twitter is also powerful in terms of networking, no question. The ability to send links or interesting ideas to people who might not currently have you on their radar makes for a pretty connective tool.

*I struggle with the marketing aspect of Twitter. And I am guilty of this as well, the “New Blog Post: The Twitterialization of Blogging, Networks, Etc” http://tinyurl…” type of Tweet that serves to bring readers in faster than a speeding RSS aggregator. I feel kind of slimy for some reason when I do that. (Not slimy enough, of course, to not do that at some points, but slimy enough to not do it every time.)

Obviously, Twitter wasn’t created to be the learning/professional development tool that it seems to have become. And I think in many ways it struggles under the weight of that. And yes, there is some network capital to be harnessed here. And yes, 1,000 “followers” (I really, really hate the way that sounds) makes it compelling. But while there may not be a direct cause and effect, since I started using Twitter last March I’ve been blogging less and reading blogs less and wondering more about where all of this takes us in the end.

Now, to post this on Twitter…

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UStream Upgrades–Private TV!

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Not sure if this has been blogged much but UStream now has a privacy feature as in the ability to password protect your show. That’s a huge first step that all of a sudden makes classroom television a little more palatable for teachers. Let’s kick this around a bit…this lets us provide a limited, invited audience to:

  • Poetry readings
  • Dramatic interpretations
  • Skype interviews
  • Homebound lessons
  • Lectures
  • Demonstrations
  • Debates
  • Interpretive readings
  • Concerts
  • Meetings (BOE, Administrative, etc)
  • Sporting events
  • Talent shows
  • Ceremonies
  • Assemblies
  • Food fights

What else can you think of???

As an aside, UStream has also done some sprucing up in terms of your ability to design our show homepage and other fun things. I’m going to be playing with some of the alternatives more and more this winter and spring, but right now, I’m liking UStream more and more.

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2008 Tools/Sites/Extensions I Use List

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Since it’s still close to the first of the year, and since if I remember to do it at the beginning of ’09 it would be an interesting comparison (I think), let me follow the TechCrunch meme and make a list of the tools and sites I currently use on a regular basis. These are in no particular order, btw, and the only requirement here is that I use it at least once a week, but I’ve put a * next to the ones that would probably be near the top of the usage list. Here goes:

  • WordPress*
  • Skype*
  • Gmail*
  • Google Search*
  • Google Reader*
  • Google Notebook*
  • Google News
  • Google Calendar*
  • Google Docs*
  • Firefox*
  • Flickr
  • Ning
  • Elluminate
  • Audacity
  • Wikispaces
  • Delicious*
  • Netvibes
  • Pageflakes
  • Jing
  • MindMeister
  • iTunes
  • iPhoto
  • Skitch
  • Twitter*
  • Twitterific
  • NeoOffice
  • YouTube
  • Jott
  • Rhapsody
  • Pandora
  • Wikipedia
  • Amazon

Kinda Google-centric, I know. Scary on some level. And I’m sure I missed some along the way. (Btw, Facebook is missing on purpose…I’m not going there at least once a week these days…not feeling the Facebook love.) If you have better suggestion to a tool listed here, I’d love to hear it.

I’ll be sending my 10 Favorite Tools to Jane Hart as she’s updating her list for 2008.

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The Wii as $99 SmartBoard

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So the cool thing about this is not that you can pretty easily hack a Wii to make just about any surface you can project onto into an interactive white board (though that is cool, no doubt.) What’s REALLY cool about it is that Johnny Chung Lee, the guy that figured out how to do it, created a video that shows pretty compellingly the amazing applications here and then offered up the program that makes it all work for free on his Website.

I showed this for the first time in a presentation I gave this morning and I made sure to watch the reactions of the people in the audience. They were doing the OMG head shake and stare for the most part. But what I should have made more clear is that the important part of this is not the hack but the delivery, the sharing of the inspiration, the willingness to give it away. You just know (don’t you) that there are going to be dozens if not hundreds of more Wii hackers born because of this, and it’s primarily because of the transparency of the process.

That’s what continues to make me giddy about this moment…

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"Give 1 Get 1" One Laptop Per Child Promotion

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Widely blogged about, I know, but I just wanted to include my voice in the chorus. The OLPC program is offering a special during the weeks of November 12-26 where if you buy one laptop for $399 you’ll automatically be getting a second laptop into the hands of a child in a developing nation somewhere. This is just such a great opportunity to support a whole bunch of good causes, not the least of which is providing access to kids that don’t have it and putting a learning tool into the hands of your own children. (Lots of open source goodness, too.) And if you do the math, a classroom of laptops for $12,000 with another set being donated out would make a great service project for schools to get involved in. (Thanks to Magda for that idea.)

So, put a pop up on your calendar…the holidays are coming fast.

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The UStream Experiment (Con't)

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So last night, David Jakes, Steve Dembo and I met in a wifi enabled restaurant in Chicago to watch some of the Cubs game (sniff) and to put UStream.tv through its paces by doing a “live” remote broadcast which we Tweeted out as “2.5 Cubs Fans in a Bar.” Let me just say, in a word or two, it was a great deal of fun, as you can easily tell by the amount of wide-eyed wondering that was going on. It probably should have been titled “3 Guys Amazed that New Technologies Actually Work With Little Effort.” And while I don’t want to spend an inordinate amount of time reflecting on it, I did learn a few things last night that I’ll just bullet out.

  • If we can do this using wifi in a public place, we’re getting close to really starting to think out of the box with technology. This was cheap and easy.
  • It was fascinating (and distracting) to watch the progress of the chat. People, thankfully, just tuned us out and started connecting around what they found important, tuning back in when they heard something relevant or interesting. And they were teaching each other how to change the colors of the text, to connect the stream out around social tools, and I’m sure much more than that. (You can read through the 28-page chat if you like.)
  • The global reach of the network and the speed that it reaches out still really amazes me. We had people from Australia, New Zealand, China, Argentina and all across the US. All collected initially, at least, by posting on Twitter. We got up to 43 people in the room, which was about four times as many as I thought we’d get. It is instant audience.
  • I loved the fact that I was learning and getting answers from the audience. For instance, we were lamenting the fact that Twitter was no longer allowing us to see older Tweets when Karen Hokansen chatted in that it had been fixed. Ok, not earth-shattering, I know, but still…

If all goes according to plan, Saturday at 11 am EST I’ll be at the MediaTech center where I live doing a live stream interview with a group of game playing middle schoolers. I’ll Tweet it out a reminder, and it would be great to get some questions from the audience. I also might see who I can rope in for a keynote in Chicago today at 2:45 Central…

Thanks to all those that dropped in. Would love to hear your reactions.

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Reality EduTV and Open Second Life

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This weekend I saw the future. Not that it’s the long term future by any stretch since things seem to be moving at warp speed anyway. But there were a couple of technologies on display at the “New Media Literacies in Learning Landscapes Conference” in Charlottetown, PEI that had me feeling like that giddy little geek that sometimes pops up when everything around me is feeling new again.

The first isn’t really all that “new”, but it was the first time I’d taken part in a live video stream of one of my presentations thanks to Jeff Lebow of Worldbridges.com (and edtechtalk.com) who was there to record the proceedings. I should say that on Friday when I gave a short tech pep talk to a group of about 50 7th graders who are embarking on a most excellent online archiving project about PEI, it was very cool to tell them that folks from as far away as Australia and Abu Dhabi  were watching us live. And then yesterday for the conference with about 40 island teachers, we had at one point about 25 viewers “in da house” to watch and take part by text chatting questions and having that more and more ubiquitous back channel chat going on throughout. (The best was when Jeff told me Clarence Fisher had been watching while doing his dishes as I raved about his work during my keynote. Kinda scary, but cool.)

Jeff used about a hundred miles of cables, numerous headsets, cameras etc., but he streamed the whole thing through Ustream.tv which, if you have a camera, a mic and a fast connection, you can start “broadcasting” live from wherever you are in like maybe 3 minutes. (And so of course the new model is to Tweet “Hey I’ve got a show starting in 15 minutes! Here’s the link! Come participate!” Mercy.) The mind reels with the possibilities, and I’m actually to do a first “broadcast” interview Q&A from the audience on Tuesday if I can set it up. (I’ll be sure to Tweet it from willrich45.)

Now I know that streaming per se isn’t all that bleeding edge any longer, and really neither is the whole Second Life in education discussion, though there is much there that still needs to be worked out. But what Dave Cormier (who with Bonnie Stewart were running both the archive project and the conference) showed us in terms of a new Second Life “hack” (for lack of a better word), was pretty mindbending. OpenSim uses the Second Life interface (which Linden Labs released to developers last year) but allows you (wait for it) to serve up your own world on not just the server of your choice, but (wait for it) even just your local computer. Want a world just for your classroom that isn’t “out there” on the Second Life server? Done. (Read more about it in Dave’s post here.)

And get this. Dave said that while this is all still in alpha and very thin, within six months we’ll probably be able to take our own local worlds and selectively connect them to other local worlds, building communities just among those that we want our kids to interact with. From our desktops. That’s what he’s working toward in the project he’s doing with the PEI kids. They are going to build their own archives in their own local worlds and then invite other school worlds in to show them around and teach them about the history of the island. Private tours, so to speak.

I’ve struggled with Second Life for a lot of reasons, and frankly, I haven’t stepped a virtual foot in there for about six months. But what I saw and heard the last couple of days just started my brain really exploding with the possibilities. OpenSim sounds like it’s building toward an easier, safer, more convenient environment than where Linden is going. And you can do it without the downside that comes with the open grid or even the teen grid to some extent.

We’re not quite there yet with either of these technologies, but this weekend, you could just feel it coming. That is what’s so much fun. Almost as much fun as spending time with Sharon Peters, Rob Patterson, Stephen Downes and Harold Jarche and some other great educators trying to make a difference. Good stuff.

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Extending and Expanding the Conference Experience

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VoiceThreadLaura D’Elia was in Boston a couple of weeks ago attending the Building Learning Communities Conference and she’s put together a VoiceThread presentation that she’s going to present to her colleagues. And the cool thing is that she’s invited some of the BLC folk to add their own voices to the presentation.

What a concept, huh? I wonder what would happen if every conference goer at NECC and BLC and where ever else went back and used one of these new tools to communicate what they had learned and to model the ways we can create and collaborate using the Web. Think we’d get a little further down the road?

I know I repeatedly say that creating and publishing is only half the opportunity here, that it’s the conversations and connections that occur around that content where the most potential for learning lies. But this is a great example of beginning to participate in the virtual community that is “out there” for anyone (with access) that wants to take part.

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Mind Mapping Love

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MindMeister - Connective LearningI’m a big mind map person…just something about the visual tree effect that makes it easier for me to organize stuff. And I have loved FreeMind for a few years now. But the limitation has been that, well, it’s not very flexible in terms of social collaboration and stuff.

Enter MindMeister which has my mind a fluttering. It’s a web-based collaborative mind mapping app that so far, after about an hour’s worth of playing, is really letting me do great stuff. You can check out the intro video on the site, but here are the key features I’ve found so far that I’m liking a lot:

  1. Easy importing of my FreeMind Maps. You can do it with MindJet MindManager too. Nice.
  2. Drag and drop and easy keyboard tools. I love Ajax. (This is Ajax, right?)
  3. Sharing/collaboration. Just invite people in to play.
  4. In the best wiki tradition, it has a history so you can track changes. (Awesome.)
  5. You can publish your Maps to the Web, even embed them into a blog post.
  6. And while they don’t have an RSS feed to track changes, they do let you configure update alerts to your…wait for it…Twitter account.

They even have this cool little extension for MAC users that puts a little app on your desktop that you can post ideas or links to your default map in a flash. Mercy.

This has been a great couple of weeks for tools…Skitch, Jing, and now this. And the thing I love about all of them is that they are solving that little publishing hump in a very easy way by making the upload piece a seamless part of the process.

Prediction: Google buys MindMeister within six months…

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What the Tweet?

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Twitter“So let me get this straight…you’re just letting people know what you’re doing when you do this?”

“Right.”

“And you call it ‘Tweeting’?”

“Well, uh, yeah. It’s kinda like a bird letting you know where he’s at, I guess.”

“And you do this how often.”

“Depends. Maybe 4, 5…10 times a day. It doesn’t take that much time, really.”

“Like how much time?”

“Dunno…maybe 10-15 minutes, total.”

“And all you’re doing is letting your friends know what you’re doing, right? At any given moment.”

“Right. But they’re not all friends in the standard sense. I mean I’ve never met some of these people.”

“And they let you know what they’re doing.”

“Right.”

“Even people you don’t know.”

“Right”

“Why?”

“Dunno.”

“Like that guy teachanlearn is ‘Reading RSS’ and he wants you to know that?”

“Um, I guess. But he also wants me to click the link there too.”

“Well, where does that go?”

“Dunno…let’s find out…it’s a blog post about a new WordPress theme.”

“And he felt the need to ‘tweet’ that?”

“Apparently.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I know. It’s kinda hard to explain. I mean I didn’t really get it at first…still not sure if I do.”

“You know all these people…how many?”

“Twenty-eight right now. They’re all in my network.”

“The network.”

“Right. My teachers…my classroom…remember? We talked about this.”

“Right. And these other people, these ‘followers’. How many?”

“Um, 209 right now.”

“209! And they want to know what you are doing?”

“I guess so, though I can’t imagine why.”

“But you only follow 28.”

“Right.”

“Does that upset them?”

“Who?”

“All those people who are ‘following’ you that you’re not ‘following’.”

“I dunno. I hope not. I can’t follow more than this many right now.”

“But I still don’t get it. Why do you want to follow them at all?”

“It’s just another layer of the connection, I think. I mean on some level, I like knowing that Chris missed his plane or that John’s doing a wiki workshop or whatever. It’s not important stuff on any major level, but it adds something.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. Just…just…presence. Just this weird presence thing. And depth. I can’t really explain it.”

“Presence.”

“Well, more than that. I mean a lot of people post links and resources and ask questions and stuff. I learn from it too.”

“And people answer? So it’s like IM, right?”

“Um…no. I don’t do this for conversation, though it turns into that sometimes.”

“I don’t think I get it.”

“I don’t either.”

“Then why do you do it?”

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Sunday SkitchArt

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Presentation1

I have to say, I love Skitch. It’s a MAC only tool that makes it oh so easy to snip pictures from the screen, annotate them, play with them and then, and here’s the cool part, easily upload them to your “MySkitch” webpage where you get all sorts of code you can then use to publish it out. I used to love to make collages when I was a little kid. So to experiment, I did the above in about 15 minutes using Flickr Creative Commons photos (listed below) uploaded the result in one click, and then just snagged the code and pasted it in.

That, seems to me, to be covering the “last mile” in terms of some of these non-bloggy tools, the getting it online really easy part. If you want to see that done with screencasts, take a look at Jing. You capture your video, click a button, and it’s online for you to link to or do whatever. That publishing hump continues to get smaller.

Anyway, just a bit of play on a rainy Sunday morning…

(BTW, I’ve got four Skitch invites for any MAC users who may want one…leave a comment with your correct e-mail…I send ’em if I got ’em.)

Lights
The Veins of Bangcock
Jealousy
Dark Dangerous Moods
a loto stand
Sunset
Locking nothing
Orange jellyfish for orange day
Today is orange day
halcyon

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