I’m constantly amazed at the move toward “social” software on the Internet, not so much because it’s happening (people by nature, I think, like to connect) but in the creative ways it’s happening. Not only can you connect with the people, you can connect with their ideas, like with Furl and del.icio.us. The newest example is 43 Things, a site that at first blush seems a bit silly, but once you dig a little deeper, has a really intruiging premise.
It’s simple; you put in 43 Things (or 5, or 23, or 12) that you want to accomplish and if anyone else has put any of those goals, you get linked up with them. For instance, I want to learn how to play guitar. Well, there are 11 other people at 43 Things that share that goal, and now, if we like, lilevil, and shira and bjorn and the rest could pursue that goal together by posting or blogging about our experience and commenting back and forth to one another about it. There are even RSS feeds that let you keep up with everything from your aggregator. Life is wonderful, isn’t it?
Right now, the top goals are “taking more pictures”, “stop procrastinating” and learn Ruby. (What made me think one of them would be something like “save the world from utter destruction?”) At number four is “be a better blogger”, something I know we all aspire to ;0).
So what? Well, I’m thinking wouldn’t it be cool to hook students with similar goals or assignments up in a similar fashion? Like a site that could create communities of students who were all doing fetal pig dissections or reading the same novel? They could share experiences, techniques, interpretations… Now I know there would be a lot of safety and security issues to think through. But this is an interesting model of what we can do these days, connect learners, achievers, goal setters, whatever group you want from around the world to work toward a common end.
Personally, I’m heading to the live simply group. My life is waaaayyy to complicated…
I agree whole-heartedly Will. A tool like this would be a superb resource to connect students with similar academic (or other) interests and allow them to collaboratively document their learning journeys. I see this as going someway to realising Ivan Illich’s vision of a learning web.
What about students who have reached a learning goal being available as mentors to other learning teams? Or what happens if you implement another part of Illich’s learning web, a directory of instructors from which learning teams can choose their preferred teacher (based on peer recommendation). Disruptive deschooling?
Thanks for passing on this great site. I can see an application of it in my career’s class, where other like minded students would be be put together according to occupational goals. But what would make it rock is if adults in these particular jobs could chime in and help out the students with their never ending questions. This sort of mentoring and real life interaction would be much better than even a guest speaker sort of event.
I just ran across this article in Salon – http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2005/02/08/43/index_np.html – 43 Things is a Amazon product. I don’t know if that should be a turn-off, but it does raise some questions about the ultimate purpose of the site. I also have to ask myself why they’re hiding their involvement, how I feel about it (since I choose not to use Amazon as much as possible), and how I feel about commercialization of these types of sites in general.