I’ve been reflecting on how my use of various internet tools has evolved, and affected my ‘conversation’ with a handful of people, most of whom I’ve never met, but whose views, thoughts, experiments and expertise have probably had the biggest impact on my teaching that anything else. In this post I’m going to reflect on my changing use of some of these tools, and on the possible ramifications for what people like me are doing in trying to develop systems in schools.
RSS Feeds
I started using the built in RSS feed reader in Safari (which is excellent) and used it to subscribe to the blogs of various friends, and Neil Gaiman! When Doug started his blog, which I found out about through the school history forum I started subscribing to that as well. After a while I decided to sign up to bloglines and started adding some of the blogs that Doug referenced. After a while I moved over to Google Reader and the number of blogs I subscribed to started to increase, and vary in topic. My feed reader now includes many of those ‘personal’ blogs that started off in Safari (as my computer use change, I could now be checking from one of four computers, so having things online makes sense)
One thing I have become aware of recently is that my use of my feed reader tends to pull in information, rather than push me into conversations on topics. I’m probably only interested in engaging in conversations on 2% of the posts that come through my account, but in the past I’ve either blogged about it, and used pingbacks to track the conversation, or commented and checked back when I remembered. Hopefully CoComment will allow me to get more meaningful interaction on those areas I’m interested in, and I’ll be added the widget to the blog at somepoint in the new year when I tweak the blog design
The best description of Twitter I’ve heard is that it adds humanity to a network. From cooking with Jeff to notification of blog posts, to asking and answering questions, it’s hard to explain what Twitter does if you’re not using it, but I feel much more part of something with Twitter than I did with blogging alone.
I keep being taken aback by Facebook. Like many I’m not a massive fan of some of the changes, especially many of the new wall apps which seem to have taken the chain-mails, hoaxes and bigetory from my inbox and posted it online. However, if you don’t just add everything you’re invited to, and if you take some time with settings then I don’t think those things become unmanagable. I have both a FunWall and a Superwall for example, because some of my friends choose to have them and I want to send them messages, but my not publicly displaying them, I don’t feel I’m having to constantly delete the kind of images and comments that I wouldn’t want to be associated with. But the uses that it gets put to, especially by communities is brilliant. Groups commemorating recently deceased friends, political campaigns or encouraging friends to guess the date, weight and sex of impending babies. Birthday wishes going backwards and forwards between people who, in all honesty, would have forgotten otherwise. Friends able to see and comment on picture of babies they may never see otherwise. I could go on.
The interesting thing for me is that facebook is starting to join up with what, for what of a better term I shall call my ‘professional network’. It’s going to be intresting to see where that goes in the coming months.
So what’s my point? I think it’s two fold. Firstly I think it that one of the most important thing about the way I’m using these tools (and I’m guessing others as well) is that I’m taking various tools and merging them together. No one application could do everything that this system I’ve created does, and yet in education we seem to be looking for that one killer application that will solve all our problems. The more I refelect on this the more sure I am it doesn’t, and will never exist. The other part of that is that I’m the one choosing. And if, outside of our schools, our pupils are doing the same, then one system that we force them into will always seem second best for them.
Secondly, up until now I’ve been very big on the idea of keeping networks separate. My social friends and my professional friends weren’t joined up. Now that’s starting to change, and I’m wondering if our pupils see that gap? After all their ‘social’ friends are the same people they’re working with. As such, is there likely to be a sticking point between my plan at having a ‘school’ network separate, and with separate levels of acceptable behavior, to their ‘social’ networks, out there on Bebo and MySpace?
Maybe the one group of people I really need to extend the conversation to are our pupils.
Same similar thoughts, different blog:
Why loosely coupled, freely available third party systems can be better from Pontydysgu
Thoughts on Facebook from Apace of Change
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