Suppose you're standing somewhere in the middle of a foreign city with a couple of friends. Everyone's getting hungry and you had better find a good place to eat. Wouldn't it be cool to be able to instantly look up, say, all restaurant reviews within a 1000-feet radius of where you are? And then intersect the results with your personal web of trust to increase your confidence in the info?
Charlie Lowe reflects on the following question: "my classes are the perfect size for forming online communities -- more than a dozen but not over a hundred. Why then, do online communities not form?"
Charlie asks the opposite question - why should they form? "Won't an online commnity form only if the class is extremely collaborative-based learning oriented in which students are granted more agency than many instructors are willing to give?"
Wifi, Personal Calculators, and the Backchannel. Clay Shirky: "What both optimists and pessimists believed, however, deep down, was that their opinions mattered. "Someday," each of them thought, "someone is going to ask me what we should do about these here calculators." What the adults didn't understand, but me and my 5th grade posse did, was that calculators, having arrived, were never going away." [Corante: Social Software] What do you think? [] links to this post 9:49:49 AM
Joseph Hart: Blogs as Electronic Readers' Digests. "So what does it mean that modern blogs resemble the old Reader's Digest? I'm not sure, but readers of blogs and readers of the Digest seem to share some commonality of intent and purpose in their rapid absorption of quick, bite-sized information and entertainment."
Joseph lists similarities and differences between Readers' Digest periodicals and weblogs. One crucial difference he missed is that blogs have yet to send sweepstake junkmail packages to subscribers. (Thank goodness!).
Students and lecturers are more familiar with a knowledge-transmission model of education and don't always understand what is expected of us in a more constructionist environment.
We have too little information about lecturers' and students' backgrounds, networks and skills - so often we don't realise that there is somebody in the group who could teach the rest of us a lot about some aspect of what we're studying.
No or very limited mechanisms for students to talk back to the lecturer and (especially) to talk to one another.
Inadequate 'course memory'. Lecturers often are the only bridge for this year's students to the knowledge created by last year's group - students don't get to see what last year's group did. There is no mechanism for students who want to stay in the group after the course is officially over (and who could be a useful resource for next year's students) to do so. [Martin Terre Blanche]
Reading through this list made me realize that the people who pioneer new modes of communication in hi-tech conferences these days are in the process of fixing these issues - through backchannelling and real-time blogging, the product of which most often gets turned into permanent, hyperlinked, googlable archives for the benefit of those who aren't there.
Jill Walker (who coauthored the first academic article on research blogging) has come up with a very decent definition of the term 'weblog', which is slated to appear in next year's edition of the Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory.
