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November 27, 2006

Managing the Free Flow of Information

Here are three interesting quotes I heard today.

The first is from Sasa Vucinic of Media Development Loan Fund, a New York nonprofit organization providing low-cost financing to independent news businesses in emerging democracies.

"More than 80 percent of people live in countries without a free press. In other words, more than 5 billion people can't trust what they read in the newspaper, hear on the radio or see on TV, and do not really know what is happening in their own country."

The second is the article "Blogs And Wikis Move In As E-Mail Overload Becomes Unbearable" from Information Week, which says that businesses are using these new formats to manage the transmission and receiving of information.

The third concerns schools and Social Networking sites from an article in eSchoolNews.

"More than three years after social-networking web sites such as MySpace and Facebook first began cropping up online, school leaders still struggle with how to set policies regarding the use of such sites both inside and outside of school--and many school systems lack these policies altogether, according to a recent survey."

I was struck by the three counterpoints. In the first, we have a group that is actively attempting to increase the free flow of information so that people can access and harness information for their own daily lives. In the second, the free flow of information has become so overwhelming that new strategies are needed to manage it.

But the third story was the scariest, we have already claimed that our students are Digital Natives who understand how to utilize the technology to manage their lives and information. They have clearly embraced social networking as a way to operate in the digital landscape. With 3 years behind us, educators are still baffled by the whole phenomena. Surely, there is a way to bridge these three ideas and harness the technologies to lead and support students to manage information.

Posted by Pat on 2:36 PM

November 22, 2006

Blogs as Tutors

I just got a note from one of my students from the summer. She's been using Edublogs to the scaffold her students in Spanish class. Her level 2 students write about different topics that she assigns. Then her level 4 and 5 students respond. This is a great way to do online tutoring that could be used for any subject area.

For me, the interesting thing is how much we can do now in education without spending more money. Back in the 90s, there was an awful lot of "build it and they will come" mentality. That really didn't pan out very quickly. I think we underestimated just how much hands-on time people needed to become comfortable with being online. Now that cell phones and e-mail are our regular way of doing business, everyone has an online persona or at least modus operandi.

In addition, the new tools like blogs and wikis enable us to have these new interactions with very little muss or fuss, and better yet NO COST! Every day I see something even more exciting than the day before. I'm hoping that people will take a look at this Edublog at senorawilson2.edublogs.org and see the future!

Posted by Pat on 11:41 AM

November 5, 2006

Google AND Wikipedia...What a combo!

One thing geeks have really enjoyed over the past decade is debating which browser is best. Of course, this month with the introduction of Firefox 2.0 and Internet Explorer 7, we are just in hog heaven!

These days, I'm splitting my times almost evenly between my MacBook and my desktop Windows XP machines. On my MacBook, it's all Firefox, all the time. On Windows, I jump from IE7 to Firefox and back and forth. Both of the browsers on both platforms have tabbed browsing which is wonderful for juggling the many things I’m working on at any given moment.

Most of my time with browsers is devoted to searching. If I clocked it, I'd bet I spend about 1/2 of my time on a Google page. For weeks, I was really leaning to IE because of the Google toolbar. This gives me access to my Google bookmarks on any machine I happen to be using, as well as a few other items. This is available on both browsers, but the IE implementation has more features.

This week I've really become committed to Firefox because of a new plugin only available on Firefox. This is the Googlepedia plugin. It's just what it sounds like. When you add this plugin, you have the same search box in your menu bar. However, the search returns Google results on the left side of the page and the most appropriate Wikipedia page on the right. Already this is changing the way I look at the world. On the left I have a sampling of points of view and windows on whatever my topic is, but on the right I have a compilation of research on my topic that serves at least as a briefing paper for me to get started on my own information hunt. It's like having a research assistant right at my desk!

The plugin is available on both Windows and Mac, but only for Firefox. So, looks like that's where I'll be staying for awhile!

Posted by Pat on 9:12 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack