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Twitter as a Curation Tool
Excellent post from Langwitches! She addresses the progression of moving from collector to curator, quoting Mike Fisher, who observed, "Curating is different. It’s the Critical Thinker’s collection, and involves several nuances that separate it as an independent and classroom-worthy task." Sylvia writes: "There are different sides to Twitter as a Curation tool: Taking advantage of a network of curators working for you (building your own customized network), consuming their curated information Collecting, organizing, connecting, attributing, interpreting, summarizing the vast amount of information that comes across your desk/ feed /books/articles/etc. for YOURSELF! Becoming consciously the curator for others for a particular niche, area of expertise or interest. Disseminate resources, add value, put in perspective, create connections, present in a different light/media/language. Real time curation allows you to be part of an event, that you physically might not be attending or being on the opposite end allows you to be the bridge for others to participate at an event where you are present, but your network is not."
Via Nancy White
My five-year-old son recently learned how to ride a bike. He mastered the essential components of cycling—balance, peddling, and steering—in roughly ten minutes. Without using training wheels, ever...
Want to explore this further especially as it relates to their larger suite of software. Any one out there used the DOKEOS suite of tools?
Via Baiba Svenca
If you want to see how technology shapes the way we perceive the world, just look at the way our experience of time has changed as network speeds have increased. Back in 2006, a famous study of onl... This might as well be a whack upside the head for teachers. As our students become more connected (meaning fast connections) the less patient they become online-- as in"less that the blink of an eye" wait time impatient. If this translates to the analog, 'meatspace' world (and I suspect it might), then what does it mean for gathering attention in the classroom? We need to be studying student attention in the classroom where there is unrestricted wireless and device access like my own university one. Here is Nicholas Carr's take (and it honestly makes me think that everything I do in my teaching is wrong: "One thing this study doesn’t tell us — but I would hypothesize as true (based on what I see in myself as well as others) — is that the loss of patience persists even when we’re not online. In other words, digital technologies are training us to be more conscious of and more resistant to delays of all sorts — and perhaps more intolerant of moments of time that pass without the arrival of new stimuli. Because our experience of time is so important to our experience of life, it strikes me that these kinds of technology-induced changes in our perception of delays can have particularly broad consequences." Gotta love that oxymoronic understatement--"particularly broad consequences".
Mobile phones in the classroom--I am still struggling with getting my students to connect via twitter much less all these tools, but they stand as a challenge to me to keep them in mind as I re-think lessons, assignments, and other learning 'stuff' for the next semester. I think they might help you too. Learning first, tools to support, and no extra tech without careful thought.
"Google Research Tool is an easy way to add web information and images to your Docs and Slides." Perhaps it was easy for some, but I found it a little hinky at first. In other words, I found the directions at EdReach and at Google a little sketchy. Plus, the settings for the tool is buried in the 'research bar'. I realize that I am burying the lead here because... I actually love this tool and I think it could become a regular part of my blog posting and my students' writing lives. I love how I can research in Google and Google Scholar, look for images, cite stuff, change citation style. This would make it so much easier to write academic style essays to meet the demands of the common core. I am all for transparency of ideas as one of the prime values of informative, scientific, and academic writing. This tool makes it easier to gather, sum up, make sense of and share ideas, information, arguments--the "full catastrophe" in Kazantzakis's phrase. I am making a bit of a hash of this myself so see what you can make of it yourself.
Sometimes all it takes is a list to get you moving. In this case here is a list on how others have used Google Docs for his or her classroom. This is a k-12 centric, but as is often the case while your mileage may vary these are freely adaptable to formal and informal ed of all stripes. And a reminder--the question you should always ask first is this: what learning purpose and for whom? Then you bring out the repertoire with that audience in mind.
We need to show folks how to detect crap online. In this post the authors use 'questioning' as the prime tool for this. I love their first question: How do you know what you know? I also love how these questions cut both ways and allow us to be skeptical of others as well as our delusory selves. Handy! I think that I will have a whole lesson on how to use these questions in writing a research paper. There are lots of other tools here as well including the News360 Periscope extension and the Unsourced Chrome extension. They got it down now let's see if they got it right. Use in conjunction with Neil Postman's essay about BS/crap detection: http://criticalsnips.wordpress.com/2007/07/22/neil-postman-bullshit-and-the-art-of-crap-detection/
I found this to be a mini-course on how to increase personal connection from without and within. I liked the idea of 'growing' a network. Seems natural to me. It also reminds me of the productivity concepts--hard and soft landscape. Hard landscape is the must-do parts of any day, our hard promises--calendar dates, meetings, classes. These punctuate our day, but soft landscapes are more what this article is advocating--ways one could create a personal network, connections one might make to do that, and tools one might learn more about to build one's repertoire. Worth a look and worth adding to your soft landscape as you trek through your day. Keep hydrated.
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For those times when the best way to say it is through a poorly drawn comic. No watermarks! Your comics are yours.
What an awesome instructional post!
Keynote presentation from the EDEN Research Workshop, KU Leuven, Belgium, 22 October 2012... Wow! I don't even know the context for this keynote, but I think it is rich ecosystem with lots of deep niches for exploring. Teachers need to read this for the sake of their learners.
Via Ana Cristina Pratas
Experiment and improvise with this word cloud parser. Feed in the text, choose an analytical knife (gender, pos/neg, tonality) and you have a data analysis. It might be useless in actuality but the exploration and discovery of that might be a great learning tool. When I teach the analysis essay I find it is the hardest for my students to do. They have such a tough time because they do not understand a careful definition of analysis. The metaphor I use is a knife. It is a tool for parsing the meat of an essay and getting at the assumptions hidden there. I realize this is only one way of looking at text, but uClassify might help beginners to tease apart the knot of analysis. I took a web article (http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2012/11/23/harries-referencing-tools/) and did a uClassify analysis of positive/negative tone in it--75% positive. Perhaps students could do an in-class experiment--half know the analysis before they read it and half don't. How does this affect their comprehension of the text? I know this isn't very clean as an experimental design,but you might open up the idea of analyzing this way. You might also get learners to create their own 'classifiers' which I think is the real power of this site. Give it a go.
I haven't vetted this properly yet but the video is very appealing and it looks like I might have a morning to play with it over Thanksgiving. Gotta love the anticipation. This looks like fun for all ages. Mayge I can get a nephew or niece to play along.
"When you find something you want to view later, put it in Pocket." That is the former ReadItLater's new motto. More and more we are seeing these all-in-one systems that are hardware and software agnostic. Evernote and Dropbox spring to mind in my own personal use. Pocket is another. I have used this app before, but now I am ready to give it a second look especially since I am working to bring my iPad into my teaching workflow. With the advent of sites like IFTTT it is possible to tie all of your digital life together, but it is also true that adding new niches like this can be disruptive, too. For example, when and how will I review all the gathered pieces that this app brings in? Will some of it happen on the fly and others later? I have had similar issues with Diigo that I have settled by using that tool for very specific purposes, for example annotation, shared lists, group lists, and presentation. Will the same be true of Pocket? Will I use it for specific projects? Will I have a specific time daily for review? Will I keep everything, archive, or dump after looking. One thing is very certain--I won't be able to figure it out without trying it religiously for a couple of weeks. I will keep you posted on this little experiment and sample of one. Here is where I have Pocket installed: Desktop Mac Desktop PC iPad iPod Android phone Firefox Chrome IFTTT Pocket read/archived PDF's---> Dropbox Pocket read items--> Buffer Google Reader starred items--> Pocket YouTube vid marked watch later--> Pocket RSS feed (Cool Tools) --> Pocket FavTweet--> Pocket Pocket--> Instapaper (Kindle reading) NateSilver's 538 blog--> Pocket Release the hounds, Smithers! And let the iPad be Mission Control.
Five Stars in my 'handy-as-a-pocket-on-your-shirt'-o-meter. Amit Agarwal's newsletter, Digital Inspiration, truly is true to its title. Go to his website and sign up now. "You can use Dropbox as a Glacier client and any files that you upload to Dropbox will get saved in your Amazon Glacier Vault."
I tend to think that pRogramming is one of the "R's". This is such a delicously analog way into programming. Fun, have awesome fun with it. Then figure out how to cross the analog/digital boundary with some other skill. For example, I have seen teachers use 'paper blogs' to get students prepared for digital ones. Twitter=student notes in secret in class, Facebook=a bulletin board with 'pages', texts=envelopes pinned on a board. Let's all play. Last Sunday, I taught six kids of ages 5 to 7 how to program. “In what programming language?” you may ask. Well…I didn’t use a programming language, at least none that you know of. In fact, I...
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