Best Practices In Education | SLCN — Range from OK to astoundingly shallow… there’s definitely something happening in SL education, but does anyone have any idea what it is?
GAM3R 7H30RY — Not only an interesting read, but a truly innovative implementation of wordpress and whats became the commentpress plugin… I have to investigate the details of this more.
CommentPress — Another amazing find by Rev. Jim, Brian Lamb and others… contextual, nested blog comments… this partially solves a problem posed by multiple faculty this summer. Not synchronous, but fitting for some other projects.
First up was Sarah, who talked about photography, still images and video as evidenced by YouTube and Flickr:
You can view the incredibly cool video (”Metaphor Sandwich“)she made on YouTube that combines her photography skills with video (watch the knife):
Unfortunately I lost the chat window so I don’t have links to any of the products, but a shout-out to Amanda who gave an overview of the social music media phenomenon from traditional commerce to recommenders, Pandora, and my own favorite Last.FM:
And Shelly, who made a moving presentation using Flickr to share photos of her and her father who died a few years ago:
It was great not just because I could easily watch the presentations from my office in Alaska, but to share for a few moments the joy of the learning experience facilitated by social network media. Listening to Gardner’s facilitation and leading questions, catching the edges of the inside jokes, and watching the students making connections, synthesizing, and responding to questions on the fly… it was Learning 2.0 in all its occasionally glitchy glory.
I’ve really been struggling personally with the “where do I go from here” question… with so many necessary failures and so much time spent fighting the same old roadblocks institutionally and personally, this was a timely reminder of why I do what I do. Kudos to Gardner and his great students. I wish I could have stayed and watched the rest!
As someone Twittered, WikiMindMap is Wiked Cool… and it will soon be available as a piece of software anyone can run on their own server. A definite point in favor of running the MediaWiki engine (along with the insanely cool Wikipedia Presentation script).
I love how applying a visualization tool can illuminate even information that we think we already know, revealing connections ignored, overlooked, or minimized.
Compendium Institute — Another brainstorming, concept mapping, mindmapping tool. I don’t use them often, but when I do it’s usually a good experience. again via Scott-o-rino
In Technophilia, Virtual Communities and the World of Ends Dave Pollard brings up some interesting and real issues about the emerging communities facilitated by and wrapped up in social networks. But the most salient aspects of his argument are hogtied by fundamental fallacies.
First, the idea that “real community” is something different from “virtual community” based on the idea that in the former we are consumers and producers and the economy is driven by monetary interactions while in the latter we are just “people” doesn’t cohere. A more accurate way to look at it would be that communities are formed around advantages and benefits (gains) and these gains are at the heart of both kinds of community. In fact, there really isn’t a different kind of community at work in social networks as much as there is an artificial distinction– that can be useful– posed by manipulating the lens and differentiating between different kinds of similar benefits.
Second, the idea of the “natural”– which has a lot of resonance for me, not least because I have deep-seated conflicts about technology–can’t exclude technology as part of the natural world. Technology and nature are not opposite. Since the invention of the wheel, the lever, the first stick that was sharpened… technology is part of our natural world. Our “real” and “natural” communities, even the most physically place-based and earthy, all have integrated technology even if that integration comes in the shape that those communities take (and the contortions that they undergo) to avoid particular, ubiquitous technologies.
What we should be concerned with is not advancing the ill-conceived and mostly received ideas of competitive dualities like real and virtual communities and that which is natural and that which is technological… we should focus on how the integration of that natural human phenomenon called technology is integrated more and less painfully– and at lesser and greater cost (and I mean cost of all kinds here, not just specifically monetary) into our communities and how the resulting changes in community affect (by extending, damaging, enlarging, limiting, etc) how we live.
