The Wikipedia definition: "A blog (a contraction of the term "Web log") is a Web site, usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse-chronological order. "Blog" can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog."
Blogs enable you to share online your thoughts, pictures and videos publicly. They are free (amazing) and have wide ranging applications for education, work and personal sharing.
For example, I am sharing pictures I took at the Hay Estate in Newbury, NH last summer. You can see the sculpture exhibition there and my son and daughter. Now, instantly, you all know something about the Hay Estate and my children. You also now know my daughter loves cats.
The Changing Nature of Knowledge - George Siemens (video)
Siemens on Knowledge Part I (video)
Siemens on Knowledge Part II (video)
"Gonzalez (2004) describes the challenges of rapidly diminishing knowledge life:
“One of the most persuasive factors is the shrinking half-life of knowledge. The “half-life of knowledge” is the time span from when knowledge is gained to when it becomes obsolete. Half of what is known today was not known 10 years ago. The amount of knowledge in the world has doubled in the past 10 years and is doubling every 18 months according to the American Society of Training and Documentation (ASTD). To combat the shrinking half-life of knowledge, organizations have been forced to develop new methods of deploying instruction.”"
"Principles of connectivism (Siemens article):
Learning and knowledge rests in diversity of opinions.
Learning is a process of connecting specialized nodes or information sources.
Learning may reside in non-human appliances.
Capacity to know more is more critical than what is currently known
Nurturing and maintaining connections is needed to facilitate continual learning.
Ability to see connections between fields, ideas, and concepts is a core skill.
Currency (accurate, up-to-date knowledge) is the intent of all connectivist learning activities.
Decision-making is itself a learning process. Choosing what to learn and the meaning of incoming information is seen through the lens of a shifting reality. While there is a right answer now, it may be wrong tomorrow due to alterations in the information climate affecting the decision."
Those of us at CCSNH who are advocates of the critical importance of online learning, social networking (Facebook), using a constantly updated online CCSNH knowledgebase to support students and faculty, the essential nature of technology skills for all students and people who work at CCSNH, career networking sites (Linkedin), etc. are constantly dealing with faculty who are advocates of outdated learning. We are appalled to hear people say students don't need to know technology, online learning is a fad, and social networking is a risky thing to be avoided. Faculty who like small courses dominated by lecture and some group discussion are often hard to persuade that students need to be completely conversant with technology, need to master networking skills and have to become adept at collaboration, sharing, group work, building, communicating with technology, building networks to draw upon for social and professional reasons or they will not be prepared for the 21st century work place or life in this age of connected learning.
The fact that knowledge is doubling every 18 months should be enough to help faculty understand that major change is underway and what students will need to be successful is now very different. Some faculty are preparing students for a world that no longer exists. Some teachers are stuck in other era and outmoded ways of teaching.
CCSNH is a learning organization, but within it are many faculty, teaching in their own silos, who are not aware of the connected nature of learning in 2009 or what students need to be successful in the workplace. Students have a richness of connections in their personal life - cell phone, text messaging, instant messaging, gmail, Facebook, Myspace, computer technology, Blackboard, video chat, videogames, , AOL chat, online dating, Google, Flickr - online pictures, Youtube, etc. When they encounter a course taught by faculty in a sequential, read the textbook, take quizzes, write a paper, get a grade manner - they are not interested, not engaged, are bored by lack of technology or richness of content and often drop the course or worse yet, drop out of the college.
I like the video Jeff posted so much that I added it here to future reference:
RSS makes it so much easier to follow subjects of interest without having to go back to the website frequently to view new information. RSS enables you to see what has changed automatically with a feed of new information sent directly to your computer.
I have not been using RSS until this course, but now see the power of it. I have been following Guy Kawaski's Change the World blog for about a year, but now realize I can subscribe to a feed of updates to his blog.
One of the great challenges of the Internet Age is the overwhelming amount of information available and how to manage it in a coherent way that allows us to organize and find information. RSS is one tool for managing the overwhelming task of staying current with new developments in areas of professional or personal interest. Along with helpful Web tools like Delicious for organizing bookmarks, sharing them with friends and making them accessible from any computer, RSS enables new information to be fed directly to your computer without the need to navigate to each individual website to see new information. Also, RSS feeds provides only newly posted to a website. You can also subscribe to subsets of a Website such as the sports page of an online newspaper.
In the work world of CCSNH, we are constantly dealing with information overload, having to learn new technology or acquire new information quickly while managing the daily stream of emails, creating website updates, learning the nuances of new versions of Blackboard, managing the online knowledgebase and responding to endless emails. We quickly adopt anything that helps us manage information overload and will now use RSS for updates from many work related Websites.
The World is Flat is a best selling book that should be required reading for all educators. What are the skills that students need to thrive in a flat world? What is a flat world and why do we all need to be aware of its implications? I was in Dallas recently and marveled at daily trains going by the hotel composed of hundreds of rail cars carry containers labeled with the 4 feet high word of each container: CHINA.
The World is Flat by Tom Friedman is also a Youtube video of the author talking about the pervasive impact of the Internet and high speed cable connections that have made the world a small place, encouraged world wide collaboration and business, information sharing, and migration of jobs in ways that have dramatically changed the world in a very short span of time.
The video presentation itself is an example of the power of Youtube media sharing to educate and inform. We can do a search and instantly see Tom Friedman talking about the concepts within his best selling book. Youtube was started as a way for friends to share videos they had made. From that small beginning it has grown to a huge enterprise. The original developer sold it for mega millions and there is a huge amount of high quality educational content available instantly for no cost.
Also, MIT decided to make all its courses freely available on the Web in an effort to advance science and technology more rapidly. MIT also makes significant events such as Tom Friedman's presentation at MIT available as streaming video on the Web.
In addition, sites like Facebook enable people to connect easily to friends, family, work associates and people from high school and colleges. It also enables easy sharing of pictures, video, weblinks, instant messages, private messages, public postings and many other technology tools for social networking.
I use the site Flickr for sharing photos. For $25 a year, one can upload an unlimited number of digital photos that can be shared publicly or privately. The interface is user friendly and well designed. This site was created by a husband and wife who wanted to share family pictures. They sold it for mega millions to Yahoo.
The pictures are from the December ice storm that knocked out the electricity for 400,000 PSNH customers. Note the food outside of the supermarket to keep it cold!
My son, who works in NYC as a Web developer for a large international company, introduced me to Delicious a couple of years ago. I downloaded links from my work and home computer to the Delicious site. It's been a great way to organize websites and to have access to those bookmarks from any Internet connection. Prior to using Delicious, I'd constantly be searching my home computer for links stored on my work computer and vice versa. Now this web tool makes access to my stored bookmarks from any computer but also enables easy organizing by tagging each bookmark into categories. It's a good example of a powerful, free, Internet based tool that can be used by students and faculty to help organized the overwhelming amount of information available on the Internet. This excellent Youtube video (you can find it by doing a Youtube search for social bookmarking) explains quicky and clearly how Delicious works.
The problems associated with the ice storm, bursting water pipes, cars that won't start, dangerous driving and extreme cold along with the start of the semester made for a difficult start to the course for me. I am always advocating that students not procrastinate in an online course and now am feeling the anxiety of being behind.
In addition, Sharon and I have been working on a new program, eStart, which is a collaboration with the online high school in Exeter that just started last January and the Community College System of NH to offer online college courses to high school students for dual credit - high school and college credit for the same course. The collaboration has been problematic and difficult. Their systems and ours do not mesh, their registration process is not consistent with the college semester registration timing and there are endless details to resolve.
I have had difficulty organizing all the links and loading some of the technology like Skype. I loaded it but the sound does not work on my computer.
It would be helpful to have an assignment schedule on one document. I have spent a lot of time searching for things and more explanation of how to do some of the tech tasks would be helpful.
I highly recommend the bookmark organizing site Delicious as a way to manage all the links in this course.
I am currently running to catch up with everyone else.
The age of social networking collaboration is upon us, but many teachers are completely unaware of its existence.
For example, Facebook is used pervasively by college students and provides a richness of contacts and communication with friends, family, social and work connections and former friends from high school and college. It is a place of powerful connections and constant inputs of new technology, new applications, new ways to connect and communicate.
However, most CCSNH faculty have no Facebook account, no idea of how it works, no concept of the richness of content their students experience daily before attending a flat, dull, hierarchical, sequential presentation of information in their traditional classrooms.
At NHTI, many faculty only know of Facebook as the subject of a presentation by law enforcement about the dangers of being too public with your private information. There has been no presentation of the power and richness of Facebook as a social networking tool that enables students to fully experience Web 2.0 tools that they will use in their work and personal lives constantly.
The lecture method of teaching developed during the Middle Ages when textbooks were hand written and so expensive that only the university could afford one for the instructor to use as the basis of lectures to the students. That archaic and ineffective method of teaching hangs on 500 years later, but the Web 2.0 era is gradually eroding ineffective teaching methods.
My son, who works as a Web developer in NYC, taught me how to use Facebook. He has about 300 friends in his account - most are high school and college friends and people he is networking with in his personal and work life in NYC. He is fully aware that networking is the way to connect with jobs in the Web 2.0 economy and is also using LinkedIn to build his professional network (http://www.linkedin.com).
In addition, Pay Attention reveals the richness of content in students' personal life compared to the lack of richness in most college courses.
With 13,000,000 people in his social/political network, Barack Obama's election is a very good example of the power of Internet driven networks. His campaign uses technology effectively to define his position on issues and raise more money and faster than any other candidate in history. His victory is in part a tribute to the power of Web 2.0 technology tools to communicate, collaborate and focus income and expense on states and issues that had the most influence on the outcome of the election.
The Wikipedia definition:
