About :: Why use Social Software?
H2O playlist items 1 - 6
Rationale
New tools for a “flat” world.
The Internet and the rapid exchange of information has changed the world we live in. Here are three quotes from Thomas Friedman’s popular book “The World is Flat” which addresses our changing world.
“If Wal-Mart were an individual economy, it would rank as China's eighth-biggest trading partner, ahead of Russia, Australia and Canada.”
“UPS has about 2% of the worlds GNP in the back of a truck.”
“Google is now handling about 1 billion searches per day.”
All of these amazing facts are a result of technological advances allowing for connected free flowing information. With all of theses changes shouldn’t our education change to keep pace?
Push vs. Pull
Traditionally school districts administration identified needs for professional development in a top down approach. These new web tools we will examine allow the end user to control and personalize the information they receive in order to meet their own specific needs.
Networked Learning
These tools are collaborative and encourage shared learning. It will be an opportunity for educators to practice “connectivism” and explore both its benefits and the shortcomings.
Open Source
Open source consists of decentralized communities working on a common product constantly improving the product and sharing those improvements with the community. Most of the software tools we will explore are created through this process. Hopefully if educators are exposed to this process and experiment with these tools they can apply open source principals to their own teaching to share and improve on their craft.
New Literacy
Today literacy is about more than just books. Schools have focused on text literacy for hundreds of years. Now with the Internet and the increase of information and the available media types today’s student needs to be more than simply text literate. There are several genres of literacy; media literacy, visual literacy, and information literacy just to name a few. Recent studies have shown that the average child spends between 5 to 6 hours consuming media daily with a little more than 1 hour spent reading and the majority of the time being spent with digital media. Our students are considered digital natives while we teachers are digital immigrants. It would be good for educators to venture into this digital world and be able to teach students how to learn, no matter what their future holds.
Objectives
Skills
The learner will:
- Download and install Firefox.
- Download and install Firefox search plug-ins.
- Download and install Firefox extensions.
- Open an account with an online RSS aggregator (bloglines), an on-line social bookmarking site (del.icio.us), and shared writing website (writely).
- Create a “subscribe to…” or “post to…” bookmarklet in the FireFox bookmarks tool bar folder.
- Identify websites with an RSS feed.
- Subscribe to a RSS feed.
- Search for RSS feeds.
- Create an on-line bookmark.
- Create a descriptive tag for an on-line bookmark.
- Search other users bookmarks using tags.
- Add a user to your del.icio.us network.
Concepts
- Name three “world flatters”
- Pulled vs. Pushed
- Explore concepts of connectivism.
- Define personal learning environment.
- Identify shortcomings with this type of new learning.
- Describe the difference between an directories (taxonomy) and tagging ("folksonomy")
