I have a Facebook account that I read five or six times a week in the summer and rarely during the school year. Sometimes I hit the "like" button, occasionally repost a photo of my sons, send or receive messages and pokes from my husband, and one time I accidentally traded some "instant" messages with a friend. Over the last few years I've created accounts for twitter, edmodo, tumbler, wordpress, youtube, linkedin, pd360 and various other accounts that I can't think of right now. I don't remember posting in any of those accounts, but I sometimes get auto-generated messages from them saying, "where are you?" or" so and so wants to connect with you." So I'm not a leader in Web 2.0 technologies. (I just googled "web 2.0 technologies" and read the wiki article so I wouldn't sound like a total idiot.) But I do suspect I am a leader when compared to my peers at my high school or even in my county--which is kind of scary.
Which brings me to the question about what I hope to learn from this course...
Several points in the Shirky book really made sense to me. I'm kind of like the scribes of the 15th century. Over the years, I've performed an essential service to my students and their growth and journey to literacy, but with every passing year, I inch closer to obsolescence. Instead of a riding the tsunami of technological changes over the years, I've allowed myself to wade in stagnant water. I've started a class website each year for the past four years but never made the website live. I talk about the importance of 21st century skills to my seniors, but I haven't given them the opportunity to practice them in the classroom. So I think like the scribes, I'm the tradition that's being ignored except by the faithful pleaser student. I want to be a leader in Web 2.0 technologies. Although at this moment I may be at what Mr. Shirky calls "the cognitive limit of Web interactivity," I expect this class is the beginning of real literacy for me. I look forward to acquiring new tools and new confidence to use them and share them to my future students.
Just curious: Why have you created the various accounts but not used them? Were you in workshops or other settings that encouraged you to create them?
ReplyDeleteAnd yes ... this class is a great place for you to explore and figure out what it will mean to you. :)
I hear about them through a colleague or reading online. I heard about tumbler from students while sitting at my classroom computer one day while we were talking about FB and how the county tries to block social networking sites. The kids told me that they really enjoyed tumbler. Apparently the county is way behind the kids; Although I couldn't access FB at school, we were able to pull it tumbler and sign me up for an account. That's how I found Spotify. Unfortunately, I find it difficult to keep up with so many accounts, so I let them sit.
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