Introducing or teaching social media to newbs

I think the big takeaway message from the last class (which really just reiterated previous class discussions) is that when you’re teaching people how to use social media, you need to make sure that your learners understand that they have to take responsibility for their actions. They need to be taught how to use proper ‘netiquette, understand ‘nethics, and how to protect (or kinda protect) themselves.

Apps for America

Talk about civic involvement! Check out the Apps for America contest page.

Web 2.0 conference

Well, I had a lot of fun in the exhibit hall with Jeff and David. We ran into Brian and Lance there and they pointed us to a really cool product, OER Commons (which Tai mentions in his blog). I really liked that one a lot because after one of the reading assignments from my 801 class, I’ve been thinking a lot about pre-existing materials. They have an enormous database of freely available materials for education. Also, the lady was really nice and obviously cared deeply about her project.

The product that I really dug was gooseGrade. It’s “crowd-copyediting.” Great for students to improve their English if they copyedit each other’s assignments, but also great for anyone who’d love to have input on their writing skills. I wonder… Does this work for whatever language? I imagine that it could as far as the users actually inputting corrections and/or responding to them, but that the badge and their “grading” dialog box would need to be translated.

There was a bunch of other neat stuff there, but I don’t want to ruin anyone else’s chances of reporting on it.

E. Wagner podcast

Listening to all the sound clips from my fellow students regarding Dr. Wagner’s presentation was very interesting. Trying to put a bunch of them together to make an audiofile made it even more interesting. Ty and I tried to focus on the bright side of the future, and we therefore took some of what people said out of context and repurposed it.

Here is the link to the podcast. I hope you like my favorite photo of Mars.

It’s not splooge, it’s web 2.0!

Well, last night’s class was a lot of fun. But when isn’t it? I mean, my fellow students totally rock. We feed off each other and in a good way (we’re not co-cannibals, we’re co-conspirators).

There were a couple of things in our reading (pdf) and our class discussions that came up that really hit home for me. One thing, in particular, was about the reading we did and the concept of “create, communicate, collaborate.” I found validation in the section Technology in Education: Looking at Fiction to Find Real Possibilities. Not just in my thoughts that the arts and the sciences feed off each other, but in that web 2.0 is about user-generated content.

Ok, now that I’ve repeated myself. I will go further. One of the hurdles that I’ve had to get over is that I used to think of blogs as internet splooge. I thought that blogs were a bunch of people mentally masturbating and that I needed to keep myself clean by staying clear of them.

As the world has transitioned from web 1.0 to web 2.0, my analogy grew to see that there are internet voyeurs and internet exhibitionists. Hey, man, that’s fine. But bloggers were the consummate exhibitionists. By nature I am a voyeur–that is, I am a lurker.

Over time, as the blogosphere grew, I found blogs that I really liked–my opinion of them grew and the splooge analaogy diminished. Yet I could still passively consume them (i.e., be a voyeur).

Well, last week I felt like I got caught. No. “Busted” would be a more appropriate word. I got busted, and my voyeurism days are over.

During class discussion, Dr. Foreman mentioned that people often read without commenting. Jeff, on the other hand, protested that he expected more comments. During class, I cringed about this, so I commented on his post (during class). I apologized that I hadn’t said it, but my comment said that I thought it was funny and relevant. He moderates his posts and the emails he gets automatically send his phone a text, so when he got a text he was prompted to look. Of course, he related this experience to the class and we all had a good laugh. Web 2.o meets F2F. It was a good example of how all this technology can still be used during class and not be off-topic or irrelevant.

And it’s not splooge.

This is a great segue to my next topic. I’m glad that our reading talks about “user-generated content.” Yes. Web 2.0 is about user-generated content. Jeff generated content; I generated content in response. But when it comes to education, you have to think about this when you think about web 2.0–how do you use it for education?

You can’t just splooge web 2.0 all over people–you have to think of it as a tool. In what instances will you be able to use this tool in order to best generate understanding about information? In what instance do you think this will transform information to knowledge? How will these tools instill not only knowledge but wisdom?

What do you think?