Technologies and Late Adopters

One of the blogs that I regularly read is the Freakonomics Blog written by the authors of the book by the same title.

A couple of weeks ago, Steven Levitt asked for advice from his readers from someone who is a "chronically late adopter" of technologies. His orginal blog post along with all the comments is at http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/09/11/advice-for-a-chronic-late-adopter/

Today, Levitt's blog post highlighted those suggestions that he felt were the best. You can find this post at http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/09/25/salvation-for-a-chronically-late-adopter/ It is an interesting read and I wondered what members of our class would recommend if asked about the those emerging technologies that merit adoption? ....still the digital immigrant....Lois

Better Blogging

As part of our Emerging Instructional Technology class each of us is responsible for posting regularly to our individual blogs as well as finding blogs in our own areas of interest to follow. For example, Patricia noted in her blog that she had finally found a math blog to follow, Sarah D has found a blog to follow that relates to corporate training, and Steve is following a rapid e-learning blog. So what makes for effective blogging? Obviously reading other blogs is one way.

Recently I ran across this posting from Sue Waters , who details a project called 31 days to better blogging which can be found at http://aquaculturepda.edublogs.org/31-day-blog-project/ which has a daily task aimed at taking the newbie blogger to an accomplished blogger.

The leader of this project, Darren Rowse is the force behind the problogger website and also has a video blog that he posts to weekly. Take a look at his suggestions for ways of improving the blog experience at http://www.problogger.net/archives/category/video/


Thought everyone would enjoy reading more about these tasks and challenges....still the digital immigrant...Lois

Value of Social Networking and Web2.0 tools

Social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace have become an important tool of the "Millennials" quest for social connectios and community. As educators wrestle with how to tap into where this digital generation is coming from, questions arise about whether these tools have any true educational value. I would argue there is another question that we digital immigrants need to be asking -- how these tools have changed the way in which the digital natives think, learn, and interact with one another. I've come across a number of blog posts looking at Web2.0 tools and the endless list of gadgets that have been developed to promote this connectivity.

Sue Waters from Australia writes about Twitter as a micro-blogging tool and provides more evidence about the importance of these tools in connecting people in a community as well as pushing the edge of the envelope about blogging. See this post from her blog at :
http://aquaculturepda.edublogs.org/2007/08/06/is-twitter-shifting-blogging-to-a-new-phase/

For a number of semesters I've been thinking about the importance of interactivity in instructional technology applications that foster a learning community. Perhaps Twitter and other micro-blogging tools are the first step in building an interactive learning community.

Let me know what you think....still the digital immigrant...Lois

Notes: Logos from Facebook at http://www.facebook.com, MySpace at http://www.myspace.com, and Twitter at http://twitter.com