A Place to Consider Technology

What are your Online Presence, Digital Footprint and your online Lifestream? Increasingly our lives are connected to others, and by others, through the wired online world. These connections make up our online presence, digital footprint and our online lifestream. Could you go for one month without access to the web? One week? One day?

We all have an online presence. The digital artifacts about you and your life that can be found on the web through simple searches. By doing a simple Google search or a search of 123People Search you can find some of your current online presence. But this may not to be the entire picture.

A person’s “digital footprint” reflects how he or she actively participates in the digital universe, including use of the Internet and social networks, e-mail, cell phones, digital cameras and credit cards. Half of a person’s digital footprint is related to his or her individual actions, and the other half accounts for the so-called “digital shadow.” (John Gantz, IDC) Who is creating this shadow and what does it say about us?

Lifestreams are also referred to as social activity streams or social streams. These can include social networks (Facebook, Ning), blogs, Microblogs (Twitter), Instant Messaging (IM). Social network aggregators can collect and display your various lifestreams in one place. This can be thought of as your own personal RSS aggregator. Where could we find your lifestreams? How many unique streams do you have?

In this increasingly connected world we must be aware of and take care of our own personal lifestreams. I wonder what can be said about us through our digital footprint, digital shadow, and our various lifestreams?

The question of education and how we go about doing business is not trivial. There was a time when online learning, degree programs, certificates, and diplomas were seen as degree mills. They were viewed with skepticism by many and with contempt by a few. People joked with one another about “buying” their diplomas. But this is not really the case anymore.

Any serious college and university have some online presence. They offer face-to-face courses, online courses, as well as hybrid courses. It is almost impossible to find any university course that does not extend the learning experience with online interaction by students in a portal such as WebCT, Blackboard, Moodle, or Sakai. These same portals are finding homes in the brick and mortar high schools.

BestOnlineHighSchool.com lists 232 online high school opportunities for students in grades 9-12. Some of these virtual high schools have course offerings that the traditional school districts could purchase. Others are associated with school districts as an option for their regular student population. Others are independent public charter schools that mainly have an online presence. Most of these schools carry state accreditation so they can offer graduation diplomas.

Some recent studies seem to suggest that there are powerful benefits to online learning that are not being achieved through traditional face-to-face courses. Most of these studies specifically examined adult learning, leading some educational leaders to generalize these findings to adolescent learning.

So where will this move lead us 5, 10, 20 years down the road?

The past three weeks have been fast-paced, dizzying at times, frustrating, and inspiring. We have explored, used, and considered a huge number of collaborative tools that could helps us organize our own lives, stay connected to friends and colloquies, collaborate with peers, and just plain old waste time enjoying what the web has to offer in the way of diversions.

I hope that all of us have discovered something new and useful in the Web 2.0 world, either for ourselves or the classroom. We even had a chance to try our hand at video production – there are a few of you who may have missed your calling to become big time movie producers, but our students will be very lucky to have you in their classroom.

But now I reflect on the advantages in educational technology that we tend to think of as normal or expected for education today. We are all fairly confident that our schools will have either a computer lab or maybe even classroom sets of computers. We expect to be able to use document cameras, laptops, and/or data projectors to share presentations and media with the whole class. We expect that we will be able to communicate with many of our parents via email or text message. But let’s remember that this is not the norm everywhere.

The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project has set a goal to give every child a chance to experience technology supported learning through their “give one get one” program. Basically asking the developed world to buy a $300 laptop and they would donate a second to a child.

And just this week Africa just received it very first broadband cable connected it with high-speed access to the rest of the world. That is the first high speed undersea Internet cable for the ENTIRE continent.

So now it is your turn. Reflecting on your journey over the past three weeks, what do you take with you as you all begin to make your way into the teaching career? What impact has this experience had on your perspective? What hopes do you take with you as you leave our classroom? What sense have you been able to make out of our wild ride through new technologies that are aimed at supporting creativity, collaboration, and communication?

So now it is your turn.

As we have discovered, there are a lot of online tools that support creativity, collaboration, and communication. It is not just about the 3Rs anymore but the 3Cs as well. One could get lost and overwhelmed in all these web applications and cool tools. With a clear focues goal in the learning of our studnets and the careful selection of online tools, we can truly support learning in the classroom with technology.

We have seen quite a few choices. There was;

• Sue Summerfords’s List
• Judy Brown’s list
• Zotero referecne library
• Delicious social bookmarking
• Voicethread community
• Rubistar rubric creator
• Webposter creator
• Dweeber homework collaboration

Could these collaborative online tools be useful to you? To Students? How?

We have been talking a lot about the collaboration, communication, creativity, and resources available when Web 2.0 tools are used to support classroom learning – or even just learning in general. I have been able to make sense of some of these tools having a place in my own learning. The fact that you are reading this blog post about technology and learning means that I have incorporated blogs into how I learn, reflect, and interact with others. I keep up with my Google Reader every day as if it were my morning newspaper. Social Bookmarking has become the way that I search for web resources and share those resources. Zotero helps me track reference material. Skype is beginning to overtake my phone as a main communication device. GoogleDocs is how many of us collaborated with documents and presentations.

But what about some of the other tools? How can they be used effectively to support learning? What place do some of these have in teaching and learning?

I tried using VoiceThread to have a collaborative conversation with students. Now admittedly the content I used was a test and it was not very compelling. The thread was cute but did not have much substance.

Twitter has become something of a phenomenon. Ever since Oprah has joined Twitter it seems like the thing to do. Many of those who tweet measure themselves by “Here Before Oprah”. But does Twitter have some role to play in learning? Could I turn my students into throngs of “followers”? That sounds kind of cool – maybe.

How about social networking sites? A lot of places and professionals use LinkedIn. Others have tried a similar site called TappedIn. Many businesses and organizations are invading FaceBook. Even Education Studies at UCSD now has a FaceBook site. But what will this do for us? What do our students and alumni want from an organization’s Facebook or Twitter account – anything? Nothing?

Let’s try an experiment.

For any of the current students or alumni from the EDS program that are out there. Check out the UCSD Education Studies Facebook page. Let us know what you would like to see here, what would keep you coming back?

Would you add us to your friend’s list? Visit the page and let us know.