education building

Following up yesterday on a smaller talk I did a few weeks back on tagging for university web applications, I was fortunate to be able to give a full one hour seminar on tagging for educators in SCoPE. Quite a hot topic these days what with all the Web 2.0 apps flying around out there, this presentation was part of a larger 3 week seminar on Social media in education. How tags can be used in an educational context was the main focus of the session which you should be able to listen to the full recording of here, via the elluminate service we used to record it. There was some great discussion questions and a few new services emerged on the radar that deserve some linkage.

Scholar

Blackboard Scholar is built right into the Blackboard Learning System, for easy integration of relevant, reliable resources and dynamic streams from Scholar, directly into the course.

Peerworks

Peerworks is an open source project that is building content classification tools to help online browsing, collaboration, and social discovery.

Both of these look to be useful applications for educators and both of them incorporate tagging into the user experience. It was also fun to share with educators from around the world, and meet some new people from my own back yard. One of the participants in fact resides a stones throw from my own office, the blog Data Designs from from Therese Weel’s was a welcome addition to my RSS reader. Always good to know there are fellow bloggers right here at SFU. (and yes, one post per month still allows me to call myself a blogger)

Update: Sept: 27.  This workshop has been cancelled due to lack of registrants.  aw shucks.  next time.

So I have been keeping this under wraps, what with so much going on this summer, and honestly, I didnt even really believe it was going to happen, but yes it is official. No getting out of it now. I received my conference material in the mail today for the upcoming Management Skills in Advanced Technology (MSAT) 20th Anniversary event.

I have been asked to present on the subject of blogs and social networking etc. The title of the talk I am giving is called; This is not your Daddy’s Internet! Blogs—Podcasts—Relationship Networking and will be filled with intersting case studies, useful examples, and some hands on activities to get people into it. This is the blurb.

Terms like “cyberspace”, and “information superhighway” were effective metaphors in the early days of the web, and were needed to convey the paradigm shift occurring because of this new form of communication. The ideas of asynchronous communication (email), massive media accessibility (p2p), and linking to create networks of content were foreign to most people and these terms provided a logical “bricks and mortar” basis upon which to build an understanding of the internet. They have also held back its progress ever since.

The web is less and less a place you go to – increasingly it comes to you. It is “live”, “immediate”, and “present”, using technologies such as cell phones and other mobile devices. At the same time, the activities people do on the internet are changing as tge implications of social software begin to seep into the mainstream. In the early days of the internet there was an implicit understanding that the internet was going to be the ultimate source of information (Wikipedia, check.), where you could find the answers to every question (Google, check.), and people would be hiding under the auspices of false identities – pseudonyms – to protect their identity and privacy. Barely a decade old, and it is all that and much more. Sites such as MySpace are becoming the corner store parking lots of our youth where you hang out with friends, gossip, flirt, and try to stand out from the crowd.