New Media Is Going Mainstream - figures from USA quoted from podcasting news blog…
“Internet media is moving to the mainstream, according to research from Deloitte & Touche:
* 38% of Americans are watching TV shows online.
* 36% use their cell phones for entertainment.
* 54% of Americans use social networking sites, chat rooms or message boards to socialize.
* 45 percent have a profile on a social networking site.
* Online ads are second only to TV ads when it comes to consumers saying what has the most impact on their buying habits (65% versus 85% respectively).
More and more people are becoming Internet content publishers, too:
* 54% of those surveyed said they are creating their own entertainment content by editing photos, videos or music.
* 45% are making the content for others to see.
* 32% think of themselves as “broadcasters’ of their own media.”
This Nokia viral video does a nice job of highlighting essential characteristics of web2.0; the use of “user created content” as a style, and pushing boundaries of traditional advertising
Quoted from the myedna blog: “The myedna professional networking service is on schedule for launch on Nov 27th as me.edu.au. The first release will allow early users to build a detailed personal profile, indicate their professional interests, and link to colleagues who have similar interests. Release 2 will give users file space to share resources and develop more communication links with their me.edu.au ‘colleagues’. This new service under the edna banner will be complemented by edna Groups and edna Links, which will feed directly into me.edu.au. Users will have their own address for the site in the form jbrown.me.edu.au”
This is a further online/web2 development for edna - Education Network Australia - Australia’s “online resource collection and collaborative network for the education and training community”, who already invite participants to share their experiences by creating a digital stories, sending photos or blogging with tags for del.icio.us, Technorati and Flickr, or contribute to the Frappr map and/or Voice Thread. They offer podcasts, forums and RSS feeds to discussion areas… a web2-rich environment that I have enjoyed delving into regularly for discussions and podcasts from featured educators.
He says “I highly doubt we’ll see informal learning networks take over formal accreditation as measure of competence (though, in many small networks, this is happening as a person’s reputation may well exceed their formal education, but it is not a model that appears to be transferable broadly to the rest of society. The expectation in reputation-based accreditation of competence is founded in recognition of peers - hence the emphasis on small networks. A peer may hire an expert based only on reputation. Someone who does not have familiarity with the field with likely hire based on accredited degrees).”
…implications for the learning that happens within tertiary institutions, and the growth of small networks.
The other (welcome) sidetracking diversion over the last week or so has been getting to grips with version 1.0 of Flock. While there are bugs or annoying little aspects (like all feed folders displaying open as default), the array of rich media functionality gives the user plenty to play with.
I have brought my Flickr, Youtube, Facebook and Twitter feeds into the “people” sidebar. It is interesting to see how my use of these various social network sites/tools changes when they sit permanently to the side of the browser. I find the use is more directed at the messages I have for particular people, rather than a time wasting browsing of facebook. Although you cant work in the sidebar, or a pop-up, so anew tab with the facebook or twitter page opens. Still, its a great browser, and seems to be much faster than previous versions - a common complaint about flock.
I have been spending much of my extra time playing around with two new services. Tumblr in particular has me fascinated because it is such a simple and effective way of making notes, adding audio, video, images, quotes, as well as bringing in feeds from delicious, vox, twitter and other feeds.
There are a collection of themes available, but i would like more differentiation between (say) my delicious links, which are not labeled as such, and straight links, or (most especially) twitter entries which in my theme are large, bold and underlined… Have yet to discover how to easily custom appearance, which after all is an essential aspect of creating a space/service that I want to live with. Certainly an easy quick-blogging tool, and one i will persist with for a while. But how to create a community? Seems to be a private multimedia journal rather than social media.
The mail this morning included two unsolicited mailouts for the kiwi bloke - with the usual range of tool shed hardware and spring gardening paraphenalia - and both mentioned the nature of the kiwi DIY attitude. I quite liked the transfer of do-it-yourself to learners and learning, (and I’m sure it’s been used before), but DIY learning has a nice ring to it. It captures that desire people of all ages have to find things out for themselves - informal learning - in the same way that many of us are driven to create, change and restore furniture, shelves, gardens, cars…
DIY learning - driven by the user and largely uncontrolled. In the case of school age DIY learners, able to be supported by experts and the provision of the required resources at the appropriate moment.
Stephen Downes points to a blog entry by Gary Stager that offers criticism of the use of Web 2.0 tools in the classroom. Gary Stager says that many teachers eagerly using and advocating these tools have no sense of the history of school reform, and certainly no grasp of the grounds for school reform.
“Like 25 years ago with Logo, some creative teachers today have become smitten with Web 2.0 technologies. They do creative things with the tools themselves and engage kids in interesting projects. They too can’t understand why colleagues do not share their enthusiasm. These early adopters are great evangelists for the technology and hope that their work will result in school reform.”
He provides a list of criticisms worthy of discussion in NZ schools/staffrooms, including “the educational Web 2.0 community has… scant knowledge of existing school reform literature… one gets the sense that proponents of Web 2.0 in education are discovering educational theories here and there and then applying these ideas to the new tools.”
George Seimens in a blog last week (Networks, Ecologies, and Curatorial Teaching) introduced a new (for me) metaphor for the role of the teacher in a networked learning environment; that of the curator.
He describes the teacher as curator as someone who “exists in the artifacts displayed, resources reviewed in class, concepts being discussed. But she’s behind the scenes providing interpretation, direction, provocation, and yes, even guiding. A curatorial teacher acknowledges the autonomy of learners, yet understands the frustration of exploring unknown territories without a map. A curator is an expert learner. Instead of dispensing knowledge, he creates spaces in which knowledge can be created, explored, and connected. While curators understand their field very well, they don’t adhere to traditional in-class teacher-centric power structures. A curator balances the freedom of individual learners with the thoughtful interpretation of the subject being explored. While learners are free to explore, they encounter displays, concepts, and artifacts representative of the discipline. Their freedom to explore is unbounded. But when they engage with subject matter, the key concepts of a discipline are transparently reflected through the curatorial actions of the teacher.”
Nice mashup of teacher as expert/teacher as guide.
This month marks a year’s progress in the development of Wikiversity, “a community for the creation and use of free learning materials and activities.”
Wikiversity is a multidimensional social organization dedicated to learning, teaching, research and service. Its primary goals are to create and host free content, multimedia learning materials, resources, and curricula for all age groups in all languages, and to develop collaborative learning projects and communities around these materials.
A major part of Wikiversity learning is being organized around Learning Projects, collections of pages devoted to the learning of a specific topic or family of topics. Because wiki technology promotes collaborative webpage editing, collaborative wiki editing projects can be thought of as “learning projects” — participants learn while they edit wiki pages and explore topics of interest. Example - digital information literacy in the social sciences portal.
