Maximizing Productivity

Sitka Harbor at night

While I’m a 100% advocate of working at a distance, I have to say that occasional face-to-face meetings really have a way of crystalizing the discussion and maximizing productivity.  This past week we met with content experts from around the globe and after months of working via audio/web conferencing our prior work really came together.  I wonder how much longer it would have taken had we not had this opportunity to meet together?  Something about eating lunch together, working and taking walk breaks, it’s all about the side conversations and personalities mixing together in ways that are difficult to reproduce online.  So, now I’m a 70% advocate for distance, and a 30% advocate for hybrid occasional real time, face-to-face meet-ups.  Very nice change of pace.  Glad we were able to pull it off.

Meanwhile, to catch up, we had a busy week at ASTE too.  You can find the presentation materials that Maureen and I gave at a presession entitled Breaking Through the Web (2.0) of Confusion at http://aste2009.pbwiki.com/ There are notes, resources, and our PPT on this website and it links to last year’s ASTE 08 presentation that Tina (UAA) and I gave.  So enjoy both resource pages.

Just a reminder too, for those asking, my Personal Learning Environment Map is updated and found at:  http://www.mindmeister.com/9002694 Had a few people ask about that again lately, so I thought I’d link it again.

The picture to the right (sadly only taken on a cell phone) has a caption created by bubblesnaps.com Kind of fun!  Check it out.

Personal Learning Environments

Pre-conference on PLEs WCET 2008

I’m at WCET and just completed the first session on PLEs. What are PLEs? Why do we care about this? In truth, Personal Learning Environments are really not ‘personal’ at all,in the sense that they involve all the co-workers, friends and resources that we gather to enhance our learning experience. However, they are “personal” since each of us gathers the technologies that help us do our jobs, gather our research and share information with others.

Collecting, sharing, analyzing, building by action– PLE is a verb, not a noun. PLE is really about who we are. The facilitators challenged the group by asking how teachers can presume to ‘teach’ if they themselves don’t have experience with the technologies that are now being used to share and connect people with similar interests, jobs, etc. They felt that our web presences also people know who we are–what does it mean not to have any web presence? What happens when I look for you on the web and there’s nothing there? Identity is now linked to the web.

This was a very rich session. The facilitators have provided their resources and links and activities at edtechpost

Some of the tools that were showcased and definitely worth further investigation included:

• Diigo- like delicious but with other features that might make drafting and publishing to a blog easier. Social bookmarking allows you to save your bookmarks on someone else’s server. Save your identiy and access your bookmarks. No longer trapped on a single computer. Share with other people. Tagging, keywords. Descriptive information is provided by *you* or by others. Can be corrupt. Scribe and annotate. Create groups and lists for your bookmarks. Add link to your blog. Share bookmarks.
• File Url and Dropbox — tools for sharing large files with others; free tools
• Pipes and Feed2js– Okay, this is pretty cool. Take a number of blogs and create an RSS feed that consolidates them together. This could have particular use for a team or group that maintain separate blogs, but you can read them all together.
• Scraping– was really interesting. Gathering data on the web and scraping it off a website into googlespreadsheet so that it can be repurposed and relinked. Great way to gather information from multiple locations which is dynamic and not have to keep updating it. Can’t say that I’d ever even thought about this before.
• Google Coop, Lijit– Creating your own social networks, bookmarks, websites and make them searchable. You can gather pertinent links and search the content, rather like creating your own mini-google collections.
• Wow, and plugins too were mentioned. No point in re-creating their great resource page here.

Kind of silly for me to not take advantage of their resources and be relinking here on my page– so I won’t do that, again check their resource website listed above. Suffice it to say that this was a stimulating session, their resources are excellent and I think Scott Leslie, Chris Lott and Jared Stein for a very worthwhile day.

Phew- Was it just the pre-session today??