More from WCET 08

Well, I didn’t do a great job keeping up on the conference, so here’s a recap of some of the sessions that particularly resonated with me.

First of all, some links that were of interest:

• Digital Scholarship Lab: This website will direct you to at least 2 great projects Voting America (which is now integrated with Google Maps) and History Engine which allows students to use primary documents to discover history. Great stuff here! They also have a terrific website: Valley of the Shadow which almost excites me about history. Definitely a great site to take a look at.
• TinyUrl This will take a long, long url and create a smaller url for you that is easier to give to people or send via email. Says it will not expire or break.
• WorldCat I haven’t explored, but this is a global library. I think you have to pay to be a part of this library, but then you’d be sharing online library resources with thousands of others.
• Tumblr Kind of like a blog on steroids. This looks like a very resource-rich blog site. They say it is more like a scrapbook than “just” a blog.
• Informal Learning This is a very nice module on Informal Learning with great links if you have the time to work through it. There are more modules to browse at: MET Course Weblog
• The 2008 Horizon Report Haven’t had a chance to read the entire report, but it looks like a terrific resource which explains a lot of the newest technologies and talks about adoption times etc. Excellent reference for all educators.
• Pageflakes A very easy portal or homepage where you can add news, RSS feeds, images, weather, very similar to iGoogle pages, very friendly interface. Another similar website is Netvibes, but I think I like Pageflakes better.
• Sharepoint Server At least 2 universities mentioned using Microsoft’s Sharepoint to monitor projects and set deadlines and tasks online. Not sure how different it is from BaseCamp (another project management tool) but it is definitely worth looking into. If you are using this product, please let us know what you think! Overkill if you are sharing projects between only 4-5 people?

In general, WCET again did not disappoint. The networking was great, the sessions mostly good and there’s a lot to follow up and learn about.

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??