ETC 2010
I'll be doing a dog-and-pony show tomorrow about Web 2.0 tools and Desire2Learn, at ETC 2010 (Twitter feed here), although it's not that specific - I'll be using the LMS as a homebase rather than leveraging the benefits of D2L, keeping it LMS agnostic as my co-worker suggested.
The keynote for the conference is Will Richardson, which no doubt will talk about a lot of the same issues that I'm talking about - mainly because he's been an influence on my thinking as a classroom educator and this Web 2.0 tools. In looking around at his approach, and what his likely keynote will cover, I want to be able to add to what I've learned from the classroom experiments I've run. Unfortunately, it's a lot of the same things he's learned. So I'm struggling with how I'll be able to add value or build on his keynote, other than my natural grace and charm. And great moustache. I've got a couple hours on the train/subway/bus tomorrow morning to think about it, so maybe I'll have a moment of brilliance? I suspect I'll trim my theory portion of the show and get more hands-on with the different tools and what I've found from using them.
The hashtag will be #etc2010conf - so follow it for more information.
Netvibes
I've been playing with Netvibes, after Howard Rheingold's rave review of the site's ability to help make sense of information abundance. It's taken a while for me to cobble my sites together, and I'm still working through some more advanced ideas with the tool (integrating Reader alerts with it). I guess oneof the start up costs have been the time it's taken to find all the feeds and add them to my Netvibes desktop. Previously I had worked with the Windows Desktop widget for RSS feeds that did an OK job - although it forced me to use Internet Explorer. I never really got into Google Reader, much like how I got into (and out of wave) after the fact. I like the idea of distributing my identity around a couple of sites, not only for redundancy, but for privacy issues as well.
Now that I've got a lot of feeds working into it - I feel like a quick glance and I have a brief understanding of what's going on, and I think this sort of aggregation has a nice element of serendipity to it. Often I click on a posting I want more information about, click once or twice, and find something related (or entirely unrelated).
Cooped In With Audio Tracks
I've been playing with the Aviary Online Garage Band style web application called Audio Editor and have been cranking out some neat quick atmospheric items. While it takes a bit of fiddling to get good results, if you're looking to craft a fifteen second introduction theme, like the one on Howard Rheingold's videos, then this is a free way to do it. If you spend $25 to $50 on a sample kit you could put together a pretty decent intros and outros for videos or interludes.
It's fairly intuitive, drag a track to the timeline then add another couple. Add effects, twiddle virtual knobs, and away you go.
Another similar project, although definitely slanted towards electronic music, is hobnox. In some ways hobnox seems more organic, plug the tone bank or 808 clone into a few pedals and dump it into the mixer, then the amp.
So you can add a little pizazz to your videos, which if the content is good, you'll be able to make them closer to a professional production.
Riding the Wave of Crowds
There's a lot of talk out there amongst y'all about distributed learning. Considering that we're on the web and all, that's a fairly insightful statement. Crowd sourcing was an interesting concept that I hadn't heard about before, of course I'm not up to date on my marketing theories. I started thinking about how this is partially a business to individuals relationship and how it really emphasizes the power of crowds. Of course, marketing has always been about public opinion and (in my opinion) the power of many to influence.
Originally I read crowd sourcing as crowd surfing, which in my head, could describe the way individuals survey ideas on the web. Pick and choose from search results, go on facebook and ask your network of people questions, search on twitter for tweets about it, read wikipedia - you get the idea. Anyways, like a crowd surfer - you ride the crowd like a wave, eventually crashing to the floor when you have enough information to make a concrete connection to reality again - whether that's to buy a product, engage in a service, or not do any of that at all.
I like that description of how online activities work sometimes. Plus it's a nice tie-in to edupunk.