Learning in a Connected Age...

…requires that we share our knowledge. That is why organizations need to encourage blogging, social networking, and collaboration.

When I began teaching in the early 1990′s I learned about best practices from inservices and my immediate colleagues. Occasionally, I would read a book that contained pearls of wisdom for the classroom teacher, but for the most part my ability to access knowledge of my profession was limited and controlled by where I taught.

Since the dawn of the internet, and more recently the social web, I have been able to transform my teaching in ways that were impossible prior to the free and easy access of information that the social web provides. I now gain most of my knowledge of best practices from my professional learning network, which has had the added benefit of motivating me to be an even better teacher. I am now free to learn from educators all over the world at any time of the day.

This freeing up of information is why organizations need to embrace blogging and the voice of their employees. It can be a transformative and motivational act for organizations to “lose control”.

image source:

http://www.sxc.hu/photo/925147

Dipity-More than a Timeline (or how social networks work)

This summer I found out about a great online interactive timeline named Dipity. My original thought was that Dipity would be a cool tool to have students work collaboratively on timelines. Pretty cool stuff. Well, a few weeks ago I read a tweet from Vicki Davis, of the Coolcatteacher Blog, about a post entitled Dipity Do Da--An Interactive Collaborative Timeline To Track Wiki Contributions from Beth Kanter's Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media. What I found out was that Dipity was a whole lot more than just an interactive collaborative timeline. It also had the capability to track your personal contributions on wikis, blogs, Flickr, Twitter, and other web 2.0 sites.

I then created a timeline of my Tweets from Twitter (I know for you non Twitterers out there that sounds utterly ridiculous) and my American Cultures 2.0 blog posts. It provides me with another way to view my online posting habits. Take a look:


Of course, I love Dipity for the potential it creates in collaborating on class material. Here's a timeline I just began creating for topics we will be studying this year. The timeline is very incomplete because my plan is to have the students fill it in as we progress throughout the school year.


Finally, besides sharing the possibilities of Dipity, my intention is also to show those who are unfamiliar with the learning potential of social networks how they can be used for good, and not evil. I monitor Twitter most days. Usually it takes no longer than a minute or two, but on some days I find nuggets of great information that take me to other places on the web. This happens because I choose to follow people on Twitter that share interesting resources and information. For example, I know that Vicki Davis is a minefield of great resources so, of course, I follow her. On August 9th she simply shared an interesting post she read about Dipity and linked to the post. Since Vicki's tweet interested me I clicked on the link and found Beth Kanter's blog post about using Dipity to track wiki contributions. The rest is history, and now you are learning about Dipity, Twitter, Vicki Davis, and Beth Kanter. Talk about virtual networking!