Real Time Internet for Passion-Based Learning

My presentation/hands on session for Free ELearning Conference Appalachain State University, Boone, North Carolina July 15

http://lts.appstate.edu/conference-sessions

Since then Google+ has swept me away and added an entirely new dimension to what the real time internet looks and feels like.

 

 

Real Time Internet for Passion-Based Learning

                                                                 Jan Herder #FLC11

 

A MEDIA ECOSYSTEM

 

What does the Real Time Internet ‘Feel’ Like?  How do I step in and check it out? Is there a way to manage what I am learning on line? What about the learning?  I’d like to see where learning is ignited and the wealth of world information can be found. I’d like to see my students find their passion and become life long learners. How do I do this?

 

Yesterday an article came out (great timing for this session. ) Many thanks to Angela Maiers, Amy Sandvold, Lisa Nielsen, and George Couros, and Steve Hargadon

Nine Tenets of Passion-Based Learning:  

●     REACH OUT TO THE DISENFRANCHISED

●     SHOW RELEVANCE TO LIFE OUTSIDE SCHOOL

●     INDOCTRINATE PASSION INTO THE SYSTEM.

●     TRY USING THE SCHOOLWIDE ENRICHMENT MODEL

●     DIGITAL MEDIA IS KEY

 

this one is key to my technique:

●     TAP INTO THE WISDOM OF YOUR TRUSTED PEERS.

 

Social media and Personal Learning Networks (PLNs) are necessary. Teachers need to publish their innovative work and share it with their personal learning networks. It’s also important for teachers to help students get connected to PLNs via social media.

 

●     BECOME A DIGITAL CITIZENS

●     PASSION IS INFECTIOUS

 

and their number 9:

●     CONNECT WITH PARENTS

http://mindshift.kqed.org/2011/07/nine-tenets-of-passion-based-learning/ 

 

Which I would add:

●     10--FOLLOW YOUR PASSION.

 

A variety of strategies exist for integrating new learning paradigms: social media, the immersive internet and collaborative learning.   And if you are like me it is all very overwhelming--exciting, inspired--but difficult to manage. 

 

What I would like to share with you today is a technique I  use to explore  my own learning and teaching, that worked very well.  This is an Informal Learning Model that seeks to ignite passion for learning.  So many of our students are not connected to their learning journey, and have disassociated their passion from the classroom and the content that we offer.  The element of discovery, of exploration-- of passion is missing.  And yet when I immerse myself in the internet, in the web of contacts, links, thoughts and ideas I am wholly absorbed--my passions are free to explore.  What an incredible opportunity as a learner to have the world’s knowledge available on line! 

 

Let us dig right in and get started:  

Go ahead and set up a http://twitter.com account if you haven’t already. Give some thought to your profile, use keywords that reflect your passions. This connects you to people who share your passions and interests.

 

I like the mash-up approach for an LMS, --What works in this situation;  the emphasis is on the learning.   I see this as an experiential, hands-on and student empowered approach to learning. By using emerging technologies we actively combine a constructivist and connectivist philosophy of learning.  We construct our Personal Learning Plan by defining our streams, our networks of followers and hashtags-- by connecting ideas, people, links and actions in our learning journey, which we as learners actively pursue on line and off.

 

What is a #Hashtag?

The # symbol, called a hashtag, is used to mark the keyword or topic in a Tweet. Any Twitter user can categorize or follow topics with hashtags. Hashtags are the symbol which establishes that the phrase following it is an element of a folksonomy of some kind.  Whereas a keyword search is just that, while it picks up hashtags which are the same as the keyword, it doesn’t describe an intentional community of practice using the word.

 

You can check out http://hashtags.org/ to see trends and see if a tag exists. or check out http://hashtags.twittersearchengine.net/wiki/Twitter_HashTags_Wiki the hashtags wiki, or the dictionary: http://www.hashdictionary.com/Hashtag

 

I want to spend just a second on the important experiential difference between a taxonomy and a folksonomy.  A taxonomy has already been established, or started by other people  --fundamentally you are absorbing content that was created by someone else. 

 

 

 

Taxonomy 

...is the practice and science of classification. Typically this is organized by supertype-subtype relationships, also called generalization-specialization relationships, or less formally, parent-child relationships. In such an inheritance relationship, the subtype by definition has the same properties, behaviors, and constraints as the supertype plus one or more additional properties, behaviors, or constraints.

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Taxonomy       

 

Folksonomy

A folksonomy is constructivist/connectivist in nature, created by a local or familiar cohort of participants. It is only by connecting the use of our words, labels, terms and participants that develops their meaning.  This empowers the participants because they can share and collaborate in the creation of  content, expressing their passion and individuality.

 

 

http://pinterest.com/myan_duong/smarchitecture/ 

Sites like http://pinterest.com are building folksonomies of images.

A folksonomy is a system of classification derived from the practice and method of collaboratively creating and managing tags to annotate and categorize content;[1][2] this practice is also known as collaborative tagging[3], social classification, social indexing, and social tagging.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folksonomy 

 

Real Time Internet

Real time internet is encountered in a variety of social media--but by far Twitter is the most comprehensive for learning.  Facebook is taking on more and more of a real time character as it moves into enhanced chat and video, massive multiple on line games and other immersive technologies.   Twitter is also moving into a variety of enhanced real time media through twitpics, video and geo-tagging. But I think of Twitter as The Stream, or the Pulse of the internet, the synapses of the world brain if you want. 

 

I find I need to manage Twitter with http://hootsuite.com

 

 

So go ahead and set up an account there and link it to your Twitter.  You can add a Facebook tab if you want to start exploring the tool, especially if you mange a couple of pages.

 

Create a new Stream in your “Featured “ section of Hootsuite. Create a couple of things that interest you:  this is the architecture for your learning media ecosystem. Try creating a stream for our conference hashtag  #FLC11 which would be our hyper local tag, These Hashtags can be as fleeting as the Tweets.  As an example of how hashtags work in terms of communities of practice and developing a Personal Learning Network, take a look at this tweet:

 

Emory Maiden posted this tweet, retweeted by Steven Anderson:   @web20classroom RT @evmaiden: 150 Ultimate Round-Up of Helpful #Twitter Articles - http://bit.ly/buCnmR

 

 

This was only a couple of days before the conference, and it is perfect for this session, so I retweeted it and added the hashtag #FLC11, so we could find it in this session.

 

 

and let’s try #GIS--which would take us into the global context.

 

This is a map generated from social media reports of incidents during the Christchurch, NZ earthquake.

 

When I first typed #GIS in I was surprised how many jobs were posted here.  Now I see that many hashtag categories are full of job opportunities.  So I have my students look there for work. I bring #GIS up intentionally because geo spatial tagging and is where everything is going

 

Geo-tagging.  

If you notice on your settings in Twitter, you can allow your location to be included in your tweet as a metatag, not part of your 140 character allowance.

 

Geotagging (also written as GeoTagging) is the process of adding geographical identification metadata to various media such as photographs, video, websites, SMS messages, or RSS feeds and is a form of geospatial metadata. These data usually consist of latitude and longitude coordinates, though they can also include altitude, bearing, distance, accuracy data, and place names. It is commonly used for photographs, giving geotagged photographs.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geotagging 

 

But if you think about the use of geotagging in the context of a regional development strategy,  it has tremendous potential to enhance a local area network or region.
 
There are applications such as http://www.tweetglobe.com/ for iPhone. And Google Chrome has an application http://globaltweets.com/ 
 
 
http://trendsmap.com/topic/%23thinkagain 
 
 
 
 

Delicious.com

You find all this cool stuff, links that you have to organize.  I find I am not as apt to read a tweet if it doesn’t have a link with it. I dislike being excited about an idea but having no original or primary source to go to.  If you do some digging with the hashtags you can track it down, if you want to give it the time. But essentially it is an ocean of links, of bookmarks, organized by tags.

Here’s my Delicious account http://www.delicious.com/herderjan. Go ahead and create one of those if you haven’t. Delicious organizes my tags, my meta language. Get the button for your browser.  Avos just bought Delicious from Yahoo, the guys who started YouTube.
http://www.delicious.com/help/transition
Delicious helps you develop your vocabulary and organize your bookmarks through the use of tags

I admit I haven’t even scratched the surface of Delicious, Twitter or Hootsuite.  Each of them give you fabulous sharing, networking and aggregation tools.  You can tell how much of a newbie I am because I only have 495 bookmarks and 672 tags, so my vocabulary is in its infancy.

Its great to see Ed Gehringer at this conference talking about “student authored Wiki Textbooks: Authoring and Review”, which is where sense is made out of this massive amount of information.

This is an excellent wiki based on the community of practice of K-12 teachers using the hashtag #edchat.  #EDCHAT actually has a weekly schedule--It happens every Tuesday in a structured exchange based on a voted on topic the week before.  http://edchat.pbworks.com/w/page/219908/FrontPage created by  Tom Whitby, Steven Anderson, and Shelly Terrell.

Where you take if from there depends on your passion.  Remember its what we get OUT of the computer that really matters! Let’s use the tag and see what we learned. I would enjoy keeping the #FLC11 tag alive for awhile and you can experiment with it and this group of people. It would be great to have everyone say something about the conference, tweet it using this hashtag and see if it goes anywhere. I hope that we have made some good new contacts for our Personal Learning Networks.  Let me know if this takes off for you. Thank you--

Jan Herder
Jan.Herder@gmail.com
http://155.42.33.13/Academics/FineAndPerformingArts/Faculty/JanHerder.aspx
http://twitter.com/#!/jherder
http://www.delicious.com/herderjan
http://www.3de4e.com
https://www.facebook.com/jan.herder

Real Time Internet for Passion-Based Learning

 

My presentation/hands on session for Free ELearning Conference Appalachain State University, Boone, North Carolina July 15, 2011

 

A MEDIA ECOSYSTEM

Let us dig right in and get started:

What is a #Hashtag?

Taxonomy

Folksonomy

Real Time Internet

Geo-tagging.

Delicious.com

 

Real Time Internet for Passion-Based Learning

                                                                 +Jan Herder #FLC11

 

A MEDIA ECOSYSTEM

 

What does the Real Time Internet ‘Feel’ Like?  How do I step in and check it out? Is there a way to manage what I am learning on line? What about the learning?  I’d like to see where learning is ignited and the wealth of world information can be found. I’d like to see my students find their passion and become life long learners. How do I do this?

 

Yesterday an article came out (great timing for this session. )

Nine Tenets of Passion-Based Learning:

●     REACH OUT TO THE DISENFRANCHISED

●     SHOW RELEVANCE TO LIFE OUTSIDE SCHOOL

●     INDOCTRINATE PASSION INTO THE SYSTEM.

●     TRY USING THE SCHOOLWIDE ENRICHMENT MODEL

●     DIGITAL MEDIA IS KEY

 

this one is key to my technique:

●     TAP INTO THE WISDOM OF YOUR TRUSTED PEERS.

 

Social media and Personal Learning Networks (PLNs) are necessary. Teachers need to publish their innovative work and share it with their personal learning networks. It’s also important for teachers to help students get connected to PLNs via social media.

 

●     BECOME A DIGITAL CITIZENS

●     PASSION IS INFECTIOUS

 

and their number 9:

●     CONNECT WITH PARENTS

http://mindshift.kqed.org/2011/07/nine-tenets-of-passion-based-learning/

 

Which I would add:

●     10--FOLLOW YOUR PASSION.

 

A variety of strategies exist for integrating new learning paradigms: social media, the immersive internet and collaborative learning.   And if you are like me it is all very overwhelming--exciting, inspired--but difficult to manage. 

 

What I would like to share with you today is a technique I  use to explore  my own learning and teaching, that worked very well.  This is an Informal Learning Model that seeks to ignite passion for learning.  So many of our students are not connected to their learning journey, and have disassociated their passion from the classroom and the content that we offer.  The element of discovery, of exploration-- of passion is missing.  And yet when I immerse myself in the internet, in the web of contacts, links, thoughts and ideas I am wholly absorbed--my passions are free to explore.  What an incredible opportunity as a learner to have the world’s knowledge available on line! 

 

Let us dig right in and get started:

Go ahead and set up a http://twitter.com account if you haven’t already. Give some thought to your profile, use keywords that reflect your passions. This connects you to people who share your passions and interests.

 

I like the mash-up approach for an LMS, --What works in this situation;  the emphasis is on the learning.   I see this as an experiential, hands-on and student empowered approach to learning. By using emerging technologies we actively combine a constructivist and connectivist philosophy of learning.  We construct our Personal Learning Plan by defining our streams, our networks of followers and hashtags-- by connecting ideas, people, links and actions in our learning journey, which we as learners actively pursue on line and off.

 

What is a #Hashtag?

The # symbol, called a hashtag, is used to mark the keyword or topic in a Tweet. Any Twitter user can categorize or follow topics with hashtags. Hashtags are the symbol which establishes that the phrase following it is an element of a folksonomy of some kind.  Whereas a keyword search is just that, while it picks up hashtags which are the same as the keyword, it doesn’t describe an intentional community of practice using the word.

 

You can check out http://hashtags.org/ to see trends and see if a tag exists. or check out http://hashtags.twittersearchengine.net/wiki/Twitter_HashTags_Wiki the hashtags wiki, or the dictionary: http://www.hashdictionary.com/Hashtag

 

I want to spend just a second on the important experiential difference between a taxonomy and a folksonomy.  A taxonomy has already been established, or started by other people  --fundamentally you are absorbing content that was created by someone else. 

 

 

 

Taxonomy

...is the practice and science of classification. Typically this is organized by supertype-subtype relationships, also called generalization-specialization relationships, or less formally, parent-child relationships. In such an inheritance relationship, the subtype by definition has the same properties, behaviors, and constraints as the supertype plus one or more additional properties, behaviors, or constraints.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxonomy

 

©Peter Halasz

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Biological_classification_L_Pengo_vflip.svg

Folksonomy

A folksonomy is constructivist/connectivist in nature, created by a local or familiar cohort of participants. It is only by connecting the use of our words, labels, terms and participants that develops their meaning.  This empowers the participants because they can share and collaborate in the creation of  content, expressing their passion and individuality.

 

 

http://pinterest.com/myan_duong/smarchitecture/

Sites like http://pinterest.com are building folksonomies of images.

A folksonomy is a system of classification derived from the practice and method of collaboratively creating and managing tags to annotate and categorize content;[1][2] this practice is also known as collaborative tagging[3], social classification, social indexing, and social tagging.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folksonomy

 

Real Time Internet

Real time internet is encountered in a variety of social media--but by far Twitter is the most comprehensive for learning.  Facebook is taking on more and more of a real time character as it moves into enhanced chat and video, massive multiple on line games and other immersive technologies.   Twitter is also moving into a variety of enhanced real time media through twitpics, video and geo-tagging. But I think of Twitter as The Stream, or the Pulse of the internet, the synapses of the world brain if you want. 

 

I find I need to manage Twitter with http://hootsuite.com

 

 

So go ahead and set up an account there and link it to your Twitter.  You can add a Facebook tab if you want to start exploring the tool, especially if you mange a couple of pages.

 

Create a new Stream in your “Featured “ section of Hootsuite. Create a couple of things that interest you:  this is the architecture for your learning media ecosystem. Try creating a stream for our conference hashtag  #FLC11 which would be our hyper local tag, These Hashtags can be as fleeting as the Tweets.  As an example of how hashtags work in terms of communities of practice and developing a Personal Learning Network, take a look at this tweet:

 

Emory Maiden posted this tweet, retweeted by Steven Anderson:   @web20classroom RT @evmaiden: 150 Ultimate Round-Up of Helpful #Twitter Articles - http://bit.ly/buCnmR

 

 

This was only a couple of days before the conference, and it is perfect for this session, so I retweeted it and added the hashtag #FLC11, so we could find it in this session.

 

 

and let’s try #GIS--which would take us into the global context.

http://eqviewer.co.nz/

This is a map generated from social media reports of incidents during the Christchurch, NZ earthquake.

 

When I first typed #GIS in I was surprised how many jobs were posted here.  Now I see that many hashtag categories are full of job opportunities.  So I have my students look there for work. I bring #GIS up intentionally because geo spatial tagging and is where everything is going

 

Geo-tagging.

If you notice on your settings in Twitter, you can allow your location to be included in your tweet as a metatag, not part of your 140 character allowance.

 

Geotagging (also written as GeoTagging) is the process of adding geographical identification metadata to various media such as photographs, video, websites, SMS messages, or RSS feeds and is a form of geospatial metadata. These data usually consist of latitude and longitude coordinates, though they can also include altitude, bearing, distance, accuracy data, and place names. It is commonly used for photographs, giving geotagged photographs.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geotagging

 

But if you think about the use of geotagging in the context of a r

Stealth Assessment, Authentic Tests

I tested really bad in high school. Some people just do. College wasn't so bad because I kissed the Blarney Stone during an adventurous year I took off between freshman and sophmore year. yeah, the gift of gab definiely helps in academia. (oh, wash your mouth out afterwards, the locals at the pub enjoy peeing on it after a good night of drinking!) As a teacher I confront the challenges of testing (assessment) students who claim they don't test very well either. I believe them.  I have a technique that works great--stealth assessment: testing after the fact, or better put, telling the students they have been tested after the fact. For me I don't want a student to cram or prepare for a test. I want the everyday, authentic, deep demonstration of their competency.  "Oh, by the way, that last event, that was your mid term." What good is assessment if what you assess vaporizes after a week?  I want to see the knowledge demonstrated day after day. I want consistency, mastery in the everyday. This is the best proof--the pudding, what comes of it, the product, so to speak. Then let them reflect upon the event (test) and they can't tell me they don't test well. With so much emphasis on testing and assessment these days, we forget about what assimilation of knowledge (action) looks like. We have to quantify everything and then compare, compete. Stealth assessment takes the pressure off. Be cool all the time, then under pressure you are confident. It's obvious in the results. You can't cheat. What you see is what you get. We have a saying in theater: 'you are only as good as your last show.'  It cuts both ways, but inspires you to go on. No humiliation. Much like self assessment--you are your harshest critic. I always ask students what they think they deserve for a grade-- you can tell right away, and usually they are much harder graders than I am. Well, I don't believe in grades anyway--I want to see growth, confidence, the assimilation of knowledge.

Untitled

The Creative Economy is Alive and Well in Lamoille County, Vermont

Dibden Center for the Arts kicked off its summer season with 4 local Dance Studios presenting their end of season finales.  The Enchanted Woods Wellness Center http://enchantedwoodswellness.com/  of Morrisville, Artistic Director Alexis George Owen; Ballet Wolcott, of Wolcott, http://www.balletwolcott.com/, which is a “collaboration between three women, Helene Nilsen, Brandy Ofciarcik-Perez, and Avi Waring”; Stowe Dance Academy, http://stowedance.com/  Helena Sullivan Director;  and The Ballet School of Vermont, http://www.theballetschoolonline.com/ formerly ‘The Ballet School and Dance Arts’ with Maryellen Vickery Artistic Director.  The growth of these studios has been very exciting to watch over the last decade, with Ballet Wolcott reviving the former Wolcott Ballet which was featured in the Smithsonian Magazine in 1995 http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/ballet-abstract.html#ixzz1PAK30uQC

Attendance for these events drew 3700 people to Johnson State College’s fabulous Dibden Center for the Arts.  Featuring around 460 dancers, and including the occasional paid professional, including recent NYC transplant Lighting Designer Jeffery Salzberg http://www.jeffsalzberg.com/ who did a great job lighting Sleeping Beauty for The Ballet School—these studios demonstrate the health and vitality of a sector that is rarely acknowledged for its financial and educational benefits to a community.  The Studio Directors push the barre higher every year.  The dedication and professionalism of the dancers is inspiring to watch.

See the full gallery on Posterous

There are really no good studies of this sector that I am aware of—but a recent study by The Ontario Arts Council http://www.spotlightfestival.ca/AssetFactory.aspx?did=2348  found tremendous health and a significant contribution to Ontario’s Creative Economy from the dance sector, engaging over 500,000 audience members and  employing over 4000 dancers  and related occupations in the region.  Of the 20 dance companies surveyed revenues accounted for $54 million in 2008.

The report “Advancing Vermont’s Creative Economy by the Vermont Council on Culture and Innovation http://www.ksefocus.com/vcci_report.pdf  offers a peek at the vitality of the creative sector in Vermont. But the stark contrast comes when you compare manufacturing declines with robust growth in the creative industries.

Between 1940 and 1998, the number of artists working in all sectors of the

general economy (public, commercial, and nonprofit) grew at a rate roughly

two and half times faster than that of other types of workers and now number

at least 1.5 million.

Vermont lost 8,100 manufacturing jobs between 2001 and the end of 2003,

declining from 45,600 to 37,500 jobs. Manufacturing employment has dropped

from 30% of the state's non-farm labor force in 1970 to just under 13% today.

Looking at the creative industries as a whole in Los Angeles in 2010, the Otis College of Art and Design http://www.otis.edu/creative_economy/ found that the creative sector had moved to the number 2 spot as an economic driver in the city.  But what is the impact in a rural community? What types of career preparation does Dance provide? With the overwhelming majority of participants being female, what role are these studios providing that simply isn’t present in the current educational institutions, both secondary and higher ed?  With the recent emphasis on STEM—Science, Technology, Engineering and Math -- the discussion by passes the role of the fine and performing arts in nurturing creativity and innovation in our rush to prepare our youth for the new economy.  Clearly the dance community is providing critical foundation building for these young people, equally the contributions to the local economy cannot be understated.

Untitled

Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4

The Creative Economy is Alive and Well in Lamoille County, Vermont

Dibden Center for the Arts kicked off its summer season with 4 local Dance Studios presenting their end of season finales.  The Enchanted Woods Wellness Center http://enchantedwoodswellness.com/  of Morrisville, Artistic Director Alexis George Owen; Ballet Wolcott, of Wolcott, http://www.balletwolcott.com/, which is a “collaboration between three women, Helene Nilsen, Brandy Ofciarcik-Perez, and Avi Waring”; Stowe Dance Academy, http://stowedance.com/  Helena Sullivan Director;  and The Ballet School of Vermont, http://www.theballetschoolonline.com/ formerly ‘The Ballet School and Dance Arts’ with Maryellen Vickery Artistic Director.  The growth of these studios has been very exciting to watch over the last decade, with Ballet Wolcott reviving the former Wolcott Ballet which was featured in the Smithsonian Magazine in 1995 http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/ballet-abstract.html#ixzz1PAK30uQC

Attendance for these events drew 3700 people to Johnson State College’s fabulous Dibden Center for the Arts.  Featuring around 460 dancers, and including the occasional paid professional, including recent NYC transplant Lighting Designer Jeffery Salzberg http://www.jeffsalzberg.com/ who did a great job lighting Sleeping Beauty for The Ballet School—these studios demonstrate the health and vitality of a sector that is rarely acknowledged for its financial and educational benefits to a community.  The Studio Directors push the barre higher every year.  The dedication and professionalism of the dancers is inspiring to watch.

See the full gallery on Posterous

There are really no good studies of this sector that I am aware of—but a recent study by The Ontario Arts Council http://www.spotlightfestival.ca/AssetFactory.aspx?did=2348  found tremendous health and a significant contribution to Ontario’s Creative Economy from the dance sector, engaging over 500,000 audience members and  employing over 4000 dancers  and related occupations in the region.  Of the 20 dance companies surveyed revenues accounted for $54 million in 2008.

The report “Advancing Vermont’s Creative Economy by the Vermont Council on Culture and Innovation http://www.ksefocus.com/vcci_report.pdf  offers a peek at the vitality of the creative sector in Vermont. But the stark contrast comes when you compare manufacturing declines with robust growth in the creative industries.

Between 1940 and 1998, the number of artists working in all sectors of the

general economy (public, commercial, and nonprofit) grew at a rate roughly

two and half times faster than that of other types of workers and now number

at least 1.5 million.

Vermont lost 8,100 manufacturing jobs between 2001 and the end of 2003,

declining from 45,600 to 37,500 jobs. Manufacturing employment has dropped

from 30% of the state's non-farm labor force in 1970 to just under 13% today.

Looking at the creative industries as a whole in Los Angeles in 2010, the Otis College of Art and Design http://www.otis.edu/creative_economy/ found that the creative sector had moved to the number 2 spot as an economic driver in the city.  But what is the impact in a rural community? What types of career preparation does Dance provide? With the overwhelming majority of participants being female, what role are these studios providing that simply isn’t present in the current educational institutions, both secondary and higher ed?  With the recent emphasis on STEM—Science, Technology, Engineering and Math -- the discussion by passes the role of the fine and performing arts in nurturing creativity and innovation in our rush to prepare our youth for the new economy.  Clearly the dance community is providing critical foundation building for these young people, equally the contributions to the local economy cannot be understated.

Web2.0, the Real Time Internet, Twitter and Passion Based Learning

There are 4 basic tools or platforms that everyone who wants to succeed in today’s world needs to understand and use:

1)      Twitter

2)      Hootsuite

3)      Delicious

4)      Wikis

 

What is web2.0? (from wikipedia)

The term Web 2.0 is associated with web applications that facilitate participatory information sharing, interoperability, user-centered design,^[1] and collaboration on the World Wide Web. A Web 2.0 site allows users to interact and collaborate with each other in a social media dialogue as creators (prosumers) of user-generated content in a virtual community, in contrast to websites where users (consumers) are limited to the passive viewing of content that was created for them. Examples of Web 2.0 include social networking sites, blogs, wikis, video sharing sites, hosted services, web applications, mashups and folksonomies.

This is the way it works. When you set up your profile on Twitter make sure you use the key words that describe your passions: This is very important as one way people find you.

http://twitter.com/#!/jherder

·         Followers, searches, links. The importance of links and creating your media ecosystem.

·         http://blogasaurus.posterous.com

Begin to explore hashtags. What is a folksonomy? What is a taxonomy?

A folksonomy is a system of classification derived from the practice and method of collaboratively creating and managing tags to annotate and categorize content;^[1][2] this practice is also known as collaborative tagging^[3], social classification, social indexing, and social tagging. (from Wikipedia)

Taxonomy is the practice and science of classification. Typically this is organized by supertype-subtype relationships, also called generalization-specialization relationships, or less formally, parent-child relationships. In such an inheritance relationship, the subtype by definition has the same properties, behaviors, and constraints as the supertype plus one or more additional properties, behaviors, or constraints. (from Wikipedia)

Set up an account on Hootsuite. This is a Twitter feed manager.  Seek the key word searches that interest you.

You can link Facebook and Twitter, and manage your posts all from Hootsuite.

hootsuite: http://hootsuite.com/

A way of managing searches, twitter feeds and collaborative tweeting.

http://www.delicious.com/

Organizing your tags-searching others tags

Personal learning Network/ Personal Learning Plan

Wiki’s

#edchat

http://edchat.pbworks.com/w/page/219908/FrontPage

THA3130

http://tha3130.pbworks.com/w/page/9855286/FrontPage

#lamoillevt

http://lamoillevt.com

 

Is Web 2.0 Redefining the Arts?

This is probably way to vague to get much traction on the idea--but I'll give it a shot.  What motivated me to think about it like this was the recent spat over Jon Bon Jovi's odd claim that Steve Jobs and iTunes killed the music business.  This is like saying that the printing press killed writing.  But in terms of user generated content, and some of the other features of web 2.0, such as free access, the Arts hold a rather special place. In so far as we are all 'artists' to some extent, in the sense that we all can be creative beings, we all generate content, espcially as children.  There is no doubt that using technology has increased our ability to be creative in many new and exciting ways. Often the Arts are juxstaposed to STEM, or other more 'career' based disciplines like Journalism or Business. Yet if you loosen the idea of the arts to be inclusive and think of them as creativity it is universally applicable. This is definitly the way Richard Florida is thinking about creativity, as cross disciplinary or interdisciplinary.  And so we now have "intermedia" where, for example the Minnisota Arts Organization "Intermedia Arts" emphasizes the multdisciplinary feature of the Fluxus movement and clearly identifies it with the creative economy of that state. The computer immersed new media form of hyperformalism is another great example of the synthetic influences of emerging and hard to define artistic forms, allowing viewer/participant interaction and altering of the experience of art.

Here are some snaps I took in Second Life of DCSpensley's ZeroG Dancers performance.

See the full gallery on Posterous

The silos of disciplines tend to distort and homogenize people and ideas. The arts are no less suseptible to this. User generated content and the internet's explosion of resources and opportunites brings me to wonder if there aren't opportunities in what we consider the "Arts" to be. If we re envision these silos and see the blending and emergence of new forms of media as offering us the chance to by pass the limited view of a juxstapostion of these disciplines-- suddenly the world looks different. What is technology? What is Dance? What is Film? What is Music?  What is visual art or Painting? They are blending. The boundaries are getting fuzzy.  Here is a young student of mine working in these new areas. Be patient with the video, its not fully revealing the effort, but it gives you the idea.

http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/13406727

So the question is this: If we blend the disciplines--espeically the Arts, we open new possiblitlities to enhance all of the disciplines. The seeds of STEM are growing in the Arts--