So, I’ve participated in a couple of ETMOOC webinars so far. I tried to do an introduction session, but something was up with the connection at school. I very much enjoyed the session about curating content lead by Jeffery Heil. And, just last evening I participated in the first ETMOOC connected learning session with Alec. (I admit I was late for class. Since we had a day off, I actually went all out and cooked many separate and distinct things for dinner and was so busy enjoying it with my family that I had to keep eating some more. It happens.)
Anyway, here’s what I’m thinking about now.
First, during Jeffery Heil’s webinar about curation, I was thinking, how can I get him to come explain these tools to my colleagues? I was familiar with the vast majority of the particular tools but it’s never a waste of time to think about how and why we might use tools to collect, curate, and share content. I especially liked the discussion of curating versus collecting. Personally, I have adopted Evernote as my major collecting and sorting tool. It is the one that has stuck, for me. The webinar reminded me, again, that if I want to contribute more, which I do, I need to recommit myself to either diigo or delicious. I tried to do the diigo thing for a while. Even used it with my class one year. However, since saving the links publically seemed to imply some sort of endorsement, or at least having read it, I put a lot into a generic “read it later” pile and then never did. My system did not work. A few years later, I think that I will try again. Before doing so, I plan to spend some time thinking about how my Evernote and diigo will overlap/intersect. And, I’m going to try using scoop.it for some professional learning options for colleagues.
Second, last evening, I was, as usual, impressed with Alec’s clear and well planned presentation on connected learning. There are a lot of webinars out there at this point and not all of them end up being led by a pro. The pros stand out. Anyway, there was a lot of information, again lots of review of things I know, but might need to remember to bring to the front of my brain. There are only so many things I can keep at the forefront of my mind at any one time and it’s handy to have that list shaken up a bit. I appreciated the many references to articles and readings. They will be helpful for me as I give background and rationale for new initiatives at my school.
Finally, one of the ideas that I took away from the chat in Alec’s webinar was “hashtags as a new literacy”. This is a key idea to think about now, in my opinion. I would say tagging in a more general sense is a new literacy as that would cover tagging in social bookmarking (Diigo, Delicious), note taking (Evernote), as well as hashtags in Twitter. It reminds me of the ability to think about key words to look up in the old index. It was always interesting to see the students who could generate those related key words, know what topics were related, handle how to expand or narrow a research topic. It speaks to thinking about how ideas are linked. Critical back in the old days and critical now.
So, that’s where I am in my head. My next steps are to try again to add diigo to my standard operating procedures, continue participating in the webinars, and to read what other ETMOOC-ers are writing about their experiences.
