Group items tagged

Tony Wagner, from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, lists assessing and analyzing information as one of the seven survival skills in the new world of work. I think the ability to create a PLN is a fundamental information-management skill that will help my students succeed in the future.

An RSS reader is a Web site that puts together all this information in an easy-to-read format. Google Reader, netvibes, Pageflakes, Bloglines, and my preferred reader, iGoogle, are all examples of sites providing RSS readers. The RSS reader is the raw material for building a PLN.

go to "Send to Blog" in "My Tools" section, click "Add a blog", then enter the full URL of your blog

how to use it to build a PLN (personal learning network)

My Top Ten Twitter Turn-Off's

1) No profile, or profile picture

Your profile tells people who you are

If you decide to add a link to your profile, make sure it is not a dead link, an under construction page, an affiliate shop, or a page which launches pop up windows

2) No tweets

3) Hiding your tweets

4) You have lots of spammers following you

10) Being overly-self promotional

"Cliff Notes" version of advice for Twitter newbies

7) You are mainly using Twitter to sell or promote something

8) You don't tweet any links

Check out some blogs and online newspapers for topical or interesting stories, and use a url shortener such as bit.ly, (http://bit.ly/)

Searching for twitter hashtags (#)

Some examples

9) You don't interact with other users, or re-tweet other people's posts

Twitter is a social media tool

collaboration, discussion, and sharing

6) You mainly tweet stuff about yourself

the 80/20 ratio (i.e. 80% of your tweets should be about something other than promoting yourself or your blog

Karenne Sylvester wrote a great article a while back about how a you can tell a lot about people from what they tweet and how they conduct themselves on Twitter.

part of your Digital Footprint

Each one of these services will import your current Delicious bookmarks. We’ve picked out five that we think you’ll love, and we’ll walk you through importing your links to each of them.

Xmarks integrates with your browser and helps you to keep bookmarks safely backed up –including Delicious bookmarks.  Xmarks can sync information across the following supported browsers; Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer and Safari.

Diigo is a bookmarking service and more. This service will allow you to highlight text and attach notes to webpages or create sticky notes.  And, it also gives users the option to import Delicious bookmarks.

import the html file or you can punch in your delicious account details and import directly.

two options here.

Pinboard is another great alternative to using Delicious. This service is a low-noise, simple, bookmarking site that will enable you to import your Delicious html file.  To do this just go to the settings in your Pinboard account and choose the file.

Mister Wong is a straight-forward bookmarking service to share and save websites. It imports quite a few different services and browsers including Twitter (links), Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari, Opera and Delicious. Mister Wong gives you two options; upload the Delicious html file or directly import using your Delicious log in.

Historio.us is delightfully lightweight, simple, nothing fancy, many of the things that are beautiful about Pinboard, but it has the ability to bookmark in a flash and be able to search for ANY word in the pages you’ve bookmarked.

Export your delicious bookmarks as per the above instructions and then import the file into Historio.us by visiting settings, then import/export.

Faviki is a bookmarking tool that allows users to bookmark web pages using Wikipedia terms. With this service, all users use the same tags which makes searching bookmarks really easy.

The  biggest change has been in the way I meet and communicate with people in my PLN.

Most of the resources are in the form of links

social bookmarking

Discussion groups

Nings are like subject area resource rooms in a large school.

They’re social networks connecting teachers with common interests. In addition to discussion forums, members keep blogs, share resources, and plan group activities.

attended more conferences than ever before, but travel much less

Even at a digital conference, it's ultimately the people that make that time worthwhile. 

The Future of Thinking: Learning Institutions in a Digital Age, by Cathy Davidson and David Theo Goldberg,

lateral rather than hierarchical modes of learning, individualized educational strategies, global vision, lifelong learning, and collaboration by difference. 

On my way home, I read William Powers' Hamlet's Blackberry: A Practical Philosophy for Building a Good Life in the Digital Age.  Powers argues that by living in a world where "everyone is connected to everyone else all the time," we become disconnected from our own self-awareness and inner depth. 

Today's digital technology explosion is no different from the advent of language, writing, mass-produced print or the telegraph

Seven Philosophers of Screens: Plato, Seneca, Gutenberg, Shakespeare, Franklin, Thoreau and McLuhan, who lived through other technological explosions

By following the lessons of these seven philosphers in "a tour of the technological past," Powers shows how we can combat "the conundrum of the connected life" with techniques he calls the "Walden Zone" and the "Internet Sabbath," sacred times and places to disconnect with the Internet and reconnect with ourselves and our loved ones.  Both of these books, like the P3 UnConference, celebrates technology not as an end to itself, but as a means to enhance the human experience.  And like the P3 UnConference, both value time away from technology as a way to enhance that experience even more.