Reflection on my use of Web 2.0 tools in 2007

As I reflect on my work-life in 2007, there are a number new of Web 2.0 tools I’m utilizing that have become fully integrated into how I work and interact with people.

Skype allows you to conduct free calls over the internet or chat with others online. This tool has been invaluable in keeping connected with family and colleagues.

GoToMeeting is a form of web-conferencing. The Stephens Group uses GoToMeeting to work collaboratively on projects with one another and with our clients.n We also use it for internal training purposes.

We use GoogleDocs to allow committees to collaborate on documents such as Information Technology Plans. This saves a lot of time. Prior to Google Docs we would have to email versions of the document to committee members and make changes. The use of Google Docs has really streamlined this process because there is always one true version that everyone in the group can log-onto and update. Another great feature is you can see who made what changes when. I have all of my GoogleDocs linked onto my iGoogle web page which I have set as my homepage. I have also added useful Google widgets such as the weather, online dictionary and thesaurus and tabbed links to personal bookmarks as well.

We use CollectiveX internally within The Stephens Group. We have a number of different teams working on different types of projects. One of the advantages of CollectiveX is it allows members the opportunity to share contact information, discuss issues of concern, share information and upload files that need to be shared among consultants for different projects, and allows us to keep a shared calendar. Another great feature of CollectiveX is that it emails consultants updates that have been made.

Bloglines is a blog aggregator. What that means is it grabs new entries to the blogs I have subscribed to. This means that I can quickly read a number of entries without having to go to each blog individually. Subscribing to blogs has allowed me to keep on top of new trends and ideas in educational technology better than traditional media such as magazine subscriptions.

I wrote about Clipmarks in my blog entry on Shaping the Flow of Media. This tool has been great in helping me hang on to and catagorize things I find interesting when reading my blog feeds. The ability to “clip” and “tag” things to add to my library has been a huge help in organizing online content.

This year we had our first digital media conference. We were so impressed with the podcasts that teachers produced at the Milwaukee Public Museum. We are really looking forward to our second conference being held at the Milwaukee County Zoo, July 28th-31st.

In 2007, The Stephens Group developed two wikis. One for our Digital Media Conference as a way for our instructors to share resources with our participants, and one to help our clients with strategic planning on their information technology plans (The Stephens Group Information Technology Planning Wiki).

The addition of a clustermap to our blog has been a great addition. I love logging on and finding out where in the world people are reading our blog from. It has helped motivate me to keep writing.

In 2008 The Stephens Group will be learning more about digital mapping, the power of meta-tagging content, vodcasting at the San Jose Museum of Art (August 11^th- 13^th), using iPods to assist ELL students (see us at CUE), using social networking tools such as Facebook and Linked In to connect with wider audiences, as well as exploring the potential of gaming in education.

We hope you will continue to read our blog throughtout 2008 as we explore these new technologies.

Shaping the Flow of Media

I recently started using a social note-taking tool called Clipmarks. Clipmarks is a tool that allows users to organize and transmit information. It is a modern form of collaboration that allows users to “clip” parts of a web page that they find interesting. You can save your clips to your own online clipmarks space, add your clips to your blog, email your clips to others, add clips to social bookmarking sites such as delicious or print your clips. When you install clipmarks a small icon in embedded in the toolbar of your browser making it easy to multi-task as you clip parts of websites as you browse.

When you clip something you “tag” it. Tagging is an evolving social practice that allows uses to add their own searchable metadata, such as keywords, to their clips. Lankshear and Knobel (2007) call this a “bottom up approach” because the user makes the decisions about how to classify information instead of relying on a pre-established hierarchal system. This makes the exchange and sharing of information more “fluid, continuous, open” (Lankshear & Knobel, 2007, p. 15) and less “expert-dominated” (p. 9).

You can also create catalogs for your clips and make them public for others to search, view, or add comments to. The fact that others can add comments to your clips makes this a relational technology. The fact that clipmarks was designed for users to share their clips publicly shows that the developers understand that “learning is an individual phenomenon and a collective phenomenon…understanding that learning and development is a bi-directional phenomena” (Kaptelinin, & Nardi, 2006, p. 91).

The ability of social networking tools such as Clipmarks is shaping the flow of media. The ability to tag is revolutionizing the way we use the web. In a print world there were top-down hierarchical standards such as the Dewey decimal system on how information was classified. In the past the designer or author might give keywords to a web-site. Now, the ability to tag allows a bottom-up organic approach where the individual user has the ability to create keywords, categories, and libraries to categorize information in ways that make sense to them. In other words they control the flow of the media. The ability to share these tags with “my clippers” allows you to add a social network of others who have similar interests. Again this is allowing the users a new way to flow media and information to one another.

References:

Knobel, M., & Lankshear, C. (Eds.). (2007). A New Literacies Sampler (Vol. 29): Peter Lang.

Kaptelinin, V., & Nardi. (2006). Acting with Technology. Boston, Massachusetts: MIT.