XplanaZine

Here’s a summary of ideas and conversations from the edublogging community that have captured our attention in the past 48 hours.Dave Warlick offers up three more bullet points on Web 2.0. And, while he apologizes for the use of the bullet-point motif, I think these three points are worth listing.:

• Content is increasingly conversation
• Content seemingly organizes itself
• People are now connecting to each other through their content — through their ideas

Tim Stahmer offers up his reflections about the gap between what adults think is needed to improve education and what kids think. Tim writes, “What about asking the kids? How can we make decisions about teaching and
learning while leaving out the people most impacted by those decisions?” Amen.

If you’re wondering what great quotes you’ve missed at SXSW, check out Kathy Sierra’s post. One of my favorite quotes comes from a session on research and polling data. “‘Google’ is the number one search term on Yahoo. ‘Yahoo’ is number three.”

And Clarence Fisher is revisiting his recent meme of networks, studios, and classrooms. In his most recent post he asks “What about extending this theme so that it changes, merges, and becomes
networks of studios? The empowering, absorbing space of the studio joined with the power of the network…” It’s a good question and, in many ways, isn’t this precisely what MySpace and other social networks are trying to do? Now, how to we convert those models (or appropriate their energy) into the improved education and learning?

Finally, Ben Vershbow over at The Institute for the Future of the Book has some questions and uneasiness about the Google acquisition of Writely.

“I’ve been a webmail user for the past several years, and more recently a
blogger (which is a sort of online word processing) but I’m uneasy about what
the Writely-Google union portends — about moving the bulk of my creative output into a surveilled space where the actual content of what I’m working on becomes an asset of the private company that supplies the tools.”

Ben asks us to forgive him for sounding a bit paranoid but, heck, a little paranoia isn’t a bad thing, huh?