XplanaZine

Here’s a summary of ideas and conversations from the edublogging community that have captured our attention in the past 48 hours.Alan Levine points to a never ending proliferation of Web 2.0 lists and wonders, cynically, when we’re going to see people start posting such lists with.. well.. Web 2.0 tools. Michael Feldstein picks up this challenge and takes a first crack at the task using Bleezer. Speaking of Web 2.0 tools, Mark Ahlness has a good post about the biggest social networking site on the block — MySpace. Mark says that the real tragedy about MySpace is that the irrational public backlash by parents and some administrators is blocking the way for the success of other tools like blogging and podcasting.

Doug Belshaw serves up his weekly roundup of conversations going on in the edublogging space and he focuses this week on messy learning, games in education, and managing information abundance through adaptation and flexibility. Doug’s post, read along with our own What’s Up and What Matters article, should provide anyone interested with a good overview of the edublogging memes in the air.

Thanks to Wesley Fryer for his shout our about Semapedia. Semapedia allows people to connect Wikipedia articles to their corresponding real-world objects and, through unique printed tags (visual codes), call up information about those objects (buildings, art, events, etc.) at the point of access. Here is Wesley’s summary. It’s obvious that this tool has plenty of uses in creative education projects.

“Semapedia is a project that could make traveling with a cell phone (and possibly access to a printer, at least in a hotel room) much more interesting. If you see a piece of paper taped up in a location with a Semapedia tag, you can click a photo of it with your cell phone and have the free software recognize the tag. Think of this as scanning a barcode, but just using your cell phone to do it. Then your web-enabled cell phone can connect directly to WikiPedia articles related to that geographic space.”

Miguel Guhlin has a nice article on problem based professional development over at Tech Learning. One of the more interesting things about the article (worth reading in its own right), is that it was written before Miguel became involved with blogging and podcasts.

If you haven’t been reading about Brian Crosby’s experiences in messy learning, you should definitely check out his blog. Brian captures in vivid detail the cool things that can happen when we let things happen and evolve naturally with creative learners. Of course, the messiest learning happens when we let students go completely solo. It’s amazing what they will come up with. Last week, in Arizona, students organized protests using MySpace. Will Richardson has a nice overview of the events and goes on to make some observations of his own. I particularly liked this one.

“Now, I have to tell you, I have a hard time picturing a bunch of grownups doing quick, mass mobilization this way. Seriously. We’re so e-mail. And I’m pretty much done with that whole natives and immigrants meme because there’s nothing stopping any of us from becoming fluent in this language except our own unwillingness to learn it (and, ok, maybe some time issues…where do kids get the time for this anyway?) We can debate whether or not the kids should have done what they did (read the comments to
href=”http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2006/03/28/myspace_hr_4437.html” target=”_blank”>this Danah Boyd post; in fact, read the whole thing) but we might want to recognize it for what it is: a powerful example of the connectedness that technology can create.”

Finally, the good folk over at the Otter Group have posted a couple of articles on Learning 2.0 Basics — Part 1 and Part 2.