XplanaZine

Here’s a summary of ideas and conversations from the edublogging community that have captured our attention in the past 48 hours.

Will Richardson has an insightful post on the global nature of the Web (using recent Technorati statistics)

“We need to be more expansive in our thinking. We need to be talking more about
the opportunities “out there” instead of how to make things incrementally better “in here.” (I’m serious, right now, all sessions on PowerPoint should be banned from conference schedules.) If educators who pay their way to ed tech events don’t at least leave with a sense of the changes and opportunities that the Web affords these days, they’re wasting their money.”

Also, Christopher Sessums has a nice summary of Social Software and how it is used to manage the Web.

“The Internet provides me an opportunity, or more precisely, an ecology to
connect, collaborate, and aggregate numerous ideas and contributions of others
which permits me to further my understanding and share it with others. In this
sense, social software like this blog contributes to my ability to co-create
knowledge that I will continue to draw from, reflect upon, and further refine. I
hope you find it useful too.”

Clarence Fisher continues to offer insight into the value of read/rite tools in the classroom. In his latest post, writes about the power of wikis for modifying knowledge through community editing. Also, Alex Halavais has a good article that lists his students reactions to blogging in a large class.

And George Siemens continues to develop our thinking about the connectedness of information and people. In this post on what knowledge looks like, he writes:

“The end product of knowledge is nice…but the process of acquiring (I like
“connecting” better) knowledge is where all the fun stuff happens (i.e. where knowledge gets “life”). The hierarchy of knowledge is much less intriguing than the life of knowledge. For example, it may be nice to know how beetles are classified…but for knowledge to be useful, I’m interested more in watching a live beetle do what live beetles do. Classifying is an example of what is wrong with our views of knowledge… actionability is critical.”

There were also a couple of good posts yesterday about assessment. Ewan McIntosh wrote that, “Assessment is nearly always seen as the main reason not to blog or podcast or wiki… Just listening to Wes’ recent brilliant podcasts reinforces this idea - in the USA at least - and no doubt elsewhere. But in France, Le Web Pédagogique is making its blog the main way for students to revise for their baccalauréat.” Doug Johnson also had an interesting piece related to the fact that Minnesota is at the bottom of states when it comes to educational technology spending yet ranks at the top in academic testing. Finally,. Vicki Davis gives her take on why are SAT scores declining.

Under the broad category of educational technology and tools, there have been a number of great posts:

• D’Arcy Norman writes about Drupal as a Learning Object Repository and Stephen Downes comments.
• The EdTechTalk #43 podcast is up and in this episode the team discusses Podcast Academy, BRO, Second Life, & upcoming Webcastathon.
• Tim Stahmer points to others who are getting in on the conversation about fear of new technology tools in education. He points to a post by Wesley Fryer and Stephen Downes also has a take on the conversation.