Dear JTBers,
            Since a couple of you have commented on my earlier post (and
since I don¹t require much encouragement), I am providing a longer and more
organized version of my previous post.  It is somewhat long, so if you are
not interested, you know where the delete button it.
            My basic intention is to try to understand how we can help our
students develop a personal Virtual Learning Environment during their four
years here.  (My feeling is that information literacy is a dying meme - any
comments?) I realize the VLE idea is sometimes used to describe what tools
the college needs to support student learning (i.e.
www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=mle_related_vle) and there are also web sites
(i.e. www.cetis.ac.uk/members/scott/blogview?entry=20050125170206) that
design a personal VLE around commercial software (some of which is not yet
available).  I¹m thinking more about what we need to teach our students
about web resources that are free and already exist.  The tags would be
collective intelligence, connectivism, long tail, education, and Web 2.0
(what have I missed?).    The basic concept is that knowledge no longer
consists of what is in my head or in my books, but rather is the collective
wisdom of the group of individuals (³nodes²) that I am connected to and
share with.  My premise is that part of a students basic education should
include developing the tools that connect to both humans and organizations
that serve as the foundation for his or her VLE.
            Some parts of the VLE seem to me to be clear, for example,
podcasts and blogs.  They can be very valuable sources of information, but
unless a student knows how to manage them, they become a time sink.  It also
seems to me that any education major should have a clear idea of some of the
ways that these should be used for teaching.  Both techniques have already
penetrated into grade school in some places and sending out new teachers who
lack this background is like sending soldiers into battle without weapons.
The importance of Instant Messaging goes without saying, which means I have
no idea of how to describe the possible effect of IM on education.  Then
there is Really Simple Syndication, which provides a way to attempt to
manage blogs, podcasts, etc. The clipmarks site (www.clipmarks.com/) and the
shadows site (www.shadows.com/default.aspx) are both still new to me, but
they seem to provide further del.icio.us type support, and I¹ll put them in
the same category.  Trying to find the most useful blogs is still more of an
art than a science (as indicated by the fact that the most popular blogs are
Boing Boing and EnGadget (see www.sifry.com/alerts/archives/000420.html)).
            Wikitextbooks are a more difficult piece of the puzzle. Those
who believe in wikis are true believers, but the traditionalists may well
win the day here.  It is important for education majors to understand the
issues involved in deciding whether or not to use wikitextbooks, especially
since my feeling is that the argument breaks down into process vs. product,
with neither side being willing to find logic in the basis of the other
position.  Personally, I believe that wikitexts ultimately will not fly, but
I¹ve been wrong in the past, and even if I am right, their crash may strew
quite a bit of debris upon the surrounding landscape.
            That brings me to web search.  It seems clear that we have
reduced to three major search engines, and all three are aiming to become
basic entertainment tools as the media converge.  If this happens, will they
continue to serve as true information conduits, or will we have to look
elsewhere for academic search for our students?     Tags and social
networking seem to be the main current hope for taming the flood of
information.  I have doubts whether this will suffice in the long run, but
for the time being our students have to understand how to use tags,
folksonomies, and del.icio.us (www.del.icio.us.com).  There is an
interesting article on the web from BusinessWeek
(www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/05_39/b3952408.htm) describing how
one music company is using tags for market research.
            That leads me into the morass of social networking sites, like
MySpace and Face Book.  Most of my student already are using these sites,
but I¹m not sure anyone understand how powerful they can be (at least not in
higher education). I was just reading that the most popular classical
composer among those 18 thru 25 is someone I never heard of, but who has
used MySpace to reach out to a large ³circle of friends² who are listening
to and buying his music.  Similarly, I would discount Flickr
(www.flickr.com), since seeing another picture of a cat named fluffy seems
unnecessary, but if you know enough to enter blogoposium into the search
line, you get several thousand pictures, most of which are fluff.  A few of
which, however, include some great diagrams by Dion Hinchcliffe showing the
components Web 2.0.  (Yeah!  How am I supposed to know to search on the term
blogoposium?  Beats me!)
            Then there is the question of self publication.  Sites like
www.lulu.com (books), www.cdbaby.com (CDs), and www.youtube.com (short
videos) all offer individuals the opportunity to directly access an
audience, and in some cases these products enjoy significant success.  I
think that the ³Death of the Gatekeepers² idea is overblown, but these new
distribution methods are certainly pushing back against the traditional
distribution channels.  (What are the artists doing about sites that share
art works?  Since the 2x2 slide projector is going the way of the dodo,
there must also be some sites that provide images.)  Potentially one of the
more interesting of these sites for teachers is safari U (www.safariu.com/),
which allows teachers to share lesson plans and class materials on the web.
So far, most of the material is focused on computers and technology, but it
seems inevitable that there will be more lesson plan exchanges, like Merlot,
springing up in the future.
            In addition, I know that my science students should have more
specialized skills, such as the ability to create and manipulate simulations
or to understand how to access very large databases, such as those in
biochemistry, molecular structure, and proteomics.  I'm afraid that the
access my science majors need is too specialized to include in this listing
of skills for general knowledge.
            This post is already much too long, but I did want to clarify
what I had in mind.  I have the terrible feeling that I am only scratching
the surface, but it is a start.  As I said in the original post, I am
suggesting that any of us who are interested work together to define our
ideal Virtual Learning Environment for our students. .  I would invite
anyone who can to add to the list of resources I have listed as well as to
identify areas where the students already are well prepared.  If you wish to
add special skills essential to your own discipline, then feel free to do
so, but please label them as specialized skills.     I am hoping that this
type of discussion will give me a better understanding of where I need to
go, and perhaps also be useful to others.
            As I said at the conclusion of my previous post, the most
important idea for our students to understand is that the rules are changing
and the first person to understand the new rules wins (even though he/she
only wins until the rules change again - - -in a very short time). Of
course, that also goes for us. ; -)

                                                    Harry