Dear JTBers,
            Since a couple of you have commented on my earlier post (and since I don’t 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).  I’m 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 (“nodes”) 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 I’ll 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 I’ve 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 I’m 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 “circle of friends” 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 “Death of the Gatekeepers” 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