Back to School 2.0
Monday, August 28th, 2006I have been vacationing/working on Martha's Vineyard with my friend Darcy Hoyt who is a middle school teacher.
We have been strategizing about how she can use new web services for her teaching this year. Here's what she has set up so far:
Basecamp
This best-in-class project management software will be her hub for managing homework. She has created a free account and will add all of her students and their families to the list of people who can access the account. All homework and communications will be posted here. Her students can submit homework through basecamp.
Blog
Darcy has set up a blog where she can also post information about what is going on in her classroom. She can enable all of her students as trusted posters so they too can use the blog to document what they are learning. Darcy has already been blogging for the past three years. Early on she set up a blog to document an action learning project where her 8th grade class built 6 West Greenland kayaks.
Google Calendar
Darcy has created a google calendar where she can publish events and activities for her class. The calendar can be embedded into her blog (see our calendar as an example of this).
Delicious
Darcy will create a delicious account where she can bookmark resources by key word for her class. One she establishes the key words, her students can add resources to their own delicious accounts and the class can build a shared set of resources.
Flickr
Darcy can post all class photos to a public Flickr account. This can also be opened up to her students for their photos.
And the school year hasn't even begun. I think that there are many ways in which teachers can benefit from these new web services and we will continue to document what Darcy is using and how it is working
Intranet 2.0 Presentation
Presented to the International Conference on the National Communications Commission sponsored by Kainan University in Taiwan, March 2005 (submitted by Kathleen Gilroy)
“I try to tune in each week to catch your podcasts. They are a triumph of brevity and wit, remarkable for how much invaluable information and stimulating ideas they contain in a tiny, 3-minute-long package. It’s always a pleasure to listen in.”
The Otter Group has been podcasting it’s Negotiating Tip of the Week with Josh Weiss, Associate Director of Harvard’s Global Negotiation Project since this time last year…check it out, if you haven’t already. 40 podcasts and over 100,000 downloads later, these guys are taking the next step.
You are still mystified by the wildly popular new world of blogs, podcasting, and RSS and wondering how you can use these technologies to reach more people and improve your marketing and sales.
”By setting up my blog site and making a small investment in a Google Ad campaign, my business has been transformed. I am now reaching a national audience of dog lovers who refer their friends to us. My computer skills are very basic but I can post new entries and photos to my blog so I can keep people up to date on shows, litters, and our services.” 
The networked information economy has a new language. It is called RSS, short for Really Simple Syndication, and it is how you share information with your network. To read RSS you use an RSS aggregator, which provides a consolidated view of content in a single browser display or desktop application. Think of it as “Tivo” for your desktop. You subscribe to a set of channels (known as feeds) through which information flows. RSS provides an essential framework that organizes web content into clean, crisp chunks (known as items) that have vital metadata associated with them, like the date of publication, authorship, categories and tags. When something new – an article, a photo or a podcast – is published, it automatically goes out in the RSS feed. If the aggregator is tuned – or to use RSS language, subscribed – to that feed, it collects whatever is in the feed. Understanding and working with RSS is a critical new skill for success in the networked information economy.
”RSS has positively saved me thousands of hours of manual work, and it has given me opportunities that I had not even imagined possible a few years ago. RSS has extended my reach, visibility and exposure. Loyal readers can get all my breaking news without needing to come to my site each time. Finding highly relevant breaking news on the topics I research and work on, it is now more manageable and less time consuming thanks to RSS and the new technologies that allow me to aggregate and filter only what I am interested in.” 
Podcasting has emerged as a powerful new medium for entertainment and learning. Its power lies in how easy and inexpensive it is to make podcasts, and in the free global distribution system Apple has built through the iTunes podcast store. Podcasting is an example of the long tail effect: expert content can find niche audiences and efficiently deliver valuable information to them. It is the antithesis of the “best seller” mentality. For training and learning, podcasting offers many significant advantages over web, video and print materials. Experts can now make their own podcasts on the desktop and cut out the costs of expensive producers, writers, and designers. Podcasting enables you to teach what you know and create channels for disseminating your knowledge to a global audience. In this segment you will learn the basics of podcasting, and have a chance to make and publish your own short podcast. Move over Walter Cronkite…make room for you.
“Podcasting has enabled me to reach a much more vast and broad audience than the people who take my courses or trainings. I feel like I am getting to people who don’t see themselves as negotiators but who negotiate all the time.”
The Pew Charitable Trust study of Internet Ties reports that the average American now maintains a personal digital network of about 35 people. These are people with whom you have loose ties, share information and advice, and possibly, do business. More and more, your success will be contingent upon the quality of the 35 people in your network and how well you manage them and your relationship to them. This is very different from managing relationships inside a more traditional organization. Most of these relationships are managed through digital connections. In this new world, it is not what you know or whom you know, but who knows you.
“My personal learning network is at the heart of my business strategy for growth. I find that by combining web services I can reach and manage large numbers of people very efficiently. I am only as good as my very good network of teachers who write about things that really help me with my work. I am able to publish information to blogs, calendars, flickr, and delicious and quickly share what I am learning with others. The networked information economy is built on reciprocity, and my mantra is a line from Abbey Road, “And in the end…the love you take is equal to the love you make…”
No matter what your job title or description, learn to think and act like a CEO to be successful in today’s economy.
