Drew had a bright idea (he seems to be full of those - see Andy’s blog). A book group on Twitter. A few hours after it’s birth the group is forming and evolving on a wikispaces wiki. The thing I love about this is that it is at heart a constructivist response to Twitter. It’s not “How can we use this for education?” It’s “Let’s make something and record our learning along the way.” What’s not to love about that?

Here’s a few of the advantages we’ve already come up with:

twitterbookgroup » home
Advantages of a Twitter Book Group
Brainstorm your thoughts below

• Being able to effectively synopsis your thoughts in 140 characters requires higher order thinking
• It is is more inclusive of those with lower bandwidth capabilities or do not have computers they can use cell phones
• Contributions can be made “on the go” via cell phone
• It would potentially allow a greater number of people to participate
• It could encourage participants to read off line.
• It will further the growth of the Twitter network.

If you can think of any others or you just want to get involved, get along to the wiki, put your name down, start following @bookgroup (and the other participants) and get yourself a copy of this month’s choice:

It should be a great way of discussing a book, whilst building a network and learning the power of Twitter. See CoolCat Teacher’s Blog about it as well.

Original source Courosa

I was always the one playing with the cardboard box, wonder what that says about me?

It’s a serious point though. I used to get annoyed by learning facilitators saying:

“That’s an interesting site (and/or) application - how could we use it for education?”

Now I find myself wondering the same thing, rather than just getting on and using whatever it is.

I’ve just discovered a paradox though. Although new things come and go, I’m pretty faithful to my chosen tool set :

• Flickr (I’m soooo Old Skool!) I’ve had an account since Sept 2004
• Blog - I’ve had blogs on Blogdrive, Edublogs and here. I’ve blogged continuously since Nov 2003 (eek that’s a long time!)
• NetNewsWire Lite- my RSS reader of choice since 2004
• BlogLines - RSS reader for when I’m away from the mac - since 2003
• VoodooPad - my choice for a personal off-line wiki since March 2004
• Furl - social bookmarking since Nov 2003 (I use del.icio.us more now but furl is still where most of my bookmarks are as it saves a copy)
• gmail - for my email since July 2004
• MediaWiki - for my teaching resources for usefulwiki.com since Feb 2007

Starting to think I’m a dinosaur except for the most recent addition:

Twitter - microblogging since March 2007

This scriptlet can display not only a flickr photo in a web pages or blog articles, but also the notes.This means you can embed a flickr photo with its notes in your own website. Just mouse over the image to reveal the note.

There’s a handy bookmarklet to pop on your toolbar. This means you can just generate the code whilst you are looking at images in Flickr & then nip into the blog, switch to code view & paste it in. Cool or what?
Don’t forget to only use Creative Commons images though or you might run into copyright issues.

See a more detailed use over on Classroom Displays

I’ve been thinking today, in between lots of other bits of work, about the need to widen my network. I want to start to link up with other bloggers working in Further Education, particularly in the UK. Most of the people I already read are classroom teachers or edubloggers whose main concerns are the teaching of children. I won’t stop reading them of course but I’d like to find some new contacts who are working with adults. Trouble is I’m a bit baffled as to how to do it.

My network of people I read and sometimes interact more directly with grew up dynamically over the last 3 or 4 years. I must have gone looking for people at the start but mostly I just found them from other people’s blogrolls. It’s the same with Twitter. I just added people I saw other people following who looked interesting.

So where to start? Technorati seems like an obvious place. They’ve got a search button and they use lots of tagging. But what to search for? I tried “informal learning uk” as a starting point - I’m not too hopeful, might just link here lol!

Ah - well there’s Ewan of course And quite a few KM (Knowledge Management) bloggers but nothing obviously relevant.

So I tried GNVQ - none

Erm - Further Education UK?

• eew an Official Microsoft blog which hasn’t updated for 88 days. I suppose I ought to subscribe, I do have to use windoze at work
• Going through the Phases might be interesting, not a tutor though. More ICT stuff probably isn’t what I need. Might be fun though.
• EducationState - Promises:

  An alternative and critical view of UK education news, policy and issues and a fly-on-the-wall insight into the day-to-day running of educational institutions.

  But it has a baffling theme, still I won’t notice that in my rss reader and the posts look controversial & interesting I’m starting to feel better!

• AoC NILTA Aha - Josie Fraser, she’s usually worth reading Oh, Josie is listed as one of the authors in Technorati but she doesn’t appear on the “Who we are” page. The writing looks a bit dull but I’ll put it in my ‘on probation’ folder & subscribe anyway.

Everything else is either dead or totally corporate Where am I going to find ordinary FE tutors who love blogging and want to use Web2.0 with their students to read?

I’m more and more convinced that social networks like Twitter are a powerful force for informal learning. I do wonder though if people are accessing them ‘in their own time’ then what impact is this having on their work/life balance? Many of my American Twitter network have been off work today, but I’ve watched them slogging away all day. I often see people in both the UK and the US working late into the evening on work related projects. If you ask, many will tell you that sites like Ning, Twitter and Facebook are banned in school. Just today John tweeted that “Wikispaces is blocked because it’s like MySpace.” Some schools still even ban edublogs.org! So I was interested in this post:

Pontydysgu - Bridge to Learning » Blog Archive » Has informal learning a chance as bosses crack down on internet socialising?

Informal learning is the most powerful route to competence development and innovation in the workplace. But informal learning means trusting employees - trusting employees to usefully use their time, trusting employees to make decision, trusting employees to try out new ideas.

The public sector is probably the worst place for trust. In many organizations public sector workers are not even entitled to send emails without prior approval. Supervision rules. Why? The work culture of the public sector is still all too often rooted in Fordist ideas of production. Knowledge is carefully filtered and controlled. Strict hierarchies prevail.

I ‘m not sure even researchers and those who defend the workers get it. From the same article: “Cary Cooper, a professor of organisational psychology and health at Lancaster University, said that managers should be realistic. “Britain has some of the longest working hours in the developed world. Employers have created this culture. It is natural for people to have to use work computers for organising their personal life.”

Of course I agree with him. But that is not the point. Social networking is not just about organising ones social life. I certainly do not go to Facebook to arrange to meet my friends in the pub.

Social networking can be about spreading and sharing ideas, solving problems, forming and participating in communities of practice. And to all of you who say I am not being real, I suggest you study how people really use the internet n companies. Most people like to learn, they enjoy learning. Learning is a natural human activity. How sad we are so suspicious of it.

I could not agree more!