Comments on: “Ambient Awareness”

By: W4, #6: FACEBOOK AND “AMBIENT AWARENESS” « pass the conch

W4, #6: FACEBOOK AND “AMBIENT AWARENESS” « pass the conch — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 22:26:16 +0000

[...] you might want to hang out there a bit and see if anything grabs your attention over time), I ran across a cool piece of writing of his entitled “Ambient Awareness” (see, I didn’t make my title up entirely – wink) which supposedly talked about how [...]

By: W4, #7: FACEBOOK & “AMBIENT AWARENESS” « rabbits and cheshire cats

Wed, 10 Sep 2008 22:15:31 +0000

By: Gary Stager

Gary Stager — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 17:17:27 +0000

Will,

The excerpt you shared reinforces an inconvenient truth of all this “free” and open media – it’s primarily about commerce.

You can define commerce as broadly or narrowly as you wish, but most blogging is a form of marketing, not the exchange of democratic ideals or personal learning.

Twitter’s financial model is now built upon marketing and data-mining. That’s fine. They need to keep the servers running somehow.

If all we want/need kids to learn is how to find a reliable plumber or tasty cheesesteak, then as John McCain would say, “Mission accomplished.” Most of these amazing feats of networking you share come naturally to most people in the developing world (3rd world too – http://www.stager.org/blog/2008/08/you-must-rethink-tech-standards.html) who have an interest in being a participant in 2008.

By: Darren Draper

Darren Draper — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 15:36:25 +0000

Ahhhh Twitter: The “tool” we love to hate. And to think that we’ve likely been the “tools” all along.

Nonetheless, I’ve found that Twitter beats Google hands down when it comes to searching smarter.

By: Tom Hoffman

Tom Hoffman — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 12:57:42 +0000

I thought the most interesting parts were about the backlash among kids — like “no camera phones at parties.”

By: Dean Groom

Dean Groom — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 10:00:11 +0000

In addition to this use of Twitter, and I love the PLN that it has developed for me, right now its most powerful use is to bring those same people from the ‘theory and advice’ lane into the learning lane – when you drop these great people in the middle of a class thats working online – it significantly improves what the learning looks like – get those people back to talk ‘live’ to the kids at the end of a project and our previous notions of formative and summative evaluation get kicked right out the ball park. Right now I think my PLN is giving kids a lens on their learning that I cannot do – I don’t have the time I need to get around all the kids – and I don’t have all the answers – but Twitter by proxy – has dramatic affects – to the point where the PLN teaches students as much as their physical teachers.

Great post (as ever) – Looking forward to the PLP!