So with the caveat that I am only halfway through Mark Bauerline’s book The Dumbest Generation, I have some early impressions to throw out there. While I think there is some merit to this side of the debate (much like Keen’s Cult of the Amateur) what really bothers me about this book so far is, as the title suggests, this sense that our kids are at fault. Let me put it plainly: our kids are not “dumb” nor is this generation “dumb” simply because they spend a lot of time in front of television screens and computers or because they haven’t worked out for themselves how to get smarter using the Read/Write Web. And to label them so is demeaning and smacks more of marketing than reality.

Here is a sampling of quotes that I think pretty accurately reflect the tenor of the book:

In an average young person’s online experience, the senses may be stimulated and the ego touched, but vocabulary doesn’t expand, memory doesn’t improve, analytic talents don’t develop, and erudition doesn’t ensue. (109)

For must young users, it is clear, the Web hasn’t made them better writers and readers, sharper interpreters and more discerning critics, more knowledgeable citizens and tasteful consumers. (110)

The major finding: “More than half the students failed to sort the information to clarify related material.” It graded the very communications skills Web 2.0, the Read/Write Web, supposedly instills, and “only a few test takers could accurately adapt material for a new audience.” (115)

And just whose fault is this?

If the argument is that these types of gains are not possible through the Web, that’s one thing. But, speaking for myself, I know that is not true. My interactions using social tools have definitely expanded my vocabulary, improved my memory, improved my analytic abilities, made me a more discerning critic and all the rest. And I would be that many reading this would agree to those shifts in their own experience. Networks push our thinking. Networks can push our kids’ thinking.

Bauerline guzzles the “Digital Native” metaphor and leverages it to the extreme, expressing genuine surprise that our kids aren’t able to figure this all out on their own and then, worse, blaming them for the failure when the failure is ours. It’s our own lack of context and practical skills for what is happening right now that is the failure, not just at school but at home. How many millions of parents have no clue what their kids are doing with their online time, have no ability to counsel or model for their own children the ways in which these technologies can facilitate new opportunities for learning? How many tens of thousands of educators?

And that really is the time challenge that we have, not so much the lack of time in the day to get our brains around this but the time it’s going to take for adults to get on some sort of more than equal footing with our kids in their uses of these technologies. We’ve always known more, been able to do more, been “smarter.” In these contexts, however, we’re not smarter any longer at a time when our kids really need us to be.

We’re the dummies, not our kids.

If Clay Shirky is right, and all us baby boomers are carrying around a boatload of “cognitive surplus“, we better start unleashing it sooner rather than later.

(Photo “Bored” by foreversouls.)

First Monday is out with a collection of essays that might be of interest in terms of contextualizing where the whole 2.0 thing is at. From the introduction:

The rhetoric surrounding Web 2.0 infrastructures presents certain cultural claims about media, identity, and technology. It suggests that everyone can and should use new Internet technologies to organize and share information, to interact within communities, and to express oneself. It promises to empower creativity, to democratize media production, and to celebrate the individual while also relishing the power of collaboration and social networks.

But Web 2.0 also embodies a set of unintended consequences, including the increased flow of personal information across networks, the diffusion of one’s identity across fractured spaces, the emergence of powerful tools for peer surveillance, the exploitation of free labor for commercial gain, and the fear of increased corporatization of online social and collaborative spaces and outputs.

I’ve added a bunch of these to my “To Read” list (which just keeps getting longer), but I settled into one by David Silver titled “History, Hype and Hope: An Afterword.” Here is a part from the “Hope” section:

This is the writeable generation, a generation of young people who think of media as something they read and something they write – often simultaneously. This is a generation of content creators, a generation of young people who with the help of Web 2.0 tools know how to create content, how to share content, and how to converse about content. This is the generation for whom broadcast media – and its silent, obedient audiences – is rapidly fading and for whom conversations make more sense than lectures. This is a new generation with new writeable behaviors and it’s hard not to be hopeful about that.

I’ve got a post brewing about what our students really know and can do in this Web 2.0 world, and I think I’m slowly coming to understand that this type of rhetoric (of which I have been guilty of kind of dreamily espousing myself) is really still hope, not reality. Kids have the potential to do this in ways that no other generation ever has, but not so many are doing a great job of creating content and coversations and exhibiting “writeable behaviors” to the extent that most would like to think.

At any rate, just offering up the link for those that might be interested…

On many levels, I’m lucky. My children go to a good school where by and large the educators care about their well-being and want the best for them. There are computers in every classroom, the student body doesn’t get itself into too much trouble, and there’s talk of starting a compost bin in the courtyard for lunch scraps. It’s a safe place, situated right in the middle of corn fields and barns. The air is clean and crisp on these fall mornings, and I know as I watch Tess and Tucker get on the bus each day that they will be getting much more than the vast majority of kids in this world are getting in terms of an education.

My curse, of course, is that it doesn’t feel like quite enough. There’s not enough connecting going on, I think, and the number of worksheets and handouts that come home in the “Friday Folder” frustrates me no end. While there is some technology, it’s not used very well, from what I’ve seen. It’s more for automating (as Alan November calls it) than for constructing and creating and publishing and starting conversations. As I’ve said numerous times, it feels like my children are being fairly well prepared for a world that is already past, not the much more “hyperconnected, hypertransparent” world that is their future.

The good news is that there are some signs of change. Last summer at NECC, our superintendent dropped in unannounced on my open source blogging workshop. And, while I wonder about the wisdom of doing so, I’ve been invited to present to the school’s staff in a couple of weeks. (I’m already nervous.) It feels like there is an opportunity to start some conversations about how to really think systemically about change in the context of curriculum and pedagogy. And while I wonder what effect, if any, those conversations may have on my own third and fifth graders experience, it’s a start, at least.

For my kids, it’s up to me and my wife to add to the experience they are currently getting. And, more thanks to Wendy than to me, we’re starting to do that. Much of it is informal, such as narrating through our clicks when the kids are looking over our shoulders as we work and surf, or having constant conversations about their use of the computer when we let them online to play or work. They both have e-mail accounts which they check (because they get mail from us). I think we do a decent job of trying to model effective use (as much as we know it) and from that my kids are getting something they can apply to their own practice as well.

But this year, Wendy and a friend of ours who is home-schooling her kids have started supplementing their public school education in some more “formal” ways. Every Tuesday afternoon for about an hour, my wife’s office turns into a classroom where my kids are making wikis, learning about searching, and creating stories around whatever their interest is. And they’re being shown some ways in which technology can be used to connect, as in the picture above. (Click on it to see a more viewable size.) A couple of weeks ago, Steve Hargadon made a guest appearance using Skype to help them identify what they might want to work on in terms of projects. And there are plans to invite other people in to speak to them and help guide their work. (Let me know if you want to volunteer!) Real people, real work, real audiences.

Now I know that, again, I’m very, very lucky that I can offer this to my kids. There are literally billions of people who can’t. And I have an incredible partner who despite my frequent absences is able to make this happen (with ample help from our friend.) And I don’t know what type of an effect this will have on their “education,” but I do think it will help them see the potentials, and perhaps push their teachers even more. (The other day Tess noted that she had told her teacher to try to Skype the author of a book they are reading instead of send him e-mails…you go girl!) My biggest fear, however, is that it will only serve to make their school experience less relevant and more mundane. It’s a delicate balance.

And, of course, I wonder where this leads. I look at that picture and see a pretty compelling classroom, (as well as another pretty compelling classroom right outside the window) with a whole range of opportunities that most schools simply can’t offer. The more I think about it…

Technorati Tags: education, learning, homeschooling, stevehargadon

We took a lot of photos while in Australia. A lot. I must have shot about 400 frames throughout the trip, most of them of my kids having fun. But a few of them were of fairly tourist-y spots: the train station in Melbourne, the Syndey Harbor Bridge and Opera House, nice landscapes at various surfing spots. And I found myself wondering aloud at some points just why it was I was taking these pictures. I mean surely, there are better ones that I could find on Flickr. Why shouldn’t I just use those to capture my memories?

Case in point, this picture here that I took of Bell’s Beach, one of the top surfing spots on the South Australia Coast. Beautiful place. Kinda ok picture. Look on Flickr and what do you find? Over 1,100 photos tagged with “bells_beach” and probably twice that many in the database that aren’t as easy to find. And even on the first page of results are a couple that I find much more appealing than my own. Now even though “all rights are reserved” on these, I can still find almost 100 that have a Creative Commons license, and many are the exact same angle, exact same shot. Most importantly, there are some that are as good if not better than mine.

So the question is, why take pictures of places that you visit that probably aren’t going to be as good as the photos that others have already taken that are already available for you to use in your own albums, slide shows, whatever? I mean, unless you want to organize the wife and kids in front of the spot just to prove you’ve been there, what’s the point?

Just a question…

Technorati Tags: flickr, australia, phots, creative_commons

Some random reflections and thoughts from Building Learning Communities Day 1:

–In a lot of ways, I can’t believe this is my fourth BLC conference, and if nothing else, the one thing that really stands out is that there is very extensive intellectual (if not practical) understanding of the Read/Write Web as compared to my first year here when a lot of people looked at me funny as I talked about blogs and RSS and the like. Yesterday at a session that Tim Tyson was running about leadership, just about everyone said they wanted to learn more about Web 2.0 stuff, and in a weird way, it was a moment of some validation. Another signal that the train has left the station. But still, the fact that I am still doing a lot of talking on an introductory level speaks volumes, especially about RSS.

–Although the conference has doubled in size this year, from 300 to over 600, it so far has retained its feeling of intimacy. And I just never go to conferences where there are so many people from outside the US. One really funny moment today was sitting down for lunch with a contingent from Northern Ireland and asking them what they thought of the workshops and presentations. They all said they hadn’t learned a thing, and they were serious. It seems they’ve been talking about this stuff for a long time over there. After a little prodding, they admitted their thinking was getting tweaked, but it was fascinating to listen to them talk about the ways in which they were already rethinking their schools.

–There is one technology director here who brought two kids from his school to attend the conference. What a concept. Can you imagine a conference where really high level ideas about schools and education were being discussed where there were just as many students in the rooms and in the discussions as adults? Whoa.

–For some reason, I decided to get pretty edgy in my “New Literacies” presentation and I basically started by saying the whole concept of having people get up and give a presentation at conferences like this is really becoming ironic amidst all of this talk about conversation and collaboration. And so it was nice in that about 15 minutes of the hour (at least) was taken up with discussion. While Tim’s keynote this morning made plain the power of publishing, I wanted to push past the feeling that the product was the end of the process, and I tried to move the concept of what we can do now into the realm of building sustained, trusted, relevant, safe learning communities and networks in which the products nurture the conversation and the learning. That creating and sharing a movie or a podcast or blog post is important, but it is the connections we make around those artifacts, the discussions and interactions that surround them from the community where the most powerful learning takes place. It’s where the “meta” stuff happens, where the true potential lies.

–Ewan McIntosh is a rock star. Plain and simple. “The Italian mafia makes you an offer you can’t refuse. The Scottish mafia makes you an offer you can’t understand.” Priceless. David Jakes and Dean Shareski came back from Ewan’s second session awestruck, and I was truly sorry I was presenting opposite. (That is one of the personal frustrations of this conference…so much I want to learn and see.) Waiting for Jakes to post the “Chat Cast.”

–For reasons yet unclear, I am falling more in like with Twitter. Oy. Jakes put up a reflection on his blog that really resonated.

With Twitter and Skype, I have access to immediacy. My aggregator and my del.icio.us network (18 people I follow, 80 who follow me) are more asynchronous, and not as immediate. I need both types of networks.

Amen.

–I found this quote this morning via Stephen Downes and used it in my presentation.

 “We have been seduced by our inability to imagine ourselves as superfluous to student learning.”

Now I’m serious…that wins the “Best Sentence in a Blog Post of 2007″ award (so far at least.) Amen. Amen

–Warning: We’re all heading downtown tonight…Tweets ahead.

(Photo “chatcast” by jutecht.)

Technorati Tags: blc07, learning, education

So before my flight home got canceled, I had a great day just outside of Green Bay speaking to superintendents and principals at the FIEL conference about the Germanic influences on the English language. I mean…um…the Read/Write/Connect/Reflect Web.

But here was just a classic teachable moment:

I’m showing how the last 500 edits in Wikipedia occurred over the last 2.5 minutes and how that translates to something like 300,000 edits a day when someone raises his hand and says “so take a look at the very last edit on the list…the one about Ronald McDonald.” I look at my own list, and of course, due to the deluge of edits on Wikipedia, there is no Ronald McDonald edit listed, and so we go to the site and see (Caution: vile and unpretty stuff ahead) this. I say something like “yep, this is the issue with Wikipedia isn’t it? So let’s fix it.” And silly me, I start going in and deleting the picture and erasing the bad words, and by the time I’m done doing all of that I hit save and wouldn’t ya know, someone else had come in and reverted the page back to a more appropriate version.

“See?” I say. Vandals come in at 14:27 and start mucking it up, page fixed within 10 minutes.

That’s why Wikipedia is worth a second, third and fourth look from educators.

Amazing.

Technorati Tags: wikipedia, literacy, education, learning, collaboration

So there is no question, right, that there are a lot more teachers using blogs and wikis and Read/Write Web tools today than ever before. And even though most people still report huge obstacles standing in the way regarding implementation of these technologies in their classrooms, it just feels like the winds are starting, ever so slightly, to shift in a different direction. (And no, I don’t think this is a “tail wind” from the EduBloggerCon love fest we just had in Atlanta.) More people are opening up to the conversation.

But here’s the thing that’s been sticking with me of late. For all of the talk about Classroom 2.0 and School 2.0 and Addyourwordhere 2.0, there still isn’t much talk about what fuels the 2.0…the network.

A couple of purposely vague examples. I listened to a presentation of late that attempted to define School 2.0 and did so pretty much solely on the grounds that we can have our students create and publish meaningful work to the world. Now I have absolutely no problem with infusing these tools into classrooms to allow kids to publish what they know to large audiences. That’s a great first step. But that’s not School 2.0 (is it?) And in another conversation I had recently with someone who is doing some really interesting implementations of social technologies into her district, the main success was that her teachers and students were now able to communicate more effectively with each other and parents. That’s not it either (is it?)

I know I visited this theme a couple of weeks ago at NECC, but in the time since, it feels like it’s been jumping out at me more and more. (Except when I was on the beach where even the fish weren’t jumping.) I’ve been trying of late to convince folks that until they understand the uses of these tools in their own learning practice they’ll be really hard pressed to deliver the different pedagogies that go along with them in compelling and effective ways. Yes, we can have kids create movies and podcasts and wikis and all sorts of artifacts that have meaningful purposes and messages. And yes that’s all good, but at the end of the day, all that’s about is being able to use the tool to do the same stuff we’ve done in the past only put it into a new form and offer it to a wider audience. The pedagogies haven’t changed.

But here is the bigger question, I think. Through teaching them to use these tools to publish, are we also teaching them how to use these tools to continue the learning once that project is over? Can they continue to explore and reflect on the ideas that those artifacts represent regardless of who is teaching the next class? Can they connect with that audience not simply in the ways that books connect to readers (read but no write) but in the ways that allow them to engage and explore more deeply with an ongoing, growing community of learners? Isn’t that the real literacy here?

It’s not just the Read/Write Web, is it? It’s more than that. (Someone already came to this conclusion a while back, I know, but I can’t dig it out right now.) It’s the Read/Write/Connect/Reflect Web as well. It is, in the words of Jay Cross in his book Informal Learning (which I’ll have more to write about later,) the “Learning is Optimizing the Quality of One’s Networks” Web. I love this other quote by Jay as well:

“What can you do” has been replaced by “What can you and your network connections do?” Knowledge is moving from the individual to the individual and his contacts. (18)

He’s right. This is our “outboard brain”. This is the power that the publishing facilitates. And this is what we need to get the conversation to, now that the tools have “arrived”.

Photo “The People I Follow on Twitter” by CC Chapman.

Technorati Tags: connectivism, JayCross, education, learning, NECC07, NECC2007

So we’re driving to the airport, Tess and I, to start our most excellent weekend adventure to South Dakota. Tomorrow, it’s horse shows, Sunday, Rushmore and Custer, Monday back home after a presentation.

We’re cruising down the interstate and all of a sudden she pokes me from the back seat.

“I can’t help it,” she says. “I have to poke someone every thirty minutes.” She laughs, and I put a fake frown on my face.

But then, I start thinking.

“Hey Tess,” I say. “Remember how we talked about maybe you and Tucker writing books and then being able to send them out for Christmas presents?”

“Yeah…”

“Well, you know, that could be a pretty fun story to make into a book.”

Her faces scrunches up in the rear view mirror. “What? About a girl who has to poke people?”

“Yeah,” I say, with more than a tinge of enthusiasm. “Like, maybe it’s a disease or something, like the flu.”

She looks out the window. “Like the 24 hour-flu,” she says and smiles. “Like Pokinitis.”

I laugh. “Pokinitis,” I say. “Perfect. Maybe she wakes up with Pokinitis…”

“Yeah, and can’t help but poke her mom and her dad and her little brother…”

“And maybe her teacher,” I say. I can see this. It’s got potential. I look in the rear view to see if she feels it too.

“Hey Dad,” she says after a moment. “Could we really make this into a book? Like a real book?”

“Absolutely,” I say, thinking about George Mayo and Lulu and how cool this could be.

“I already wrote a book, you know,” she says.

“I know. You know how many people have read it by now?”

“How many?” she asks.

“Over 1,700,” I say, and I see her face brighten.

“Really?”

“Really. But we could turn Pokinitis into a book that people can put on their bookshelves.”  She looks out the window and the cars passing by.

“Maybe she goes to the school nurse and pokes her too,” she giggles. I laugh.

“So what do you think? You want to try to write it? On the plane maybe?” I’m hoping.

“Maybe…we’ll see.” I deflate a bit.

“You know what else?” I say. “You could write it, draw the pictures for it, and then when it’s all done, we could make a movie of it with you reading it so other kids could even listen to it.” Oy, I think. Overload. The curse of being so invested in all of this. But she’s thinking about it.

“We’ll see,” she says. “We’ll see.”

Technorati Tags: books, publishing, read_write_web

The front page of today’s New York Times features a story about the attempts of Tim O’Reilly and Jimmy Wales to create a set of guidelines for “Web Civility” in the light of what happened with Kathy Sierra and others.

Chief among the recommendations is that bloggers consider banning anonymous comments left by visitors to their pages and be able to delete threatening or libelous comments without facing cries of censorship.

Should we feel lucky, I wonder, that a sense of civility has pretty much been the norm in this community to date? Obviously, since most all of our conversations in some way revolve around students, I think this whole process will be important to follow as it plays out.

Technorati Tags: education, blogging, learning

This is a few days late, but I just wanted to write a quick post about the two day workshop that Steve Hargadon organized and that I gave at the Science Leadership Academy this past weekend. First, I got to check a couple of more bloggers off of my life list: Christian Long and George Mayo, both of whose names surprised me when I saw them on the attendee list. George is doing such creative stuff with his kids in terms of videocasting and podcasting. And Christian has become a prolific blogger who is pointing to all sorts of great stuff on his site.

The two days were highlighted by some great conversation about how we get to the next level of the conversation, which to me, at least, is how to make some systemic changes regarding teaching and learning. We all seem to have variations on the same theme, that it will eventually happen from the ground up. I just wonder what we can do to move things along somewhat.

A couple of blog-worthy moments from the workshop. At the point where we started talking about doing audio recordings, I took out my iPod, my iRiver, my microphones and other such stuff. Within about a minute we had a pretty impressive array of equipment that the group was carrying. That was the first time I had that happen, and Chris Lehmann, our distinguished host, pointed to that fact as a sign that things were changing.

The second moment was when Christian began talking about how easy it was not just to publish in digital form but also in print form as well. I had one of those “doh!” moments when he started talking, like why aren’t my own kids writing books that we can publish on the Web but also kick out through LuLu as holiday gifts next year. In fact, we should make it a yearly event. As I looked around the brand new SLA library where we were working, noticing a few empty shelves, I said to Chris “you know, you should reserve one of these shelves for books that your students make.” As you can see by the picture, he agreed.

The best part of the whole workshop was that the attendees got the chance to interact with the SLA teachers for a good chunk of time. Unfortunately, there weren’t any kids around as Friday was a teacher workshop day. But I think we all got a sense of what it was like to work with these technologies with kids and what some of the real advantages were. It was great to see Moodle and blogs and wikis in practice, and there is much more to come when Chris and his teachers move over to Drupal in the near future.

One final story. I got the chance to chat with Marcie Hull who is a technology and art teacher. (She uses both sides of her brain.) She shared with me an IM chat that she had been having with a student as she sat in on the workshop. This student was struggling a bit in adjusting to the different teaching and learning emphasis that SLA has, and, as his advisee, Marcie was counseling him even when he was away from school. The best part was that she was sharing some of her own struggles with him, and modeling for him the ways in which she’s learned to change and cope. It was a pretty amazing example of the extended connections that these teachers can have with their kids. They can know them and teach them and even learn with them in some amazing ways…

Technorati Tags: sla, teaching, learning

Pew’s latest report on tagging doesn’t offer much in the way of surprises: 28% of Internet users tag, 7% on a typical day. Things on the folksonomy front are definitely taking some root. But even here there is evidence of a divide: taggers with broadband outnumber those without almost 2:1, and the higher your income and the better your education, the more you tag. (Interesting, though, that the race/ethnicity with the highest percentage of taggers is black, followed by Hispanic. Wonder what that means…)

Worth a read as well is the interview about tagging with David Weinberger that comes with the report. A couple of pull quotes to whet your appetite:

Maybe the most interesting thing about tagging is that we now have millions and millions of people who are saying, in public, what they think pages and images are about. That’s crucial information that we can use to pull together new ideas and information across the endless sea we’ve created for ourselves.

And:

We’ll also undoubtedly figure out how to intersect tags with social networks, so that the tags created by people we know and respect have more “weight” when we search for tagged items. In fact, by analyzing how various social groups use tags, we can do better at understanding how seemingly different worldviews map to one another.

The whole self-organization meme is really interesting me of late. It’s crucial that our kids get their brains around it in effective ways. This quote from Donald Tapscott’s book Wikinomics speaks to it as well:

We are shifting from closed and hierarchical workplaces with rigid employment relationships to increasingly self-organized, distributed, and collaborative human capital networks that draw knowledge and resources from inside and outside the firm (240).

I love the way that’s stated. Networked learning requires self-organization. I’m still constantly tweaking the way I tag and sort all of this information, and to be honest, I’m not sure I’m as effective as I could be. But it’s the process I learn from, and once again, the way I’m doing it now looks little like what’s happening in most classrooms I see…

Technorati Tags: tags folksonomy Weinberger Pew learning education

So one of the reasons I’ve had no time to blog of late (or read for that matter) is that life is getting crazed once again. Seven weeks off goes much too quickly, but I’ve gotten into some very cool projects that I hope to blog about in short order.

Meanwhile, in case any one is interested, here is the link to the presentation that Rob Mancabelli and I did at FETC on Friday. I’d be really interested in any reaction from those of you that might listen and watch (sort of) it.

Technorati Tags: fetc07 social read_write_web

So I know this is totally self-indulgent and egocentric, but I do have a point to make about the fact that out of over 2.7 billion results that you get when you search for “Will” on Google, this blog now comes up first. First of all, I find that fact just simply amazing in some warped way. I mean, I know it’s in no way a measure of my character or worth as a human being. There are probably at least 2.7 billion people out there without any Google rank who do much more than I to make the world a better place for others. (At least.)

But here’s the thing…the fact that I am “clickable” or find-able to this extent gives me tremendous opportunities to connect to other people, many of whom may have much to teach me. I am truly humbled by the powerful learning that I have done within the network of people that I’ve become a part of, and it would not have happened had I not had a way to engage in these conversations. I’ve said this many times…blogging has transformed my learning. Our students who are not “clickable,” whose content is not being shared and distributed using the tools of the Read/Write Web, who are not engaging in potentially global conversations about the ideas and topics in which they take an interest, who are not learning how to build their own networks of trusted sources and teachers are, I think, missing a huge opportunity. Without question, I come to this because of what has transpired in my own life, and I recognize full well that what’s happened to me in this blog will not happen to everyone who decides to participate. But not taking part, not sharing in this way leaves little opportunity to find the deeply personal learning experiences that have transformed so many of us in this community, regardless of where their names land on a Google search.

Which is why, more and more, I think that educators have to understand and use these tools. As teachers, I don’t think it’s enough to simply repackage old stuff and “publish” it in a new way. Unless we experience the learning that comes with being a part of the network, unless we are willing to take the time to embrace and use these technologies in our own practice, I’m not sure we can adequately teach our students how to leverage these tools for their own learning.

Now back to our regularly scheduled blogging…

Technorati Tags: learning, google, education, network

Daniel Pink has it right about design being an important literacy in a world where we are able to publish so easily. To that end, I’ve been noticing that a lot of us, myself included, have been putting more and more photos and graphics in our posts. Many of us are also reading Kathy Sierra’s blog which always offers up some compelling graphics, ones, however, that seem a bit out of reach for my scarcely artistic brain.

So I need things like Thumbscrew (MAC only) which lets me take a picture, like this one of Tess, and in about a nanosecond give it just a bit of a twist to make it all artsy and stuff and, hopefully, enhance the design of this blog. (Watch out…that’s my kid.)

Now I know there is a danger of over-design here. (I know I’m on the verge of getting over-widgeted.) And I also know that many times vanilla is better than a whole bunch of flavors mashed together. Good thing my wife is a designer and has promised to kick me in the right brain if I get out of hand…

Thanks to John Pederson for the link.

Not sure why it took me so long to finally dive into Library Thing but, despite the imminent demise of books as we know them (smile) I got hooked in maybe 27 seconds. In fact, I might say that I found LT to be among (if not the) most intuitive, easy to use, fantastically fast interface of any social site I’ve seen yet.

Basically, Library Thing allows you to easily catalog all of the books in your personal library which, in turn, leads to all sorts of social goodness. I can easily find out who else is reading the books I have, see what’s in their libraries, and start conversations with them about what they are reading and recommending. Of course, I can tag the books in my collection, rate them, write a review, add comments to the listing, and access all of the Library of Congress information about the book in an instant. (They just added their 9 millionth book to their database.) There are widgets to add (scroll down and see mine in the right hand column) and it has a great zeitgeist page that gives an overview of all things…um…Library Things. (For instance, the largest collection is 14, 954 books…whoa!)

Obviously, this is a great way to not only track what you’re reading but find other stuff to read (although one look at the stack of books next to my bed and I wonder if that’s a good thing or a bad thing.) But I also thing it’s a wonderful example of the social potential of Web 2.0 in a very concrete way. I mean del.icio.us is a powerful tool, but I’m not sure how many people really “get it” without some bit of brainwork. This is easy and obvious, and let’s face it, everyone has a library…right?

Technorati Tags: library, books, reading, social