On the 45th birthday of Alan Johnston

Generation C

I am writing a paper for a workshop at the Flexible Learning conference that I am running next week here at Heriot-Watt. I am working on the paper together with a 3rd year student, and lo and behold, we don't just talk about Web 2.0 tools, we have been using them while preparing the talk.

While Google Docs & Spreadsheets is great for Excel and okay for Word it doesn't work with PowerPoint. Thinkfree, however, once we had cracked how to use it, is brilliant for PPT.

We were also collaborating via good old MSN and Bebo.

Interestingly, though, when we worked on the real meat (abstract, concept, activities, main content) we did that meeting F2F. Now what does that tell us about the way we humans prefer to work? Hmmm ...

Netvibes

I am discovering more and more facsinating tools that appear to be puerly social ones, but then I think, what does that mean? Social? isn't learning a social activity? Surely, we all know that it is.

Netvibes is the latest tool that I have wholeheartedly embraced. It's a portal and this means that I don't even need to open all those tabsin Firefox anymore. It also makes me smile wrily, because of the inability of Universities to ever keep up. Well, not all, but certainly many. Not with the digital generation, not with the vast possibilities out there and not with thinking out of the box.

Or, as Michael Wesch said it: "Students are already frequently visiting Facebook, so we can bring our class discussions to them in a place where they have already invested significant effort in building up their identity, rather than asking them to login to Blackboard or some other course management system where they feel “faceless” and out of place."

Indeed, why don't we.