Val Evans over at the Social Software for Learning blog asks
What about using social software, viz blogs, wikis, social bookmarking and virtual conferencing in the VTE teaching and learning environment? How are they being used now? How could they be used better? Which disciplines do they suit best? Should they be used at all?
And what about using the same software for capability development within and across organizations – are they the right tools? How are they being used now? How could they be used better?
It’s a good question, and one that I’m not sure I’m fully qualified to answer. I can give some example of how I’ve used some of these tools to learn in a professional environment, though.
Firstly (as a software developer) I’d like to point to the JavaBlogs site. It’s a great example of loosely coupled community of bloggers who together have formed what many educators would describe as a community of practice. A similar example - although this time in the form of a forum - is the Sitepoint forum. This example is often pointed to by EdNA Groups‘ participant Simon Fenton-Jones as a good example of professional learning in practice.
Secondly, Wikipedia is an invaluable resource. A colleague and I were discussing this a while back - we concluded that the ease we found the page on the Two’s Complement algorithm probably saved us two weeks of elapsed time if we had to rely on finding it at a traditonal book-based library. Perhaps that is a good example of how one discipline (software development) is particually suited to this form of learning.
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Thanks Nick for linking us to your blog and sharing your thoughts and links. It is really interesting to see how different communities are forming through the use of Web 2.0 technologies. A
s I become more immersed in the research I have found myself drifting to many and varied sites - keeping on target is challenging! I still have so much to learn about how to use the different tools - social bookmarking is next on the list as I am not doing that very well at all yet!
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[…] I’ve previously posted about how the availability of digital information saves me weeks of elapsed time on a daily basis. But the effort of a couple of minutes of searching compared to years spent trawling though libraries really shows how the effective digitizing resources really is. […]
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