Monday, June 07, 2010

Back Up Out Of The Twitter Rabbit Hole And Other Musings...

Hard to believe that it has been almost six months since my last blog post - I truly did fall down the Twitter rabbit hole - was (and is) to type out that quick and witty (well I think they are witty) 140 charcter stream of consciousness than it was to sit down and think of something almost sensible to say...

Another advantage of Twitter is that with TweetDeck, I could kill two birds with one stone - tweet and post to Facebook (in fact other than Birthday greetings, I have not used the Facebook interface since I installed TweetDeck almost a year ago...).

While I find Twitter a good way to stay in touch and to get info - depending on who you follow it's almost a "headline" RSS feed - there is still very much room in my life for a blog and for other folk's blogs too (although I must confess I have not looked at Netvibes in months either - something I must get back too.

We're nearing the end of another full and busy academic year here at the College - convocation is next week and we are already in next year mode - seeing prospective students, looking at enrollment numbers (ours are great!), and all in all getting sorted out for another academic year - there is no longer any "down" time...

The two big pieces of tech news for me over the last few months are all Apple related - the release of the iPad and today's announcement of the new iPhone 4 - there is definiteky an iPhone 4 in my relatively immediate future, as for the iPad we have oredered some to try as teaching and learning platforms and to become more informed about their capabilities as we know students will strat showing up with them this fall.

I see the iPad as primarily a consumption machine, not a creation machine - Ira David Socol on his SpeEd Change blog has an interesting post on the iPad - check it out. I think the jury is still out on if the iPad can be successfully used as a learning tool in PSE - I suspect that in some programs it can and in some it cannot. I plan on using one this summer and fall as my " go to meetings" machine - note taking, file retrieval etc. I'll post on how it goes.

My cross Canada virtual trek continues - I think I'm somewhere in Saskatchewan I'll be updating those posts shortly - I did the Bluenose Marathon 5 KM walk/run this year for the third time - my goal was sub 50 minutes and I finished in a chip tine of 50:07.9 (shouldn't have tweetd at the 1 Km mark :-)). You can see my hard-earned medal above...

Well it is so good to be back up from deep in the Twitterverse - I've really missed that 141st character and all the ones that follow. Time to think and muse on what will be here next. Hmmm...