New Technology - The Threat To Our Information...

This is a great presentation from Norman Lamont, posted on SlideShare. It points out the threat of technology on our information and suggest a perfect way to counter that threat. This is important viewing for anyone who uses technology to manage their information flow, and particularly if you are a user of Web 2.0 technologies.

New technology - the threat to our information

View more presentations from normanlamont.

Enjoy!! (and a special thanks to Randommind for finding this)

Eight Things You Don't Know About Me...

My friend randommind sent me this post - "8 Things You Probably Didn't Know About Me". It's part of an internet meme making the rounds of the blogosphere. The idea is that you list eight things that people didn't know about you then "tag" eight other people. Sort of an internet chain letter. Well. I'm going to play along, sort of, and list eight things that most don't know about me. I'm not going to tag eight others as it seems that my friends have already been taggedin this process.

So here goes - eight things that you didn't know about me:

1. I was awarded the RMC Club of Canada scholarship in 1974 to attend the Royal Military College of Canada - I turned it down because that summer I did basic officer training at CFB Shilo and I didn't want to end up like my platoon commander, a recent RMC graduate. I went on to serve 28 years in the Canadian Army Reserve, retiring as a Lieutenant-Colonel in 2001
   
2. I've always wanted to jump out of an airplane (with a parachute) but have never had the courage to do it - mind over matter and right now mind is still winning and keeping my feet firmly on the ground
3. I'm allergic to cats but love (I love dogs more but live in an apartment building that is not dog friendly) them and an still thinking of getting a Maine Coon cat
4. I'm not afraid of heights but I get the willies if I look up from a high place (what's that all about?). I have no problem looking down from a great height (of course I'm 6'6", so that might have something to do with it)
5. I love military history, particularly World War II - the strategy, tactics and politics of the era
6. I have never gotten lost, temporarily misplaced, but never lost. When I travel to a strange place I love getting a map and just exploring - it's the best way to see the sights.
7. I spent the equivalent of grades 2-4 at a British school operated by the British Embassy in Bonn, West Germany (Dad was posted to the Canadian Embassy) and the PNEU. I learned things in those three years (math, biology, geography, economics...)that I didn't see again until I was in high school in Canada and I sailed through school because of what I learned and the study habits and skills I developed as a 7-9 year old - what's that all about, and what does it say about our education system?
   
8. Like many educators, I am an introvert - do not put me in a social situation with a room full of strangers - I hate it. Put me in a classroom with a room full of strangers who are there to learn and I love it...

So there you have it - eight things you didn't know (but might have suspected) about me...

(Picture - "8 Mosaic" - by Leo Reynolds)

Some Web 2.0/Social Networking Flotsam and Jetsam

One of the effects of becoming immersed in the use of Web 2.0 and Social Networking tools and technologies is the sheer volume of information that I now receive daily. Between the hundreds of feed a day that I get from Netvibes and other sources, I have an ever increasing circle of friends and colleagues with whom I am sharing information and they are doing the same in kind right back at me. I would not be surprised if I was receiving more than 1,000 pieces of information a day.

Obviously that is way too much information to easily manage and utilize and I am sure that I am missing some great stuff that is just floating around out there. But on the other hand I also see a lot of stuff that I would love to spend more time with but just can't. This post collects some of that flotsam and jetsam and gives me a chance to at least briefly try to make some sense of it.

• Politicians and YouTube - several politicians are actively using YouTube, Facebook, and Second Life among other tools, to access their constituencies at the same time that governments are banning their use by civil servants. What's that all about?
• 2007 Web 2.0 Awards - To really see what is going on with Web 2.0, check out this site - over 200 Web sites in 41 different categories - a great way to check out the great stuff being done with Web 2.0
• Shaping Learning Through Comments - a great post on how students are learning from comments posted to their blogs - a very effective learning tool from my perspective. The teacher here uses student blogs to have learning happen and then measures it against standards like "the student understands and acquires new vocabulary and uses it correctly in reading and writing". Very cool.
• Can Social help in finding resources? From the Flosse Posse, this post talks about leveraging our learning communities through the use of Social Information Retrieval (SIR). SIR is described as "a family of techniques that assist users in obtaining information to meet their needs by harnessing the knowledge or experience of other users. Examples of SIR techniques include sharing of queries, collaborative filtering, social network analysis, social navigation, social bookmarking and the use of subjective relevance judgements such as tags, annotations, ratings and evaluations." This is how I am getting and sharing most of my daily information - neat to have someone put a name to it. There is a SIR workshop planned called SIRTEL 2007. Check it out!
• Encyclopedia of Life - the Encyclopedia of Life is an an "ecosystem of websites that makes all key information about life on Earth accessible to anyone, anywhere in the world.". It's aim is to catlogue all species on Earth and have the information accessible online. This just might be the "killer" Web 2.0 app.
• Tagging Tips and Non-Bloggy Remorse - this post is from Nancy White, who is absolutely amazing. Some tips and hints on how to keep up and manage tags while still living and working your busy life - a must read. Check out her blog and company.
  
• McLuhan's Laws of Media and PLEs - from Terry Anderson (more brilliance), this post applies Marshall McLuhan's Laws of Media (Enhance, Obsolete, Retrieve, Reverse) to PLEs (Personal Learning Environments). If you are at all interested in PLEs, you have to read this post.
• Read/Write Web Weekly Wrapup - a weekly wrap up of all things Web 2.0. You can subscribe and get the weekly feed. A great way to get a manageable digest of what's happening with Web 2.0 tools and technologies

I know there are literally thousands of other bits and pieces out there. Hope that some of these will be of use. Now, it's time to fire up Netvibes and get the next flood of information...

(Photo "Flotsam and Jetsam" by RobW)

Research 2.0

As we start to move more and more to an online world, we spend more time doing research and finding information on the Internet and through other electronic stores of information. This video, titled Research 2.0, discusses the issues of doing research in an online electronic world, including the pros, cons, pitfalls and advantages.



Thanks very much to my friend and colleague Lana, who originally passed this video on to me.

Lots to think about. Hmmm...

Reading, Writing,...Hey! - What About The NEW Literacy Skills?

OK, we are all acquainted with the 3Rs - Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic. They have been the foundation of our educational system for, well forever. Unfortunately I think that the foundation is cracked. A large majority of the learners I see coming out of the K-12 system lack the literacy skills in reading, writing, and arithmetic to be successful at the post-secondary level. So much so that we spend a lot of valuable time during the first year of their diploma programmes trying to improve these essential skills.

But it's not as simple as just improving the 3R literacy skills and it's about to get worse - there are a whole new set of literacy skills that are just as important or in some cases more important for learners to be successful in this new information age. From my perspective we have to add the following skills to the set of basic literacy skills needed by all learners beyond the 3Rs:

• Typing
  
• Information gathering
  
• Information analysis
• Safety and security
• Privacy
  

If you lack typing skills in the ever-increasing synchronous (and asynchronous) online world, you cannot communicate. If you cannot communicate, you will have difficulty learning. E-mail, chats, IM, games, virtual worlds - they all require an ability to type to keep up with and follow multi-threaded conversations - typing is the new talking.

The Internet has become the single largest source of information ever known to man - the amount of information is staggering and learners need to not only know how to find information, but how to analyze it for veracity and accuracy as well. These two skills are just as important (or more so in some cases) than reading and writing are. If information cannot be found, and analyzed for accuracy, relevancy and currency, then learning will not happen.

Learners (all users of the Internet actually) need to have skills that will keep them safe and secure. Security of personal information, who to trust, what to reveal about your self are all important issues as we move forward in an increasingly Web-centric educational world - this also ties into Privacy skills - what should be private, and what should be public is an essential and basic question that every user of the Internet must answer. In order to answer that question, learners must have the skills to make informed decisions about their online presence.

So what can we do as educators? We cannot ignore the 3Rs - they are still required skills, but we must also be aware of the the "new literacy" skills as well. If our learners are not adequately prepared and practiced in all of these literacy skills, how can they truly be life-long learners which is ultimately what as educators we are preparing them to become? Hmmm...

(Photo - Keyboard ~ Blur by Striatic) (Photo - Reading by Maxey)

Managing Information - Turn Off The Fire Hose!!

I suspect that we are all suffering from information overload, or as I like to call it - drinking from the fire hose - you get to swallow a little bit of information - the rest just gets you wet.

This was brought home to me this morning when I asked friends if they got my e-mail. The answer was "which one?" followed quickly by "turn off the fire hose!!". I was overloading them with information and not doing a very good job of even telling them what information I was even talking about.

So how do we manage information in this age of always on Internet, TV news, radio, and print media? I know that my information gathering patterns have changed significantly over the years from print to audio, to video (TV), to print again (the early Internet) and now to constantly streaming pushed multimedia content (Web 2.0) that I get to customize myself, creating an information nirvana for a data junkie like myself. I must receive on average over 200 e-mails from different sources (and with multiple e-mail addresses of course), although I will admit to merely reading the Subject lines of the messages and filtering out the ones of no or little interest (or the duplicates) to my Delete folders.

And then there is my latest information goldmine - the RSS aggregator - with Netvibes I am now receiving hundreds of feeds a day. Again I am mostly looking at titles and synopses and reading only the ones I think are relevant to my interests. On top of all this e-mail and RSS information, I read the newspaper every day, watch TV news, and get information sent to me by my friends - no wonder I always feel a little damp around the edges...

I tend to share what I find with friends and colleagues. The problem is I get carried away with my own enthusiasm and turn the fire hose on full, and everyone is just too busy to go around wet all day. How do I share what I think is neat, cool, essential, or just plain hmmm... information? My filtering system seems to work for me (or am I just kidding myself and missing more than I find?). So is it blogs, RSS aggregators, Google Groups, or some yet to be seen Web 2.0 "killer app" that will let me share the information I find and not get my friends (or myself) drenched by the information fire hose? Any thoughts, any ideas?

Hmmm...