Figuring Out Life While Aging
Hashtag: #spoileralert
– After reading poems by Emily Dickinson, and Tweets on Twitter
My future hides before me;
The ending pre-ordained.
The losses will continue
But bright joys may remain.
My feet will grow more tender;
My knees and hips more lame.
I may remember much;
I may forget my name.
The ending could be sudden,
Or agonies, – and slow.
But life that waits before me
Holds time and love and hope.
We can see more people creating more works than ever before in history. And it’s because of the web and because the web is social. On the web, much is possible. Whether you are finding the right beautiful photo (with the right Creative Commons license) to illustrate metaphorically the connectivity and the beauty of the internet for a blog post, or whether you are playing with a web app (Skitch – http://skitch.com/) to draw
So serious people who sell cars and race cars become part of the crowd playing:
Two typographers ( Pierre & Damien / plmd.me ) and a pro race pilot (Stef van Campenhoudt) collaborated to design a font with a car.
The car movements were tracked using a custom software, designed by interactive artist Zachary Lieberman. ( openframeworks.cc )
I’m ambivalent about my title because I use Twitter mainly for learning, communication, and entertainment. I recognize, however, that business is becoming increasingly a part of Twitter. I recently posted a picture on TwitPic …
and commented that it reminded me of a Liberty print.
(I have fond memories of a dress made from material I got at Liberty’s in London, and several scarves I treasure, including one my husband discovered in a second-hand store and bought for me. I haven’t shopped there for years because I haven’t been in London for years.)
What happened next was this –
plus an invitation to follow them. I looked at their site and saw that they had a number of people tweeting using the business name plus the (I assume) first name of the person posting the tweets, which strikes me as a good way to display a business and keep the personal touch so important a part of Twitter.
I didn’t chose to follow them, because I live a continent away and because my prime interest is people I know, web businesses that can have an impact on what I want to do, and people I can learn from. (I love the freedom of not following back without feeling rude. So different from invitations in symetrical social sites.)
I found it very interesting that my casual mention of their business brought them directly to me; they are obviously monitoring Twitter, which I didn’t expect from such an old and traditional company – which shows me I should be careful about stereotyping. ;->
Today, in a Google Group I am part of, Gloria Hildebrandt – http://ohouse.ca/ – linked to this site –
It is clear to me that even businesses not directly connected to the web and social networking are seeing the business possibilities that Twitter offers.
So while I keep on enjoying the learning and entertainment that Twitter provides me, I also recognize that it has many uses beyond the purely personal.
At the Toronto WordCamp 2008, I live-blogged, and that was fun:
At WordCamp Toronto, 2009, I Tweeted using the hashtag #wct09, and that was fun, and more social for a couple of reasons.
So, for me, with the current social applications, Live Tweeting was a richer experience than Live Blogging, but both were fun.
I learned from the mix of new information in presentations and conversations around and between the sessions, and my most frequest conversationalists were –
I enjoyed great conversations on shared interests with them – who could ask for anything more?
There was much more of value there, and others will be blogging about WordCamp Toronto 2009, but this is my contribution for now.
Thanks to http://www.flickr.com/photos/lexnger/
Oh yeah, and I won:
The most fascinating thing about the web is that there is no end; there is always more and new.
The most frustrating thing about the web is that there is no end; there is always more and new.
Everything is always changeable. My website – jnthweb.ca – is not the same now as it was a half-hour ago. I just added my most recent brilliant idea,
Currently, I look at Twitter using the third or fourth application I’ve tried. It’s Nambu now; it was TweetDeck, and who knows what I’ll try next. And Twitter is the poster child for constant change, as Tweet after Tweet flips by.
My friend showed me her new laptop today, and I drooled enviously, although mine does everything I want and need and is only a little more than a year old.
I’m behind in my Bloglines again, no, make that still. I never did fully catch up.
So I love the web, and I learn so much from what often feels like frittering my time away, but there is no end to what you can learn to do and learn and do on it. Clay Shirky, in Here Comes Everybody, says in the first 100 years after the invention of the printing press, it broke more than it fixed. I know that the printing press brought endless developments with it from dictionaries to science, from the Enlightenment to romance novels, and more. And here we are in the same early stage with the web, where everything is alway beta, never done!
Want to more about how Twitter works and what it’s good for? Check out http://www.fastforwardblog.com/guides/twitter/
Will Richardson describes the way news is currently collected:
from his blog – http://weblogg-ed.com/2009/the-news-according-to-twitter/
Clay Shirky in Here Comes Everybody says journalism is losing ground as a profession, as it becomes an activity that anyone can practise, and this demonstrates his point.
If you read this blog regularly, you will know that I believe setting up your computer as your own PLE (Personal Learning Environment) or as some call it, your PLWE (Personal Learning and Working Environment) is a basic step in being efficient on the web. When I have research time, and sometimes just because I feel like it, I go to the web to learn more and to keep up with what is available and useful for me and for other educators. I see this as basic life and professional research, and something all educational professionals should be concerned about, both for themselves and for their students.
Although I’ve been using my RSS reader Bloglines as the source for my “harvesting” for my ongoing learning, recently I find I’ve been neglecting it somewhat because I go to it after I collect professionally and personally relevant URLs from those I follow on Twitter.
An aside, I’m proud of the background I uploaded, a photo I took, then manipulated in Photoshop. I plan to continue being seasonal in my background.
The people I follow on Twitter:
As you can see, I like having visuals along with my text;->
A couple of days ago, I found some interesting-looking material that I didn’t have time to read. I added them to my del.icio.us account and tagged them, but knew they could easily disappear into that great reservoir of learning possibilities. So I tried out something I’d read about on Twitter – Instapaper, which allows me to save articles and blog posts to be read later. I have put its link on my personal Bookmarks toolbar, and I save things there, and maybe ;-> read them later. (There are so many choices, so much available!)
This description of my PLE and my web reading/researching process is a lead-up to, and I hope, a demonstration of, what the two articles I eventually read, and am blogging about, said.
First, from JISC – http://www.jisc.ac.uk/news/stories/2008/01/googlegen.aspx –
New report reveals the information needs of the researchers and learners of the future
A new report, commissioned by JISC and the British Library, counters the common assumption that the ‘Google Generation’ – young people born or brought up in the Internet age – is the most adept at using the web. The report by the CIBER research team at University College London claims that, although young people demonstrate an ease and familiarity with computers, they rely on the most basic search tools and do not possess the critical and analytical skills to asses the information that they find on the web.
and
The findings also send a stark message to government – that young people are dangerously lacking information skills. Well-funded information literacy programmes are needed, it continues, if the UK is to remain as a leading knowledge economy with a strongly-skilled next generation of researchers.
This research supports what I have seen in Canadian classrooms, and leads directly to my next quote from David Parry’s Science Progress blog post about the use of Wikipedia in academia – http://www.scienceprogress.org/2008/02/wikipedia-and-the-new-curriculum/ I was particularly struck by the following:
It is irresponsible for educational institutions not to teach new knowledge technologies such as Wikipedia. I should probably admit upfront that I am not a scientist by training; my scholarship grows out of literary studies and a concern for how literacy changes in the age of the digital. Wikipedia, or more generally the networked archival structure it represents, alters the way in which we create, share, and record knowledge, and thus has rather significant effects on how we approach education across all disciplines, and specifically in technology and science. Students and teachers alike must understand how systems of knowledge creation and archivization are changing. Encyclopedias are no longer static collections of facts and figures; they are living entities, and the new software changes the rules of expertise.
and
When I hear debates about the digital divide, access is often the largest issue, as if merely having access to computers solves the problem. “Bring computers into the schools and fund technology” are the regular solutions. However, the technology here is merely secondary: what is more important is teaching people how this technology changes the social sphere so that students too can be empowered to engage the polis rather than being passive users of Word Processing programs. Knowledge of how to indent paragraphs on a computer or make bullet points for a Power Point presentation is meaningless without the more important literacy of how to use these new media collaboratively to create a different kind of knowledge. Literacy in modern society means not only being able to read a variety of informational formats; it means being able to participate in their creation, with Wikipedia serving as the marquee example.
I suggest that you read the whole post, especially if you think you disagree.
Learning Living 