I’m attending the PBWorks Camp for teachers, and this is my homework for my second week, a screencast made using Jing on how Styles in MS Word can help in writing long pieces such as academic papers or business reports: 2009-07-02_1211
I re-did this a number of times, dealing with –
fitting what I wanted to say to the time available
figuring out what to leave out
making sure my set-up worked
reducing the size of my Word screen so I could fit everything into a smaller frame
stumbling while I was recording
I really like learning from screen captures myself, so I enjoyed creating one
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 …
Like a Liberty Print
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 –
Libertys of London Tweet
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.
LibertyDaniel
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 –
Business & Twitter
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.
All the brouhaha about financial game playing and our perilous financial system has brought a question to my mind: why do we talk about wages with percentages?
%
If someone, A, making $20,000. gets a 5% raise, that’s $1000.00 dollars and they now make
$21,000.
If someone, B, making $200,000. gets the same percentage, 5%, they get $10,000, and now make
$210,000.
Both get 5%, which sounds equal, but, in fact, A got 10% of what B got, and B got %1000of what A received, or half of A’s salary.
In plain language,
B received $9000. more than A.
So a year later they each get a 5% raise again.
A started at $21,000. this time and got $1050. which gave A a total of
$22,050.
B started at $210,000. this time and got $10,500. which gave B
$220,500.
This time
B received $9,450. more than A,
that is, at the same percentage rate,
the actual difference in money increases by $450.
and each time they get another 5% raise, the difference will increase.
The rich get richer, faster.
Here’s my refined Querulous Question #1:
Why do we use percentages to talk about wage increases when that only increases the disparity every time? B gets increasingly more than A, so the difference between their wages keeps increasing. Why don’t we just say what the actual numbers are?
I’d really like to know if it’s just habit and convenience or if there’s an actual, communication-based reason for this.
The web is less than 20 years old, but I see some remarkable yet indirect changes in the other media which are occurring because of it. Newspapers, magazines, tv shows, publishing, and textbook publishing are all being affected.
About a year ago I noticed that the way the Toronto Star, numbered its sections had changed. I had grown up with the sections in most newspapers being alphabetical, which seemed natural in our print-based society. The change was to a system where the sections were labeled with the first letter of the section’s name. So the Sports section was “S”, the Living section was “L”, Ideas was “ID”, only the World section had the atypical label, “AA”. It looked to me like the web-created concept of tagging, where you label sites you bookmark with terms that indicate what makes them relevant for you, (an approach made workable by hypertext linking) had ousted the print-based alphabetical approach. The Toronto Star had a number of their journalists blogging by then, but to me that seemed like a less significant change. Writers write, and any medium will do. Labeling sections in a new way and expecting readers to ‘get’ it and seamlessly shift to it, was a subtler but more radical change, to my way of thinking.
When magazines started developing an online presence that seemed pretty sensible to me too. Nothing too radical, just information, text and visuals, also available online. There was a cultural and economic bump, though. The paper & print versions of magazines and newspapers charged money. Customers had to pay for their copies. The web culture is based on free access, a very different approach. There are some sites that demand payment, but the practice has largely shaken out to the current web business culture: something for free, and payment only for more advanced information or features. The money is made from advertising revenue.
I also watch TV news shows, and my two most watched, the CBC and the BBC, provide extensive online news, with the BBC even offering one minute world news available any time!
BBC Website
Book publishing, in my opinion, is going through the most radical change. The gatekeepers that made publishing difficult and limited which books were published are gone, along with the jobs (and skills) that used to be required. Typesetting is now done on the author’s computer, using software. Editing is also the author’s responsibility, whether done by the writer or hired out. The expense of a set number of books published in the hopes that they will all be sold is becoming a thing of the past, replaced by just-in-time printing. Self-publishing is now possible and growing.
Last year I tutored a 14 year old who wrote a very really good coming-of-age novel. Rather than seek out an agent and pitch the novel, we went to Lulu.com, worked through the set-up process, and ordered enough copies for her family. They are attractive books that make her, and her readers, proud. Another friend wrote a good, but atypical detective novel; he used Amazon self-publishing because his book would then be part of their catalogue. And I’m putting together a collection of family photos for a Christmas gift (for someone whom I hope doesn’t read this ;-> ) that I will self-publish.
What inspired me to write this blog post was a textbook publishing site I just stumbled upon, Flat World Knowledge Its study texts (read about their very different approaches) won’t be available till 2009, but it is a very interesting and web-culture concept.
So the web is bringing all kinds of changes to the media world, in fact, –
“Autodidact” was, at one point, a mocking term. Someone who had taught themselves was someone who didn’t really know because they hadn’t learned in the authority-approved, academy-approved, institutional manner. They were “undisciplined” because they were outside of the academic disciplines. Yet the connotations around this word are shifting. As the web, with the immediacy of its access to information, becomes more and more a part of our lives, more people are learning outside of the traditional institutions. Being an autodidact now has more caché, and more real value.
Most people who are web 2.0 savvy are autodidacts because they have taught, and are continuously teaching, themselves about what is available and what can be done with it. All kinds of people are learning outside our educational institutions. Some are now skillful learners despite having struggled to learn inside the institutions. And inside our educational institutions, the most exciting and dramatic changes in human communication EVER are often being ignored and avoided by many who should be leaders in learning. In my opinion, universities and colleges are just not keeping up.
Don’t get me wrong; there are amazing people out there doing amazing things in their classes. I loved Virginia Yonkers’ description of a course she developed; it blew me away. It’s a course that everyone should take, IMHO. We all need to know about “communication (mobile communication technologies such as cell phones, pda’s, video conferencing), information sharing (pod and vodcasting, visual information software, blogs, pageflakes), collaboration (wikis, groupware), and networking (facebook, LinkedIn, Ning)”. I admire the hands-on action research approach she uses with her students, but what I admire most deeply is the framework she has created so her students are learning the complexities of the impact of the new communication tools – (read her post!)
Yonkers demonstrates something very important with her design of this course, something that educational institutions should be paying close attention to because it is the value-added aspect of the expensive education they are meant to provide. It is easy, now, to find information on the web, and tutorials, both free and with a price. All kinds of people offer books and videos for sale on all kinds of topics on the web. But what Yonkers offers, and what universities should/ could be offering, is a rich learning context lead by a fellow learner who is skilled in shaping learning for herself and her students. Her students are learning applications, and the communications implications of these new tools, in a rich social learning environment. (A comment of hers on her post reveals that the technical environment wasn’t that rich.)
I have taught myself at least basic use of most of the applications she has her students use. I am an autodidact where web 2.0 is involved. I chose what blogs to follow, I harvest links from Twitter and my Bloglines account, and I use del.icio.us (and diigo) to be able to re-find links I value. But when I read this –
I know that I need deeper, richer, more contextual learning than I can get from being alone f2f with my computer screen. I need a learning community to bounce ideas off and learn new possibilities from. I envy Yonkers and her students. I’ll leave you with Yonkers list of what current and future workers need to know, and a question: How widespread, do you think, is the teaching and learning of these work literacies?
Learning Living 