Enter your thoughts, summaries, and stories about the Tony Karrer eLearning 2.0 deep dive. What did you learn? How will you use the information? Will you apply the information personally as well as professionally?
On Tuesday, July 15, over 80 GCASTD members attended the elearning 2.0 workshop presented by Dr. Tony Karrer. In the workshop, we explored the following concepts:
Social Network Pages
Social Bookmarking
RSS Feeds
Blogs
Wikis
We also explored particular tools associated with each concept.
By using this wiki page we can, share what we learned and build on what we learned. That’s my starting point.
One overall impression I have is that the tools help promote user-centric training. In fact, they sort of require that the users take responsibility for their own learning.
As one of the organizers of the event, I have the advantage of looking at the evaluations. From my quick evaluation of the evaluations, I would say most people got value by being introduced to the tools, getting some definitions of terms, and getting some sense of how to use the tools. Also, many respondents thought that they know how to use the tools personally, but not so much for training.
So, my thought is to start sharing what I learned about the tools, one by one, and provide my own ideas about how they can apply to training. I invite everyone else to join in and share how you use the tools and how they are working for you. That is, I invite you to tell us what “next steps” you put into place and, over time, what has happened.
Social Bookmarking
The topic I knew the least about, going in to the workshop, was social bookmarking. In fact, I had no idea what social bookmarking is. That’s the one I chose to explore. This morning, I signed up for del.icio.us, the social bookmarking tool we explored in the workshop.
A quick, personal definition: social bookmarking is a web-based tool that allows you, the user, to bookmark favorites on your own personal web site and organize them according to tags rather than folders.
Here’s the del.icio.us definition of a tag: A tag is simply a word you use to describe a bookmark. Unlike folders, you make up tags when you need them and you can use as many as you like. The result is a better way to organize your bookmarks and a great way to discover interesting things on the Web.
So, I created my account and started tagging pages. The first one: the del.icio.us tutorial. In other words, I am still learning how to use this tool.
Application to Learning
There’s a personal aspect and a distributed, shared aspect.
Personally, using del.icio.us will allow me to develop a list of web sites that have valuable information. By learning to use tags well (and del.icio.us helps by providing prompts), I will (I hope) be able to organize these favorites so that I can easily group them and find them again.
The shared, distributed learning occurs because del.icio.us is web based.
First, I can see what websites other del.icio.us users are tagging. Through that, I already found one web site that listed seven essential cheat sheets. I didn’t tag that page, but I did tag the home page, http://www.makeuseof.com/dir/, which provides a list of free web 2.0 tools to explore.
Second, by using tags appropriately, I can make pages I tag visible to others and find pages other people have tagged. I tagged the first pages I found with gcastd. If you join del.icio.us and search for those tags, you should see those pages, as well as two others that use that tag: the GCASTD home web page and the GCASTD eLf wiki. At least I did, and I tagged both of them.
Third, I can form a network. I have not started that, so reporting on how that works will have to wait.
Eric Hansen