Both Gateway and Mesa College of the Maricopa Community Colleges kicked of 2008 with Cole Camplese (and a little help from MCLI). Cole, Director of Education Technology Services at Penn State, identified 3 trends in teaching and learning as they intersect with technology: social spaces, mobility and user-created content. Social "virtual" spaces involve creating an environment that is interconnected or networked with FOAF applications, such as facebook or myspace. Such environments enable profile creation, connections, and collaborations, which lead to a very interesting point that was made: identity management and marketing.
This concept is related to the next area: the rise of student as creator and developer of knowledge in the "content is king" paradigm (sorry, I tried not to use this word). We've all heard of constructivism, but now it has really taken off. With such a plethora of tools that a 5-year old can use (literally), students are taking off with content development. Tools such as utube, blogspot, google, and others have enabled students to do all the things they wanted to do. While higher education was figuring out how to, how much it would cost to, and if they should, students found easy-to-use tools to meet their needs. Now their content is connected, shareable, and preserved for all time. The accelerated use of these tools is a testament to what can happen when you put a simple, but powerful tool in the hands of a user: The State of the Live Web, April 2007.
What else? Well, that leaves mobility. Mobility and technology is not new, but consider that by all reports, technology use and ownership is spreading progressively faster among our youth than in the last few years. This is true. For those of you who have kids or have friends or family that have kids, what kinds of gifts did Santa bring them?? How about ClickStart's My First Computers (for toddlers)? Or Webkinz (don't ask). As one faculty member said in response to the question, "what motivates you to use technology?" "Keeping up with my kids," he said. If nothing else, toddler technology will force you into the 21st century.
As a means to communicate, today's students prefer cell phones, text, instant messaging, and email---in that order. The other idea of identity management and marketing...well, I'm still thinking about that. As a former BSchool learning technologist, I totally get this, but I'm not sure how that fits in with what students perceive as an identity. Which identity? Marketing to whom, anyone? Perhaps it's as simple as "this is who I am, what I'm doing, and who my friends are." I think identity management can really evolve, especially when coupled with content creation.
On a final note, Cole demonstrated a nifty tool: feed2js.org. What is it? In Alan's words: It is a rather simple technology that allows you, the humble web page designer (or instructor), to have RSS feed content displayed in your own web page, without having to know a lick about XML! Thanks Alan!
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