All Annotations of Education World - The CTO Challenge: Building Your Personal Learning Network[Preview]

saved by24 people, first byMiguel guhlin on 2008-04-11, last byAndrew Loch on 2008-07-16

• EDUCATION WORLD
• Miguel Guhlin
• As a chief technology officer or director of technology, probably one of the toughest challenges you face isn't keeping up with the technology, but rather understanding how to leverage it for your organization.
• I am continually astonished at the rapidity of change.
• the world is changing faster than I can keep up.
• The only way for all of us to deal with the current challenge to our particular approach to learning
• s to seize the wheel and create our own learning network
• do four things with the overwhelming amount of unorganized content
• content that might be useful in the future but today might be thrown away or filed away
• and would probably be forgotten. Those four things are:
• Read: Read/watch/listen to the entirety of the content that you are presented with.
• Evaluate: Consider what the content means to you, and whether or not it is a source of information that intuitively seems appropriate/acceptable for a task at hand.
• Critique: Moving beyond evaluate, seriously reflect on the material and then form your own opinion of it.
• Write Share your critique with others, so they can engage with you and the original content to develop a cohesive knowledge-product.
• Now, it is possible for me to share how what I read, evaluate, and critique connects with my own personal learning and schema.
• The key thing to remember is that as we externalize our thinking, it becomes less of "I am an expert expounding on what I know" and more of "I am a learner, just like you, sharing what I'm learning so that we can learn together through our common errors and maximize our breakthroughs."
• f you fail to connect to the network of learners, you miss out on a global conversation about what you are passionate about.
• it can save you time, energy, and increase your reach, no matter how brilliant (or not) you are.
• Smart people get smarter because they have access to the network of learners
• essential learning tools that every 21st century learner should have.
• THE TOOLS YOU NEED
• Get a Diigo.com account.
• Some of the exciting ways educators are using Diigo are listed in the sidebar to this article.
• suggestions for using Diigo:
• Annotate curriculum documents and add stickies to show where tech integration is happening and could happen. That could be annotated for a group of curriculum writers.
• Annotate state education agency memos for your administrators. We get memos every day and they are posted online. Immediately, among a team, share the implications of the ideas in the memo, the most important points, and so on.
• Use Twitter.com to build a professional learning network.
• You can use Twitter specific tools to connect with others. One of my favorites is TweetScan.com. It allows you to search the many "tweets" that occur each day (view a search on Education) and subscribe to the results via RSS
• That way, real-time comments about what is critical to your work come to you.
• I was not in Scotland. I was sitting at my desk working on work projects, when a "tweet" came in from Paul Harrington, an educator in Wales. As a result of his sharing via twitter, I was able to participate in the conference via my web browser and listen to speakers
• By combining the power of Diigo and Twitter, I am able to track more easily ad-hoc professional learning opportunities as they occur, as well as have conversations about them before and after they occur.
• creating a Diigo group. I invited other educators to join and now we have a collaboratively updated list of EDuStreams --educational professional learning happening online via uStream, Elluminate, Wimba.com sessions that are appearing online.
• Twitter allows us to share those at will, while Diigo allows us to keep track of those opportunities and share them with others, even if they are not on Twitter. After you get your Twitter and Diigo accounts, join the EDuStreams group on Diigo to keep up to date on new learning opportunities.
• Start blogging.
• Blogging is a process of reflecting on what you learn every day. How can anyone spend time blogging on top of what they do all day?
• some of my best blogging research -- when I decide on Future Blog Posts -- occurs while I'm looking for something else
• At the end of the day, early evening in fact, I quickly look back at what I tagged for a Future Blog Post, which is actually a "tag" I keep in Diigo. I might bookmark many items, but I only blog about those that are immediately relevant or connected.
• In the past, I would copy-n-paste the link or the relevant quote or point that triggered my thinking into my blog program (Thingamablog) but now I just use Diigo. In that way, blogging for me isn't a "special" activity, but part of everything I do
• If I have spent time reflecting on the implementation of a technolgy-related project in my blog, I usually bookmark that as well and quickly can pull up the needed information.
• I never would have done that (tag ideas, blog about my response/reflection, wikify my resources for others, podcast valuable conversations with other people for later listening). In fact, keeping a journal was a joke for me, even though I knew that every "good" writer kept one. It wasn't until I started blogging -- with a real audience reading it -- that I understood the power of blogging everything.
• Blog your initial brainstorming…Blog your research and discovery…Blog your interactions. Did you just have an interesting conversation relevant to a topic you've been blogging? Ask the person with whom you conversed if you can blog the relevant portion, and whether you can identify them…The clincher to all this is to use your blog as your "backup brain" or at least as a public notebook. Why not get more mileage out of work you would have done anyway by changing your habits toward managing information and communicating publicly? Instead of keeping your thoughts, notes, and conversations to yourself, post them.
• use your blog as your "backup brain"

• 
  This kind of externalization is useful to others. For example, back in 2005 I wrote a how-to for doing something in GNU/Linux operating system that used KDE as the GUI (as opposed to Gnome or the others out there). In September 20, 2007, someone found it and blogged about it...if I hadn't externalized my knowledge, made a "backup brain," then the information would not have been here for Jim Plumb to discover:
  

  If you want to change the default view in the Linux file manager konqueror check out this article: http://www.edsupport.cc/mguhlin/archives/2005/04/entry_174.htm.
  I wanted to have the view in tree mode rather than the default icon view.

• Another neat result of Jim’s discovery is that I rediscover my own blog entry when Jim writes about it or interacts with it. It makes me want to re-read the entry. In reviewing my social bookmarking network, I noticed Mark Ahlness had picked up on one of my favorite blog entries, The List Article. I hadn't seen that blog entry in ages, even though every article I write is based on the structure outlined in it.
• discover more -- about what is in your head than you think.
• Get started at edublogs.org with an education-related blog about what you are learning and how it is relevant to your work. Ask yourself a few questions to get started, such as What are you most passionate about in your work? andWhat is the hardest thing you do in your work, and why is it challenging? Finally, share your successes -- and failures – by answering such questions as What obstacle or problem have you encountered and how did you overcome it?
• What backup software do you use in your district?
• Have you considered switching from MS Exchange to Google Apps? How did you make the transition?
• What kinds of audio/visual solutions are you using to broadcast school board meetings?
• sharing resources with other technology directors via Diigo will enable you instantly to share ideas about important matters relevant to your work.
• Use Google Reader to Manage RSS Subscriptions:
• RSS (real simple syndication) feed enables you to read the content without visiting the site beyond the first time
• updates/changes to the site will be delivered directly to you. (Watch this Video.) The benefit of that method is that creating a personal learning network will not result in more email, but less. Instead of receiving email notifications, you go to Google Reader to review the latest updates and changes, and participate when you have a need.
• My Example: Miguel's Shared Items in Google Reader