Steve Hargadon and Will Richardson have just blogged about the future of teaching. Their posts reflect on the evolution of students and the needs that they will generate in the future in terms of learning and teaching. “If we want students to be learners, the teachers and schools must be learners”. Steve’s account of the workshop on the future of teaching can be read at his blog. Will Richardson began his thoughts on the topic and he is yet to finish them.

While doing some research on Web 2.0 applications I came across a series of articles focused upon the social networking app Twitter. It is like a mini-blogging app. It allows you to deliver micro-chunks of data to users who have subscribed to your Twitter account. It allows you to post a maximum of 140 characters.

For those of you new to Twitter you might like to catch up with this Wikipedia article. A review of Twitter with an emphasis upon its possible uses and application can be read at the Infocult site. One can view the location of “Twitterers” live via this visual interface.

Educators are considering ways to use Twitter in teaching and learning settings. David Lee King puts forward some ideas here. Christopher D. Sessums has written a nice article and provided a set of useful links with his look at Twitter in education. David Warlick has posted some ideas as well. Alan Lew’s post is rich with some good ideas for educators. Finally Educause has published an article Seven Things You Should Know About Twitter that is well worth downloading as a pdf and reading.

There are a significant number of web based apps similar to Twitter and they can be explored via this link. One of the more significant of these apps is Jaiku. It is quite a powerful tool however I have found it slow to update the published feed. This article compares and contrasts Twitter and Jaiku. Two of the more interesting clones of Twitter include Yappd and MoodMill.

Last week the television set in our living room came to an end. See the blog entry earlier “Sootie is a hero”. Anyway, the television set was less than fours year old. A bit disappointing that it did not last longer. I was not thinking of a new plasma or lcd TV at this point of time. I would rather spend that money on renovating the house.

Well, after the bush walk on Saturday morning I arrived home and there was a replacement TV set in the living room. The damaged set was on the floor. The new set is smaller, less intrusive and fits in better with the furniture. It is a Sony with a trinitron screen. Shao Ping had bought it while I was out. She picked it up at a garage sale for twenty five dollars! Brilliant. Simply brilliant.

The NavCon2K7 conference is coming up in about 5 weeks. The Navcon2K7 Conference is a collaborative professional learning opportunity established by Australian Navigator Schools Consortium (Navcon) and hosted this year by the Catholic Schools Office (CSO) - Diocese of Broken Bay on the Central Coast of NSW.

I am perusing the eLearning strand workshops and as far as Web 2.0 and podcasting workshops go here is the breakdown… Six of the workshops feature a Web 2.0 aspect and three are focused upon podcasting and iPods. Some of the spotlights explore wWeb 2.0 and podcasting as well. Which should I attend is the question I must now consider?

Hugh Macleod on why we are blogging less together with his regular cartoon.

Nicholas Carr digests Eric Schmidt’s account of Web 3.0 and provides a very nice analysis of Google’s take on 3.0, the Semantic Web and his own definition of Web 3.0.

The CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, recently defined Web 3.0 when probed by a journalist at the Seoul Digital Forum. Here is his reply. Channy Yun of Korean Crunch posted the initial movie via YouTube.

Dion Hinchcliffe provides a series of definitions or explanations of the Web 2.0 phenomenom in his blog. His entry, Review of the Year’s Best Web 2.0 Explanations includes definitions from Richard McManus and Tim O’Reilly. It is an old post but useful nevertheless.

Tonight my cat Sootie did something quite remarkable! I was in one part of the house near the bedrooms and Sootie came in looking alarmed and frightened. He miaowed loudly and was looking down the hallway. I thought that perhaps there was a burglar in the house and I gingerly went to investigate. When I reached the living room at the other end of our home there was smoke gathering around the ceiling! There was a fire! I looked for the seat of the blaze but could not find any. There was just smoke thinly accumulating near the ceiling. Perhaps a “down” light in the ceiling had shorted.

I called my neighbour Dale. He switched off the power. He had a look in the roof but found nothing. We went back to the living room and came to the conclusion that the TV had shorted based on the smell of the smoke. We restored power and the TV is indeed dead. Perhaps it had made a loud noise when it shorted. Anyway, Sootie is a legend and perhaps he saved the day!

Our smoke alarm is further away, nearer the bedrooms. I think the smoke would have eventually set it off if I had not opened the windows and the door. Sootie was uneasy for quite a while afterwards. He hid in our bed during the drama.

This is an interesting tool that teachers and students may find useful when commencing some research…Similpedia - Finding Similar Content. I do not advocate the use of wikipedia as a primary vehicle for research due to its inherent problems rleating to the veracity of the content however it does come in handy when obtaining an initial grasp of a subject and the links at the foot of an article can often prove to be a valuable launch pad for more concrete source material.

Similpedia also has a few tools and plug-ins that developers may find useful for embedding in thier blog or web site.