Ken Ronkowitz never ceases to amaze me with his excellent posts regarding teaching, learning and technology. During the last week or so he has posted some informative items regarding podcasting, Google Earth and the art of writing itself.

With respect to podcasting he brings up the point that simply repurposing lectures for delivery via podcast is not an ideal use of the medium. Ken illustrates, by way of a positive example, how David Miller at the University of Connecticut is employing the podcasting medium in a proactive manner. Each week David Miller and his students collaborate in an one hour discussion of the course material. The content is discussed and recorded for podcasting. Ken also points out how David precasts and postcasts key material before and after each lecture. Students are attracted to the subject due to this proactive and particpatory approach to the use of podcasting.

Ken also blogged an interesting post about the use of Google Earth to plot and trace the moevements of characters during the course of a novel. This would indeed be a novel approach for teachers of literature seeking to inpsire their students with additional visual cues as they explore each destination on the plotted Google Earth map.

The last gem from Ken that I wish to share is a new podcast set up by NJIT entitled ‘The End of the Essay’. This podcast is a project that Ken has been working on with Dr. Norbert Elliot, Professor of English at NJIT. Ken points out that Dr. Elliot had given a presentation called “The End of the Essay: Writing in a Mediated Environment.” Ken thought it was something that Dr. Elliot should develop into a book, however he was already involved in another book project, so the concept became a podcast. The blog post makes very interesting reading for educational technologists and teachers alike.

I have just read a telling post by Sue Waters in her informative Mobile Technology in TAFE blog regarding the skill set of Generation Y or the Digital Natives.

This very point has come up in staff meetings and during IT workshops, etc. Sure there are students who may know a few more keyboard shortcuts and can type much faster than I. Their use of mobile phones is impressive. Yet, there are a wide variety of IT skills lacking.

They can all make an iMovie or Windows Movie Maker project but they exhibit little creativity with their editing, timelines, etc. They do not explore the technology. They may apply special effects but they do not know why they are applying the special effect. They produce a video then what next? Teachers then have to share the technological possibilities that are available to allow online publication or dissemination of the product.

Even use of tools like Word or Powerpoint is quite basic on the whole. Rarely does a student show an eye for good design or layout. These skills need to be taught by a teacher with the necessary skill set.

I am trying to encourage the student population at our school to avoid wasting endless hours with MSN Chat, MySpace and the like and steer their energies towards the construction of blogs and web sites that are beneficial for themselves and the wider community. It is an uphill battle. Some of my students have produced worthy web sites. One is actually earning about $20.00USD per day via Google AdSense on their site. Great way to earn money while still a Year 10 student.

Perhaps they are not Digital Natives at all but simply Digital Dilettantes… they are, and I quote from a dictionary, an amateur or dabbler; especially, one who follows an art or a branch of knowledge sporadically, superficially, or for amusement only.

October is approaching fast and soon I shall be giving some workshops and presentations at two different venues. The first two workshops will be conducted at the NavCon2K7 Conference in Gosford, NSW, Australia. Each of the two workshops I shall be facilitating at the conference are tagged to the eLearning track. The first is Podcasting and Vodcasting. The second is Working Wonders with Comic Life. These workshops will be conducted on the Macintosh platform. The conference finishes on Friday October 5th.

On the Sunday, October 7th, I shall be flying up to Singapore to conduct a week of workshops and presentations at the Centre for Educational Development at Nanyang Technological University. I shall be presenting an updated version of my Web 2.0 Information Sharing Session followed by four days of workshops on Podcasting and Vodcasting, Web 2.0 and managing Web 2.0 applications, in particular RSS feeds. These workshops will be conducted on the Windows platform. I shall fly home to Australia on the Friday night or the next day.

I look forward to the opprtunity to catch up with old friends and to meet new teachers.

Why We Twitter: Understanding Microblogging Usage and Communities. An article authored by Akshay Java, Xiaodan Song, Tim Finin, and Belle Tseng. The abstract reads as follows:

“Microblogging is a new form of communication in which users can describe their current status in short posts distributed by instant messages, mobile phones, email or the Web. Twitter, a popular microblogging tool has seen a lot of growth since it launched in October, 2006. In this paper, we present our observations of the microblogging phenomena by studying the topological and geographical properties of Twitter’s social network. We find that people use microblogging to talk about their daily activities and to seek or share information. Finally, we analyze the user intentions associated at a community level and show how users with similar intentions connect with each other.”

Tim Finin of the Ebiquity Group blogged that PhD student Akshay Java collected Twitter data from March 2007 and wrote the paper analyzing the the Twitter data subset from April and May of this year. Tim Finin added that Akshay Java’s “dataset included about 1350K posts from over 75K users. The paper covers a lot of the standard statistics you would expect — usage trends, basic network properties, top hubs and authorities, community structure, and geographic distribution. Akshay’s title pays homage to the early paper that asked why we blog, but the title also reflects the paper’s key contribution — an attempt to tease out the user’s intention in writing a tweet, i.e. to analyze why people are using Twitter.” The article is available as a pdf via a link below the abstract.

A post on Mashable alerted myself to Placely. Signed in using the invitation code provided by Placely to Mashable.

I registered, added a couple of trips. An easy interface. I shall see if I am contacted. Will check it out further. It incorporates calendars, maps and networking capabilities naturally. Probably not that too useful for myself. I do not travel as frequently as others.