Discussion Report 5 Christian Kreutz - Personal Learning through Social Networking
Title of Session Personal Learning through Social Media Tools
[edit] Convenor Christian Kreutz
[edit] Participants Anne Babcock Chris Addison Pete Cranston Mark Hurst Pier Andrea Pirani Jess Stansfeld Taline Haytayan Sabrina Erne Kwami Ahiadeny Jane Lennon Peter J. Bury Nadia Von Holzn Pete Shelton James Marchant
[edit] Key Discussion Points
The aim of the session is on giving an overview of setting up a personal learning environment through social media with a focus on creativity and activity – it's not about more work or more interaction. It's important to find system and work to interact with people and get most out of it personally. I can offer you to show you my experience, how I use it – you have to form them as you want them, shape them as you need them.
Web 2.0 social tools Social bookmarking Interested in questions and challenges And the devils advocate Mindmap tool was presented showing Christian's Knowledge Circle introducing the key components: inspiration, research, reflection, apply, share, combine, evaluate, preserve.
Inspiration Started by using feeds – RSS feeds, a personal monitoring system, and thematic areas you’re interested in. Feeds are possible for almost anything – we could used it for links, for youtube videos, for audio, for blogs – you get the feeds to you and monitor them and get an overview – I have over 200 feeds. Different tools to subscribe and digest these feeds. I can pull the information however I want to – email is massively over-grown and hardly any way to be productive by email, leads to information overload. We have to find ways with dealing with more and more information. We can scan information and come on top and be updated on topics: - Classic RSS feed icon - Google Reader (Google Calendar – can share calendar together) - Some examples mentioned: Upcoming, wiki pages, other pages
Research Social bookmarking, using delicious - publicly available for people, there is also StumbleUpon. It’s about a community, depends on how much people use links and post links. The links are tagged, the same as giving keywords – it’s revolutionary because it’s bottom up – there exit ontologies which have been created by experts. In the case of social bookmarking, everyone tags as they want. In a case study conducted in an organisation, it was found 70% of tags were not what experts thought in an organisation, the tags are very personal – it’s a first step, it’s how you conceptualise your knowledge map. You make connections on web out of knowledge you are interested in.
Devil's Advocate question/comment: When I was a manager I didn’t have time to do this – it’s not part of your mainstream job description, it’s hard to get people to devote the time to do these things – now I’m a consultant, so I have to do these things, in order to manage my information and to stay on top of new initiatives and news and the vast information out there.
Answer: It takes initial investment – gives you much more control of vast information. Initial learning curve, once you learn then things move faster.
Question: Do you use Discovery tools? I would not use it to manage anything on my own – I lose my way very quickly.
Comments: Many people don’t save bookmarks on their personal browser – many people navigate and surf and lose track of what they found, because they don’t save their bookmarks. We need time to learn these things, but we save time next time – because we can access the information very quickly. As fast, or lose have a day to get to that document.
I also lose track from tabs – so look in my bookmark
What’s very satisfying is the group work, ability to share in email or other ways with others, and they are absolutely amazed.
I’m not academic writer, I use references at end of article as links to reference to delicious bookmarks – it wasn’t appreciated at all.
How much time you spend searching in your email inbox?
Sharing, not just for your own reference, but also to your friend – community tags too. It is useful.
It’s like the web – everyone talking about web, then moved on to everyone doing stuff –delivious good way of working with web 2.0 tools – no one did anything with it apart from learning about the web – wondering if anyone has gone beyond using it to learn about the web.
The strength of delicious is the use of tags.
Tag cloud can say a lot about a person's personality.
Underestimate the steps – there are many steps to take for most people
Also a matter of need and motivation – use of chat, and the need to chat
Web 2.0 adoption – they have no strong motivation to cross the barrier
When the motivation starts way more than the difficulties perceived by them –they will do it.
Sharing Eldis Community – just group of people.
Preseve Can preserve information through delicious – different quality criteria’s. Twitter - Use it to post questions out to community – any question, gives me a link, send me direct message. Can use it as newsfeed – as an alert service.
