The first preconference session for explore 2007 (5th Annual Canadian E-Learning Conference) is “Buzzwords worth knowing” by Brian Lamb, Emerging Technologies Discoordinator Office of Learning Technology, University of British Columbia. It’s looking to be a good session – I’ll notify it in real time… so this is going to be a different type of post – thank god for auto saving in WP2.2.
Getting through the introductions, Brian brought up an interesting point on the professionalizing of Facebook and the like as the last thing that an instructor needs is to be “eaten by the natives” as they enter the private world of the students. Part of the popularity of these social sites is that students have their own space and violating that with “school or work” can be dangerous. So this is certainly something that fits in with my thinking when we are using the system for cohorts – no “school” only social bits should be put there.
Moving into the second hour, much was made on Delicious with many people being really interested in the RSS abilities. RSS seems to be a real driver for people to come to this session as they want to be able to find ways to compress, filter and send content to their various peoples of interest.
After the break, Brian made the interesting point that blogs and RSS is a way to filter noise and create a network of experts to maintain a cloud of knowledge around you as a means of coping. He also mentioned the one(of many) issues with Facebook – they don’t allow or make it easy to export content from the system.
Overall, fun and interesting – likely there are a fair number of people that got some familiarity with at least the terms of 2.0 and have a slightly larger kernel of interest to start working with.
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