I’ve been away. As I was saying, it’s been a busy period of my life. I’ve gotten married to the wonderful John Borwick, we went to Kenya for our honeymoon, and I’m just now getting used to the Eastern Time Zone and western culture again.
I’m also working on getting caught up in the field. Luckily, I’m on the environmental scan committee for my library, so it’s actually part of my day-to-day job to be current, but it’s taking a little while to catch up. And I’m realizing that in the last two blogless months, I am no longer on the bleeding, cutting, or even the leading edge.
It’s okay, I’ll get there again.
What’s most amazing to me is that in the past few months wikis, blogs, rss, podcasting, youtube, social networking, and the like have gone from things that seemingly only I rave about at MPOW to things that my colleagues accept as part of the landscape. Yay! This doesn’t mean that we’re doing everything, but it does mean that people get that it’s out there. It also means that it’s likely that if one of these tools would be useful for an issue at MPOW, people will probably think about it with an open mind.
So where is the bleeding edge now? I think mobile devices, though not bleeding edge, fall in the leading edge part. I see mobile devices as more and more part of the fabric of daily life. I don’t think it’s going to come from the PDA angle, or even the iPod angle, but just from phones coming with more and more functionality. And if our users are comfortable with these mobile devices, doesn’t it make sense that educational institutions take advantage of this? There’s a great post over at Random Access Mazar about Mobile Devices and Coursework which falls right in line with ambient learning and practical, active, critical learning exercises.
I also am getting more and more interested in the integration of technology with instruction, or instruction into the fabric of our student’s lives. Maybe you could tell that from the post cited above? I’m in love with E-Learn Space, which is chock full of interesting ideas. Sometimes this interest includes a careful examination of what the current technology environment means for education, as discussed in Control, conversation, content which talks about how when content changes so quickly memorization of the content isn’t as important as the conversation that teaches how to think. This post also talks about the importance of control, etc, in today’s environment.
So, it’s been a busy few months, but I can tell it’ll still be busy, just a business focused on finding out what’s new and interesting in the field. Whatever I find, I’ll keep putting here!