lauren's library blog

Sarah “Intellagirl” Robbins

In addition to her roles as student, consultant, geek, etc. she describes herself as a “digital coach.” I LOVE this phase. It’s someone who can help people figure out how to learn and strategize their use to technology. She has visited 22 campuses in the last 18 months. She said it was nice to be here because she didn’t have to convert the audience (as she does at some other presentation) so her goal in the keynote was to give us tools for how to make the case and how to make it work. Pointed out that we’re just now talking about assessment.

• Our goal is to help students learn.
• More and more education puts learning only in specific contexts.
• The internet has decentralized this. Amateur teachers and learners.
• Pedagogy first, technology second.
• Students first, universities second.
• It’s about the outcome: graduating students who are smart and self-educate.
• Listed Chickering and Gamson’s 7 principles for good practice in higher education.
• Clay Sherky: “Communication technologies don’t become socially interesting until they become technologically boring.”
• Her definition of Web 2.0: prosumer (producer/consumers), remote applications, social, application program interface
• Push technology: let you distribute information mechanically to multiple spaces at once. Pull technology: let you aggregate information automatically from multiple spaces.
• Who are our students technologically? Gamers? Facebook users? SMS? Where do they live online? What do they use anyway? How do our students learn outside of the classroom?
• Prensky’s digital immigrants and natives typically used as an excuse. It’s a myth. Survey a class and you’ll see that not everyone uses social networking. It doesn’t have anything to do with age.
• If one has a motivation and reason to learn it, they will. We often forget to motivate students to learn a new technology. Must show how it will make their life better and make things easier.
• Not talking about a digital divide anymore. We’re talking about a lifestyle, engagement, motivation divide.
• We can’t change age (digital divide), but we can engage and motivate.
• Give a reason, make it worthwhile, anyone can do it.
• Biggest statistical gap between Millennial and Gen X: gamers. 81% Millennials play, 37% Gen X do.
• Gaming teaches: goals well defined, failure isn’t the end of the game, can learn skills to progress. Education needs to learn these ideas and apply them. Work needs to as well: lean a new skill, level up.
• Millennials more likely to send text than voice on cell phone. See it as a SMS device.
• We know they use Wikipedia. We should be teaching them to be critical of it. This is a skill they can take elsewhere.
• Everytime we fill out a profile we examine who we are. We recreate ourselves. We don’t take advantage of this the way that our students do.
• Students are facing a very different, 24/7 workplace. We’re negligent if we don’t prepare them for this.
• Medial Hauntings: we experience new technology through the lens of the most recent tool we used. We think in terms of what makes it better. Kids don’t think of cell phone as a new type of phone. It is what it is. It’s less intimidating, and they’re more likely to poke around with it. But less likely to think critically of the implication from the changes. That’s what we can give them.
• Hypermediated: more layers of information in one place. Our classrooms and teaching tools don’t do this.
• Showed a student ID and a created World of Warcraft to show differences in how we think of them and how they think of themselves.
• Warned: don’t build a creepy tree house! (acknowledge we are not our students, but let them customize the space.)
• Identify problems or opportunities FIRST! Match technologies with opportunities!
• Showed a number of tools & discussed a few laws: Metcalf’s Law), Reid’s Law
• Facebook or Ning: to talk to each other & people outside the classroom… this is not a walled garden like Blackboard
• Microblogs like Twitter, Pownce, Jaiku. Mashup of IRC chat room and blog. Useful for conference (room change announcements, etc), classroom wall, etc. Friendship doesn’t have to be mutual. Pownce like Twitter, but can include media. Doesn’t have as a robust API as Twitter does. Jaiku’s strength is that you can have groups.
• Prosumer content sites: YouTube, Wikipedia & Wikibooks, Kaltura, VoiceThread, It’s authentic. It’s in the real world. They can get responses from beyond just their classmates.
• Gathering and sharing resources: RSS, del.icio.us, diggio, Zotero
• Mashups: create exactly what you need. Widgets on your desktop that pulls information from the web, can use this to push information to students; they can set it up to pull in information. Many widgets can be pulled into Facebook. The strength is putting the information in places that students are comfortable using.
• Mashup: Plasma: Put in an actor or something, it pulls up everything related to the person. Visually shows relationships. Can imagine if pulling from Amazon or the Library.
• Mashup: Similarity Web: Plasma for Amazon. Different interface. Presents information in a way that shares relational information.
• Mashup: Flickr Fling: Searches news sites, gets headline, grabs Flickr photo with highest rated photo for each word. Creates visual sentence.
• Second Life: really a 3D mashup of all these tools we’re used to like IM, Skype, file directory, map, profile, groups and friends. Can Twitter & blog from within Second Life. Great API.
• Prensky: [”Today’s “game generation”] want to be treated as “creators and doers” rather than receptacles to be filled with content.”
• Guide on the side rather than sage on the stage.

Related posts:

1. Notes: What Would Dewey Do?
2. staying relevant for today’s students
3. PLCMC Technology Summit on Library 2.0
4. Does library instruction matters to students?
5. computers in the classroom