Moving from a laptop to the iPad is moving me into the cloud. The iPad is not a local storage device, so I don’t create documents there. I create them here, on the web, which means I’m naturally more focused on creating for the web.
This realization, and a conversation today about how to organize our office study group (aka Design Circle) has me re-reading my previous post (a manifesto) for changing our unit’s web strategy.
Our study group met today to look at Gary’s summary of the three broad strands of the curriculum we invented for ourselves two weeks ago. Gary suggested that we each might study within the three strands differently, or with different emphasis. In addition to the topical strands, we discussed a “course question” We didn’t nail down one question today. Perhaps with more time we can, or perhaps we should not, preferring instead to have personal questions that overlap, much as our roles and interests are personal but overlapping. And with our course questions in hand, what products do we anticipate creating as evidence of our learning accomplishments? Again, these are likely to be individual or small team. For example, Gary and I need to create a presentation for a conference April 28. And how will we assess our evidence of learning?
Thinking about our study group, and the different member’s differing needs/desires/strategies for storing and sharing documents, I concluded that we are (or need to be) embarking on creating our Personal Learning Environments (PLEs) rather than a singular unit resource.
But that makes a new problem, if we are a group of individuals, how do we do something as a collective unit? We probably also need a unit resource where we post to the web our various learning products.
A common store could hold our work products, but what about our reading lists and recommended readings. We already have a group in Diigo for sharing bookmarks. I get a digest from there of what others have bookmarked, but have not gotten systematic at re-Diigo-ing the items that ring my chimes. The result is I’ve read something, but I can’t find it, so I can’t recommend and share it.
But I could re-Diigo (like Re-Tweet) the links I read and value, and that would have an interesting effect, we’d know when several people valued the same item:
This is the information about a bookmark in Diigo. Note that 3 people have saved this link.
This way we can find our own stuff, organized the way we want to tag it, but we can also learn of one another and our overlapping reading interests:
Who is George? I might want to follow him, or look at other things he tags as “Teaching Innovation.”
I also am guessing that we could combine the RSS from several Diigo users so that the common items (those with more than one “vote”) come through a filter. This would make a means to vote on the most important readings and a way to “de-clutter” the recommended readings that we are collectively sharing out.
One small step for man 