I attended the ETUG 2007 fall workshop on November The theme this year was "Web 2.0 – Educational Whats, Whys & Hows" As always, it was great to meet up with people from around the province who are involved in education technology. There was plenty of time for networking which is often the best part.
Gina Bennett, ETUG Steering Committee chair, gave an interesting presentation that forced everyone to think back to the pre WWW days. It was a great example of interactive presentation. I'll see if I can get my hands on it.
Steve Dotto was, as always, very entertaining. He pointed out that what can technology do for us is pretty obvious. But what will it do TO us? He told a story about fishing for trout at Dragon Lake, and being able to take some time out from catching to the big biologically enhanced trout to do a quick web conference with some folks in the east. It was a nice illustration how it's really about how we decide to allow it to change our lives. If he didn't have the blackberry would be sitting at the office instead of fishing.
Steve also asked: Are social networking tools making a difference? Don't look at statistics, look at diversity and the numbers for what they are. YouTube for example has HUGE numbers of people sharing work. That has to be good.
He also told us that if we didn't have a Facebook account we should get one. So I took that as a cue to create an ETUG group in Facebook, to see how it might help us to stay connected.
John Maxwell from Simon Fraser University did an excellent presentation: Wiki: Software for Communities of Inquiry. His main take home message is that this form of publishing places less emphasis on content and more on participation.
If I didn't spend so much time yakking at ETUG I probably would have taken more notes!
No comments:
Post a Comment