Educational technologists love new web terminology, it’s like a currency. Spend an hour or so at an unconference or wordcamp and you will think Engilsh was just so 1.0 . This is fueled by entrepreneurial web developers who invent new words at an alarming rate, each trying to be the next big flickr, floppr, frappr, (my personal favorite at the moment layoffspace.com for those affected by the credit crunch). Whilst many of these concept sites never reach critical mass, we are reaping the benefits of their hard work in the areas of information architecture, standards compliance and framework design. But why is it taking so long for this to feed back into mainstream educational tools.
We use phpBB forums extensively in our studies and I am noticing they are about as inaccessible as, I don’t know say Blackboard. ‘They are just so 1.0‘
phpBB is a threaded forum. The threads are hierarchical, ordered by post date and encourage linear conversations that have no rating or tagging to aide you in filtering out the white noise or contextualising the content. The system favors the textual learner and fails to encourage any peer review. Now this is just an observation and I’m not suggesting we challenge it. But it has helped me to realize just how important it is that I spend time understanding how the technologies I use meet the learning styles of my learners. I think this is something I will introduce into my 1st project, as I research learning systems. There really is no better lesson for a teacher, than to be a student again.
Now back to reading all the white noise in search of the content…