VOTE FOR MY PRESENTATION, please, clicking on the image:

First time here? Because of the presentation @ Braz Tesol One Day Seminar in Brasília, Brazil?

WELCOME!

Hope you get some nice ideas to head for a TEACHER 2.0 future!

Leave comments, send e-mails, let’s discuss ideas here!

Here you are my presentation online, with the links and extra sites:

Some food for thought:

The machine is Us/ing us

Cheers

ThiEdu

more about RSS:

How I Use RSS To Make My Life Easier

Conversations in the “world live web” reflect how interesting a candidate is to bloggers; a candidate may get a lot of mentions for both positive or negative reasons. (Full disclosure: TechPresident editor Micah Sifry is the older brother of Technorati founder David Sifry. Display of these charts is part of their secret plan for world domination.)

Over the last 30 days:

DEMOCRATS:

REPUBLICANS:

WILD CARDS:

Over the last 90 days:

DEMOCRATS:

REPUBLICANS:

WILD CARDS:

Get your own chart!

source: techpresident

Tracking Comments

1. Create an account with coComment.
2. Install simple extension capture tool.

1. The coComment extension automatically sends comments you write to your coComment account (plus you can tag your comments).
   

Checking For New Comments

There are several few options for viewing new comments:

1. Login into Your coComment account

While reading the new comments remember to share your comments with your groups.

2. Subscribing to the RSS feed from your coComment account

This means all new comments are fed into your feed reader (e.g. Google Reader, bloglines) and you can check them while reading your blog subscriptions.

3. Using the coComment sidebar

You can access the coComment Sidebar on any web page using the shortcut keys Shift+Ctrl+Q (these keys can also be used for turning off).

Watch this video to see how to use the coComment sidebar.

Final Thoughts

Hopefully this has helped get you started using coComment. While we encourage all Comment Challenge participants to use coComment because of it’s community features — it’s not a requirement of the challenge that you do.

Also don’t forget to document your learning while completing the Comment Challenge — as Silva says

If you don’t have a blog (yet), take a paper and a pencil and jot down bullets. Remember this challenge is mainly about your own personal learning. The community effect is, of course, an added bonus

If you want to start a blog, or are new to blogging, check out our Getting Started with Edublogs page because we have lots of “How to” manuals and videos to get you going. Go here to create your blog for free!

SOURCE: theedublogger

Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants – A New Way To Look At Ourselves and Our Kids

1

Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants

By Marc Prensky

From On the Horizon (NCB University Press, Vol. 9 No. 5, October 2001)

© 2001 Marc Prensky

It is amazing to me how in all the hoopla and debate these days about the decline of education in the US we ignore the most fundamental of its causes. Our students have changed radically. Today’s students are no longer the people our educational system was designed to teach.

Today’s students have not just changed incrementally from those of the past, nor simply changed their slang, clothes, body adornments, or styles, as has happened between generations previously. A really big discontinuity has taken place. One might even call it a “singularity” – an event which changes things so fundamentally that there is absolutely no going back. This so-called “singularity” is the arrival and rapid dissemination of digital technology in the last decades of the 20th century.

Today‟s students – K through college – represent the first generations to grow up with this new technology. They have spent their entire lives surrounded by and using computers, videogames, digital music players, video cams, cell phones, and all the other toys and tools of the digital age. Today‟s average college grads have spent less than 5,000 hours of their lives reading, but over 10,000 hours playing video games (not to mention 20,000 hours watching TV). Computer games, email, the Internet, cell phones and instant messaging are integral parts of their lives.

It is now clear that as a result of this ubiquitous environment and the sheer volume of their interaction with it, today‟s students think and process information fundamentally differently from their predecessors. These differences go far further and deeper than most educators suspect or realize. “Different kinds of experiences lead to different brain structures, “ says Dr. Bruce D. Perry of Baylor College of Medicine. As we shall see in the next installment, it is very likely that our students’ brains have physically changed – and are different from ours – as a result of how they grew up. But whether or not this is literally true, we can say with certainty that their thinking patterns have changed. I will get to how they have changed in a minute.

What should we call these “new” students of today? Some refer to them as the N-[for Net]-gen or D-[for digital]-gen. But the most useful designation I have found for them is Digital Natives. Our students today are all “native speakers” of the digital language of computers, video games and the Internet. So what does that make the rest of us? Those of us who were not born into the digital world but have, at some later point in our lives, become fascinated by and adopted many or most aspects of the new technology are, and always will be compared to them, Digital Immigrants.

The importance of the distinction is this: As Digital Immigrants learn – like all immigrants, some better than others – to adapt to their environment, they always retain, to some degree, their “accent,” that is, their foot in the past. The “digital immigrant accent” can be seen in such things as turning to the Internet for information second rather than first, or in reading the manual for a program rather than assuming that the program itself will teach us to use it. Today‟s older folk were “socialized” differently from their kids, and are now in the process of learning a new language. And a language learned later in life, scientists tell us, goes into a different part of the brain.

There are hundreds of examples of the digital immigrant accent. They include printing out your email (or having your secretary print it out for you – an even “thicker” accent); needing to print out a document written on the computer in order to edit it (rather than just editing on the screen); and bringing people physically into your office to see an interesting web site (rather than just sending them the URL). I‟m sure you can think of one or two examples of your own without much effort. My own favorite example is the “Did you get my email?” phone call. Those of us who are Digital Immigrants can, and should, laugh at ourselves and our “accent.”

But this is not just a joke. It‟s very serious, because the single biggest problem facing education today is that our Digital Immigrant instructors, who speak an outdated language (that of the pre-digital age), are struggling to teach a population that speaks an entirely new language.

This is obvious to the Digital Natives – school often feels pretty much as if we‟ve brought in a population of heavily accented, unintelligible foreigners to lecture them. They often can‟t understand what the Immigrants are saying. What does “dial” a number mean, anyway?

Lest this perspective appear radical, rather than just descriptive, let me highlight some of the issues. Digital Natives are used to receiving information really fast. They like to parallel process and multi-task. They prefer their graphics before their text rather than the opposite. They prefer random access (like hypertext). They function best when networked. They thrive on instant gratification and frequent rewards. They prefer games to “serious” work. (Does any of this sound familiar?)

But Digital Immigrants typically have very little appreciation for these new skills that the Natives have acquired and perfected through years of interaction and practice. These skills are almost totally foreign to the Immigrants, who themselves learned – and so choose to teach – slowly, step-by-step, one thing at a time, individually, and above all, seriously. “My students just don‟t _____ like they used to,” Digital Immigrant educators grouse. I can‟t get them to ____ or to ____. They have no appreciation for _____ or _____ . (Fill in the blanks, there are a wide variety of choices.)

Digital Immigrants don‟t believe their students can learn successfully while watching TV or listening to music, because they (the Immigrants) can‟t. Of course not – they didn‟t practice this skill constantly for all of their formative years. Digital Immigrants think learning can‟t (or shouldn‟t) be fun. Why should they – they didn‟t spend their formative years learning with Sesame Street.

Unfortunately for our Digital Immigrant teachers, the people sitting in their classes grew up on the “twitch speed” of video games and MTV. They are used to the instantaneity of hypertext, downloaded music, phones in their pockets, a library on their laptops, beamed messages and instant messaging. They‟ve been networked most or all of their lives. They have little patience for lectures, step-by-step logic, and “tell-test” instruction.

Digital Immigrant teachers assume that learners are the same as they have always been, and that the same methods that worked for the teachers when they were students will work for their students now. But that assumption is no longer valid. Today‟s learners are different. “Www.hungry.com” said a kindergarten student recently at lunchtime. “Every time I go to school I have to power down,” complains a high-school student. Is it that Digital Natives can’t pay attention, or that they choose not to? Often from the Natives‟ point of view their Digital Immigrant instructors make their education not worth paying attention to compared to everything else they experience – and then they blame them for not paying attention!

And, more and more, they won‟t take it. “I went to a highly ranked college where all the professors came from MIT,” says a former student. “But all they did was read from their textbooks. I quit.” In the giddy internet bubble of a only a short while ago – when jobs were plentiful, especially in the areas where school offered little help – this was a real possibility. But the dot-com dropouts are now returning to school. They will have to confront once again the Immigrant/Native divide, and have even more trouble given their recent experiences. And that will make it even harder to teach them – and all the Digital Natives already in the system – in the traditional fashion.

So what should happen? Should the Digital Native students learn the old ways, or should their Digital Immigrant educators learn the new? Unfortunately, no matter how much the Immigrants may wish it, it is highly unlikely the Digital Natives will go backwards. In the first place, it may be impossible – their brains may already be different. It also flies in the face of everything we know about cultural migration. Kids born into any new culture learn the new language easily, and forcefully resist using the old. Smart adult immigrants accept that they don‟t know about their new world and take advantage of their kids to help them learn and integrate. Not-so-smart (or not-so-flexible) immigrants spend most of their time grousing about how good things were in the “old country.”

So unless we want to just forget about educating Digital Natives until they grow up and do it themselves, we had better confront this issue. And in so doing we need to reconsider both our methodology and our content.

4

First, our methodology. Today‟s teachers have to learn to communicate in the language and style of their students. This doesn’t mean changing the meaning of what is important, or of good thinking skills. But it does mean going faster, less step-by step, more in parallel, with more random access, among other things. Educators might ask “But how do we teach logic in this fashion?” While it‟s not immediately clear, we do need to figure it out.

Second, our content. It seems to me that after the digital “singularity” there are now two kinds of content: “Legacy” content (to borrow the computer term for old systems) and “Future” content.

“Legacy” content includes reading, writing, arithmetic, logical thinking, understanding the writings and ideas of the past, etc – all of our “traditional” curriculum. It is of course still important, but it is from a different era. Some of it (such as logical thinking) will continue to be important, but some (perhaps like Euclidean geometry) will become less so, as did Latin and Greek.

“Future” content is to a large extent, not surprisingly, digital and technological. But while it includes software, hardware, robotics, nanotechnology, genomics, etc. it also includes the ethics, politics, sociology, languages and other things that go with them. This “Future” content is extremely interesting to today‟s students. But how many Digital Immigrants are prepared to teach it? Someone once suggested to me that kids should only be allowed to use computers in school that they have built themselves. It‟s a brilliant idea that is very doable from the point of view of the students‟ capabilities. But who could teach it?

As educators, we need to be thinking about how to teach both Legacy and Future content in the language of the Digital Natives. The first involves a major translation and change of methodology; the second involves all that PLUS new content and thinking. It‟s not actually clear to me which is harder – “learning new stuff” or “learning new ways to do old stuff.” I suspect it‟s the latter.

So we have to invent, but not necessarily from scratch. Adapting materials to the language of Digital Natives has already been done successfully. My own preference for teaching Digital Natives is to invent computer games to do the job, even for the most serious content. After all, it‟s an idiom with which most of them are totally familiar.

Not long ago a group of professors showed up at my company with new computer-aided design (CAD) software they had developed for mechanical engineers. Their creation was so much better than what people were currently using that they had assumed the entire engineering world would quickly adopt it. But instead they encountered a lot of resistance, due in large part to the product‟s extremely steep learning curve – the software contained hundreds of new buttons, options and approaches to master.

Their marketers, however, had a brilliant idea. Observing that the users of CAD software were almost exclusively male engineers between 20 and 30, they said “Why not make the learning into a video game!” So we invented and created for them a computer game in the “first person shooter” style of the consumer games Doom and Quake, called The Monkey Wrench Conspiracy. Its player becomes an intergalactic secret agent who has to save a space station from an attack by the evil Dr. Monkey Wrench. The only way to defeat him is to use the CAD software, which the learner must employ to build tools, fix weapons, and defeat booby traps. There is one hour of game time, plus 30 “tasks,” which can take from 15 minutes to several hours depending on one‟s experience level.

Monkey Wrench has been phenomenally successful in getting young people interested in learning the software. It is widely used by engineering students around the world, with over 1 million copies of the game in print in several languages. But while the game was easy for my Digital Native staff to invent, creating the content turned out to be more difficult for the professors, who were used to teaching courses that started with “Lesson 1 – the Interface.” We asked them instead to create a series of graded tasks into which the skills to be learned were embedded. The professors had made 5-10 minute movies to illustrate key concepts; we asked them to cut them to under 30 seconds. The professors insisted that the learners to do all the tasks in order; we asked them to allow random access. They wanted a slow academic pace, we wanted speed and urgency (we hired a Hollywood script writer to provide this.) They wanted written instructions; we wanted computer movies. They wanted the traditional pedagogical language of “learning objectives,” “mastery”, etc. (e.g. “in this exercise you will learn…”); our goal was to completely eliminate any language that even smacked of education.

In the end the professors and their staff came through brilliantly, but because of the large mind-shift required it took them twice as long as we had expected. As they saw the approach working, though, the new “Digital Native” methodology became their model for more and more teaching – both in and out of games – and their development speed increased dramatically.

Similar rethinking needs to be applied to all subjects at all levels. Although most attempts at “edutainment” to date have essentially failed from both the education and entertainment perspective, we can – and will, I predict – do much better.

In math, for example, the debate must no longer be about whether to use calculators and computers – they are a part of the Digital Natives‟ world – but rather how to use them to instill the things that are useful to have internalized, from key skills and concepts to the multiplication tables. We should be focusing on “future math” – approximation, statistics, binary thinking.

In geography – which is all but ignored these days – there is no reason that a generation that can memorize over 100 Pokémon characters with all their characteristics, history and evolution can‟t learn the names, populations, capitals and relationships of all the 101 nations in the world. It just depends on how it is presented.

We need to invent Digital Native methodologies for all subjects, at all levels, using our students to guide us. The process has already begun – I know college professors inventing games for teaching subjects ranging from math to engineering to the Spanish Inquisition. We need to find ways of publicizing and spreading their successes.

A frequent objection I hear from Digital Immigrant educators is “this approach is great for facts, but it wouldn‟t work for „my subject.‟” Nonsense. This is just rationalization and lack of imagination. In my talks I now include “thought experiments” where I invite professors and teachers to suggest a subject or topic, and I attempt– on the spot – to invent a game or other Digital Native method for learning it. Classical philosophy? Create a game in which the philosophers debate and the learners have to pick out what each would say. The Holocaust? Create a simulation where students role-play the meeting at Wannsee, or one where they can experience the true horror of the camps, as opposed to the films like Schindler’s List. It‟s just dumb (and lazy) of educators – not to mention ineffective – to presume that (despite their traditions) the Digital Immigrant way is the only way to teach, and that the Digital Natives‟ “language” is not as capable as their own of encompassing any and every idea.

So if Digital Immigrant educators really want to reach Digital Natives – i.e. all their students – they will have to change. It‟s high time for them to stop their grousing, and as the Nike motto of the Digital Native generation says, “Just do it!” They will succeed in the long run – and their successes will come that much sooner if their administrators support them.

See also: Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants Part 2: The scientific evidence behind the Digital Native’s thinking changes, and the evidence that Digital Native-style learning works!

Marc Prensky is an internationally acclaimed thought leader, speaker, writer, consultant, and game designer in the critical areas of education and learning. He is the author of Digital Game-Based Learning (McGraw-Hill, 2001), founder and CEO of Games2train, a game-based learning company, and founder of The Digital Multiplier, an organization dedicated to eliminating the digital divide in learning worldwide. He is also the creator of the sites <www.SocialImpactGames.com>, <www.DoDGameCommunity.com> and <www.GamesParentsTeachers.com> . Marc holds an MBA from Harvard and a Masters in Teaching from Yale. More of his writings can be found at <www.marcprensky.com/writing/default.asp>. Contact Marc at marc@games2train.com.

I think that Del.icio.us is one of the most useful Web 2.0 tools. It facilitates:

- saving and accesing your bookmarks online

- promoting your own sites (you bookmark in Del.icio.us your best pages, don’t you?)

- finding bookmarks from other users on your network (they are searching for relevant sites for you)

- networking with other users who are inyour network.

- reading your network’s bookmarks, since Del.icio.us provides convenient RSS feeds.

- use a “profile” tag, such as emapey’s bookmarks tagged with
“profile” on del.icio.us to feature your sites, best posts and articles

and important sites linking to you.

List of useful links to resources for using Del.icio.us:

- Del.icio.us help

- Del.icio.us Networking Features

- My Favorite Feed Reader is My Del.icio.us Network

- Networking with Del.icio.us in Education

- Use Del.icio.us to Create your Eportfolio

- Using Del.icio.us for Blogging

- Del.icio.us Is The Recommendation Service For The Internet

- How to Analyze your Site with Del.icio.us

- Who Says Librarians (and Teachers) Don’t Like Tags

- Top 100 Tools: Delicious

- Del.icio.us Toolbox: 180+ Del.icio.us Tools and Resources

- “Interview With Experts: What’s so cool about del.icio.us?”

- Social Bookmarking with del.icio.us

- del.icio.us as a PR measurement tool

- Tips for Using Delicious In (Doctoral) Research

- del.icio.us libraries

- A discussion of strategies for managing social bookmarking teaching and learning activities (using del.icio.us)

- How Delicious is Changing Academic Research

- Know When People Bookmark You on Del.icio.us

- Visualizing Del.icio.us Networks

- del.icio.us Tips, Part-2: day-to-day use

- A reputation economy via “via:”?

- Del.icio.us Network Explorer

You can start building your del.icio.us network. Join the EdTechTalk Del.icio.us network. You can also continue networking by joining some fans in the del.icio.us/network/edtechtalk

These are my emapey’s bookmarks on del.icio.us

These are my emapey’s del.icio.us network bookmarks

Note how via “My Network”, I now have a stream of bookmarks from some Del.icio.us users I have selected. These users are searching the internet and bookmarking useful sites and pages for me !!!!!

I want to credit my friend FCEBLOG for some of the ideas included in this post.

SOURCE: http://onlinesapiens.com/blog/2007/05/10/using-delicious-for-education

‘Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?’

‘That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,’ said the Cat.

‘I don’t much care where—’ said Alice.

‘Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,’ said the Cat.

Where do you want to GET TO?

source: training zone

Young employees are digital natives, so what better way to develop their skills and share information with them than with a podcast, says Duncan Gotobed. Podcasts are easier to develop than you might think, he says. Read his practical guide to creating and using them.

Organisations are increasingly using new media such as podcasts to help them develop their employee’s skills and share knowledge between them.Podcasts in particular – which are a series of online audio or video files that can be downloaded onto a computer, MP3 player or an iPod – are being used as one of these key learning tools.

They are easy to produce, at a fraction of the cost of typical elearning, and can be far more engaging. Podcasts are also easy to deploy, as employees can download the audio or video files from a page on the intranet. It doesn’t require any additional investment in IT infrastructure or ‘consulting time’ to make it happen.

“Podcasting allows employees to use their downtime to learn – whether it is on the daily commute, on the treadmill, or walking the dog.”

People are also leading increasingly busy lives and the thought of squeezing a day’s training into an already overcrowded schedule is often just too much to think about. Podcasting allows employees to use their downtime to learn – whether it is on the daily commute, on the treadmill, or walking the dog. However, to get people to listen to podcasts in their own time they have to be interesting.

If you have young employees, they can be particularly effective. School leavers are digital ‘natives’ – they have grown up alongside computers, video games and the internet. They are used to searching for information, multitasking, processing images, sounds and video before text. They function best when they are connected to other people and they want to learn things that are relevant, useful and fun.

Who is doing it?

There are numerous examples of companies using podcasting to share knowledge.

Microsoft’s Academy Mobile initiative is designed to enable its worldwide sales and marketing functions to share best practices with each other. Users can watch, listen, and share podcasts or videocasts with peers. They can also download their content onto their mobile devices. To encourage sales people to add to the Academy Mobile content, Microsoft has created a reward programme to incentivise the top contributors. It provides training sessions on how to create podcasts and audio and video recording facilities for people to use.

Capital One also uses audio content to prime employees before attending a training course by getting them to listen to a relevant audio book or article. Similarly, audio content is also used to reinforce what employees have learnt after the course. For example, after attending a workshop on difficult conversations a set of scenarios are uploaded to participants’ iPods. This enables learners to listen to a vignette each week that reinforces their learning, by asking them to think about how they are applying the principles they have learnt.

So how do I create a podcast?

First of all subscribe to a podcast yourself. Go to www.podcastnation.co.uk and listen to a range of UK podcasts that are currently being produced.

Consider what you want to achieve with your podcast. Do you want to support the rollout of a new product? Record a message from the chief executive that could be used as part of an induction programme? Or do you want to interview experts in the company to get them to share their tips and tricks, etc?

Think about your audience. Who are they? How will they access the podcast? How will you market it to them? If you are aiming your podcast at the sales team, then you could launch your podcast at their next sales conference and issue each of them with a memory stick containing a range of audio and/or video content, together with instructions on how to access the podcast.

Choose your format. Interviews are the most widely used format in podcasting for a reason – they are simple to do and can be enjoyable to listen to. Avoid putting a microphone in front of the interviewee and getting them to talk for 20 minutes as it will quickly bore listeners. You’ll also need to consider how frequently you produce your podcast and how long it will be. As a general rule a podcast should be between 15–20 minutes in length.

Get your equipment together. If you are going to interview people over the phone, then all you need is your laptop, with Pamela for Skype installed – to record your Skype telephone calls – a headset with built in microphone and free audio editing and recording software such as Audacity. As with everything, you get what you pay for and the more you invest in your podcasting kit the better your podcasts will sound.

Brief the interviewee – tell them the purpose of the podcast. Explain why you want to interview them and the main points you will cover. But as a general rule don’t give them the specific questions you want to ask in advance, as it can lead to stilted answers.

Always do a sound check at the beginning of the interview to ensure everything is working properly and that background noise is minimal, as it can be difficult to get rid of it during the editing stage.

Edit the audio and save it as a mono MP3 file to make it quicker for employees to download.

Upload it to your podcast intranet page, with a short description of what the podcast is about, inviting feedback from listeners.

Tell people in your organisation about your podcast.
Duncan Gotobed is the producer and host of Top Briefings’ passionate people podcast, which features interviews, tips and anything else that will help you to develop your human capital. Go to www.topbriefings.com to listen to an interview with Anders Gronstedt, president of the Gronstedt Group on using new technologies in learning.

An official update to the original “Shift Happens” video from Karl Fisch and Scott McLeod, this June 2007 update includes new and updated statistics, thought-provoking questions and a fresh design. For more information, or to join the conversation, please visit http://shifthappens.wikispaces.com — Content by Karl Fisch and Scott McLeod, design and development by XPLANE.

related links:

http://shifthappens.wikispaces.com/

ypou can find the script here (in pdf)

a nice post from the web:

Angela Maiers challenged others to create a student engagement alphabet in 26 Keys to Student Engagement and I couldn’t wait to give it a try. I hope you think about this and try it too. Here are my 26 keys (or ABCs) to Student Engagement

There’s the easy way or the hard way. RSS makes your life easy but for people new to RSS it’s easy to overlook it’s importance. And educating, those new to the concept of RSS, how to use it effectively should be a priority.

What is RSS

Spend any time on the Internet, and you will see the word RSS or the orange icon normally used to indicate a site has RSS feed. RSS is an acronym which stands for Really Simple Syndication.

In simple terms RSS is a simple and effective way of keeping in touch when new information is added to a website without having to visit the site.

Check out RSS in Plain English for an excellent explanation of how RSS saves you time.

Forget about bookmarking sites in your web browser…

email updates or visiting your favourite sites — these all take time and time is precious. Read What is RSS and why you should use it? An introduction for newbies for a more detail explanation of why these practices are more time consuming. Using RSS is way more time effective; simply subscribe to the RSS feed from a web site using a Feed Reader.

Subscribing to RSS Using A Feed Reader

A feed reader or RSS reader is able to take the RSS feed from a site and present in a readable form for the user. Google Reader, Bloglines and NetVibes are all examples of feed readers. Instead of visiting numerous sites the RSS feeds from these sites comes to one location — your feed reader, where you read the information.

I, like many, prefer to use Google Reader. Check out this 5 min video or download this “How To” guide to learn how to set up and use Google Reader.

Final Thought

I always find explaining why it’s important to use RSS hard, probably because it really is something you need to experience first hand. If you’re not currently using a feed reader now’s the time to learn. You could use this list of top Edubloggers to find some blogs you would like to subscribe to.

Please let me know how you go or if you an experienced RSS user is there more information you think I should add?

And off course don’t forget to subscribe to the FED UP2.o RSS feed

Subscribing For Free!

More on GOOGLE READER:

Here I am, on a holiday, 22nd May, 2008, preparing my 3rd Braz-Tesol Regional chapter presentation and the same feeling happens to fill my heart: are people ready for the net 2.0? Are students ready for it? Are schools willing to get on this fast train?

I haven’t been able to come to a conclusion YET, all I know is that I’m trying PRETTY HARD to get on this train and somewhat and somehow I can’t. I’m chasing the train, but it goes faster than me. I’m trying to keep updated to the latest in technology and teaching, but I feel alone.

Last year, my presentation was about “blogging and learning in the web 2.0″ . I thought I’d get to meet colleagues who were willing to set a blogging project with their students. However, teachers complained about it being a time-counsuming device. I tried to convince them that yes, it is time consuming but along with other time consuming devices, it’s woth giving it a try. I wonder if they started a blogging project and how they felt about it. None of them concacted me through e-mail. It’s a shame people aren’t used to giving feedback. I also wonder how they feel about all these latest revolutions taking place every second in the web 2.0 and our students being part of it.

What’s the STUDENT 2.0 like? What was student 1.0 like? What should we take into consideration to get to the student 2.0 on time? Do teachers want to follow and keep updated to all the tiniest so-called revolutions online?

These questions fill my mind and once again, I haven’t been able to find the answers o – at least satisfactory ones – to them all. I have my guesses – if you, out there, would like to help me out, I’d be very pleased. Leave your comment, send and e-mail, MSN me, google talk me, but please, do not leave me without a satisfactory answer.

I hope that this year’s Braz-Tesol Regional Chapter one day seminar presentations help teachers out on how to get the best out of the net 2.0 and how not to feel afraid of GETTING INTO this quiet, but fast revolution happening here (on the net 2.0). I also hope teachers access this blog, which I set for sharing extra ideas and trying to develop a discussion on this topic (learning and teaching in the web 2.0)

Cheers,

Thiago Eduardo

Brasília, Brazil

e-mail: thiagoedu@gmail.com

MSN: worldthiago@hotmail.com

mobile: +55 (61) 8157 00333

 Blogging and learning in the web 2.0