hendron’sdigest

Today was an interesting one.

• I received my Kindle.
• I received Eveything is Miscellaneous by David Weinberger and am anxious to read it.
• I hurt my back. Now I know why people get painkillers like valium, muscle relaxers, and the like: it hurts bad!
• I keep seeing more and more tools online for making what we write a conversation

So, let me report on a few things…

Kindle. Karen Richardson wrote so passionately about her Kindle. So, I thought it would be worth trying out. I figured… always available Internet… basic web… books… maybe there could be a place for this in education. What I found, first off, is that Amazon is having web problems. I noticed it today through Safari, then later on the Kindle. Eh, interesting. Second, you’ve likely read this criticism before: what’s with the buttons on the side of the thing?? For as thoughtful as the design of this thing was, putting buttons on both sides of it wasn’t smart.

Oh, and the little case it comes with is a laugh. I’ll be affixing velcro soon.

Conversations. I’ve been hearing for some time about the blogosphere being a conversation. You’ll read about countless edtech bloggers and experts telling us that learning is also about conversations. So let’s all blog, right? Yeah, I buy into some of that.

But conversations require some activity on your part. The writings and subjects and people involved don’t yet all… mesh so well. But they could.

A new service called CoComment links the comments up with your “community.” Disqus does something similar, connecting the commenters between the blogs.

But for as much power as these Web 2.0 tools provide your read/write experience, they require work on your part. Establish accounts, install plugins, etc. Take MyBlogLog from Yahoo! It allows you to be tracked on various blogs via sidebar “widgets.” Show up someplace (even a place you don’t normally visit), and there you are, in the sidebar, counted and noted. Like a security camera at the entrance. Some people love this stuff.

I recently installed a plugin for this blog that allows you to get an e-mail when someone posts after you, to “follow up.” I like that solution. I can’t track it, and I don’t care. But sometimes, you forget to go back and participate. Read on, comment on. It’s tough. Yeah, the blog engines make RSS feeds for comments and posts, but… that’s a lot of feeding going on there.

At some point, someone will design the next big web app, which will connect all of this together in a hopefully “Apple-esque” wrapper, meaning, it will be just so easy and intuitive to use. And this trend, really, is something I’ve been telling teachers about for about 4 years now.

At once, the Web is getting far more complex and powerful, yet at the same time, easier to use.

While all these competing tools (add-ons or not) are competing for our loyalty, we seem to be in a “development phase.” What features do folks want? Who will be the winners?

I’ll tell you, following a blog, a Twitter page, a Tumblr blog, a work-community blog, and posts in a social network is even a little too far distributed for me. I’m old school, I’ll have a blog (or two). But just as blogging today is a facile way of getting your ideas published on the Web, I think staying connected can be just as easy, around the corner.

(My back’s calling for a nice flat surface. Peace!)

This entry was posted on Monday, June 9th, 2008 at 7:56 pm and is filed under Reflection, Resources. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.