Whoa - let's take a deep breath

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Permalink Reply by Patrick Kutkey on January 3, 2009 at 3:24pm

I'm not confused, just overwhelmed. I'm reminded of a story of a man from Africa visiting a Baskin & Robbins 31derful Flavors ice cream store. He shook his head and told his host that in his town there were just 3 flavors: vanilla, chocolate and strawberry. His host explained how much better the variety here was. No, the African countered, 3 choices is enough. I love technology (and ice cream) but sometimes too many choices slows me down (we've all been behind that person in line who can't make up their mind between Fudge Ripple and Butter Pecan Fudge Ripple) and the simpler technology would have been better (strawberry). Anyway, I like what you had to say about nothing really being free with all the training that's involved and man hours overcoming new learning curves. Also, I think this web 2.0 stuff gives the illusion of work. I'm excited by its possibilities, but I still have work to do in the physical world and this seems to suck me out of that place.

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Permalink Reply by Nancy Bosch on January 3, 2009 at 4:28pm

In this forum you will finds lots of people touting all kinds of tools, software, gizmos and gadgets. You rarely hear much about content, knowledge, teaching, learning, reflection, etc. Using the "stuff" seems more important than whether the student is learning anything. Teachers want to blog, podcast, use a wiki, etc. without a lot of thought to why they are choosing the tool, is your teaching or student learning going to be better or is it just lipstick on a pig? Eventually many of these tools will be gone and the rest will charge a fee. My advice--back up all photos and documents.

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Permalink Reply by John Oppenheim on January 3, 2009 at 6:52pm

I was trying to make those points - thanks for noticing

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Permalink Reply by Kae on January 3, 2009 at 8:10pm

Trying to deal with this issue also - promised myself I'd start reading Educause's The Tower and the Cloud : Higher Education in the Age of Cloud Computing. Administrators are starting to ask this question as more instructors use Web 2.0 applications.

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Permalink Reply by Kae on January 3, 2009 at 8:06pm

Pedagogy before technology always. And I really enjoyed Patrick's story - I often get asked what is the best wiki to use for the course. I've found that our accounting faculty prefer pbwiki for functionality while our humanities faculty prefer wetpaint - because it's more aesthetically pleasing?

At my school - we do a 5 cool tools presentation for faculty development, each time we do it we have a few new cool tools. We refer faculty to http://www.go2web20.net/ if they want the latest and greatest. We only say that this website has a "fairly up to date" listing since there is always something new.

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Permalink Reply by John Oppenheim on January 3, 2009 at 8:11pm

Thanks for that site. I like the idea of the five new things.

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