What it means to relax? & the year of share, tag, share

A reminder that I should take up knitting


I was reminded today of a post I read by D’Arcy a few weeks back, about his attempt to unplug on the weekends. I was reminded because, even though today’s Friday, I had already planned for saturday on spending a good portion of the day rebuilding an app that is already working “perfectly.” I told myself that there’s good use in having a smaller verion. One that can be embedded in a threaded discusion so that a student or the instructor can punch a button and voice record and playback a summary of the weeks threads. Why? the current version is too large for that, and besides all that I have to do is reskin and resize. I don’t have to touch the code at all. it’ll be fun!”

The truth however, is that I invariably end up spending much more time than I had planned, and instead of stopping to do things like eat a sandwich or go outside to take a walk, I move right into reading through all the blog posts that have collected over night. Unfortunately this leads straight to either downloading one or more “new” apps, that I “got to check out” or subscribing to one of the new beta site/services that even though I know in advance will definitely not be the next killer “social app” I somehow have to prove it to myself, because maybe, maybe it is ! The truth though, is that the moment after I load the page the offering is usually indistinguishable from the rest in the pack. Everything is once again Free Free Free. just like in the days of the boom. “2 gigs of free space to share, share, share, and tag, tag, tag” “Hey don’t look over there, look over here, they only offer 10 gigs of free this and free that, we offer 100 gigs and we also output RSS so you can really share, share ,share and tag, tag, tag…

With that said, it’s been an amazing year in terms of the sheer number of collaboration and communication tools and services that are being developed. What I’m enjoying is that a lot of these have great usefulness to the world of online learning, and even though in most every case, the idea of serving Higher Ed most likely never crossed their mind. THe fact that all of these, at least so far, are free which makes them a perfect fit for use in education. I know that I’ve already found a tie in with Writely – Video Egg – SlidesNow and Skype and though these have very different functions, show great promise in providing students with a set of easy to use tools that can be loosely joined to expand the somewhat dry environment of a CMS and provide students a way to more effectively work collaboratively.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 9th, 2005 at 11:17 pm and is filed under Main. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.