Having now explored the online productivity sites, the image generator sites, and the wiki sites, am still trying to settle upon one tool to best use for student web 2.0 engagement to take my classes out of the slow text based land schools still hold on to. Told Darren that he and Mary seem to be the only faculty with actual employment skills for the present and the future, so I am trying to learn a small amount of this new world knowledge.
Philosophically, though, and psychologically, all of this techno toy technique seems like a vast black hole of time eating---not that I would do anything of better meaning if not online playing in the cyber sandbox to borrrow Darren's metaphor. Still, there is some sense of futuristic robot lonely substitute living, as if I were in outer space, sole space survivor, sending out semaphore signals of isolation and fiddling.
When one is young, one thinks that time is plentiful. Older, one wastes time true, but not without a sense of guilty squandering.
Remember the old chestnut about "If you got to do it all over again, would you. . .spend more time at work. . .worry so much about trivial stuff, " etc. etc? Well, 50 years in the future will the current generation be lamenting all the time spent staring at a computer screen and playing on the internet?
1 comment:
I must confess that although many of these Web 2.0 tools are meant to assist people in their productivity and save time, I oftentimes feel an information overload as well.
While I think it is very useful that many librarians are blogging about best practices ,and providing insight into new developments in the information field, I definitely feel more pressure to always "keep up" with the vast amount of content out there, which is just impossible and quite stressful.
However, I do think is important for educators to always strive to find ways to engage students more effectively, and whether we like it or not, this new generation is very comfortable using technology so it becomes imperative for us to be able to at least learn the language in an attempt to stay relevant to them. Some think these tools are a way to reach students in their own environment.
It's certainly not an easy task, as new technologies are coming out so quickly, but we should at least try. As we encourage our students to be "lifelong learners," we need to be an example of that ourselves.
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