Jonesieblog

All Webs are not equal.  My Web is very different from the Internet of the majority of teachers (yours probably is too).

My Web delivers pretty much all the new stuff from all the sites that interest me to a single page set up to make it very easy for me to see at a glance what is new. I have complete control over what appears on this page and can add new sources with a couple of clicks of my mouse.

My Web connects me to a huge network of educators from whom I learn lots, with whom I discuss important stuff as well as silly stuff, and to whom I pass on cool new stuff I have picked up.

My Web provides me with free office tools that I can access on any connected device, as well as a calendar that I share with my family – my Web is the place where I store most of my documents and photos.

My Web lets me create my own rich web applications and host them free online for me and other people to use.

My Web is pretty awesome! Personalised, customisable, flexible and very comfortable to be in.

If I had to describe the Web of a large number of my colleagues I guess it would go something like this:

“There’s a button on the bottom of the screen that you click and it brings up the Internet [starting at either the school homepage or the Web site of their ISP if they are at home].  You click on a link [or a bookmark maybe] to go to your email.  You can search for Web sites by going to Google [bookmark or type 'Google' in the URL bar].  You get to a Web site you know by typing its name into Google.”

Nothing more.  For them the Web is place of endless information , but limited, specific functionality.  For you and me the Web is a place of endless functionality waiting to be discovered or invented.  If I want to do something online, it is my expectation that I’ll be able to find a site that offers that functionality.

My Web is better!  I wonder how long it will be before enough people realise this in education, and we begin to teach teachers how to construct their own effective Webs.  Such a program is as vital today as the NOF ICT training was 5-6 years ago.

Stumble it!

As a blogging, feed reading facebooking twitterer, I do, of course, recognise the benefits of all this stuff, but today, as I reached for my laptop and fired up Firefox, I felt a pang of nostalgia for the days when I would be presented with the blank canvas of Google’s homepage.  No feeds to check, no twits to watch, no facebook games to play – just a blank search box and the question “I wonder what’s out there?” floating in my mind.

It feels harder to get into that frame of mind these days – there’s so much new stuff being thrown at me from familiar places that it’s hard to find the time to go exploring for new places.   I can tap into other peoples’ explorations via del.icio.us but that isn’t quite the same.

Other people must have spoken about this before – star prize for a link to the oldest blog post to do so

Anyhoo, what do I care, I’m away now until Saturday night.  I’m not going snowboarding, no sir no, because the conditions up North are definitely rubbish.  Don’t even think about going up, especially not to Glenshee which is even worse than the other resorts.  And if  you’re not going up then I won’t see you up there ‘cos neither am I!

Stumble it!

This morning I received by invitation to the beta phase of Lifestrea.ms.

Lifestrea.ms is supposed to pull together all your different online activities into one place – I’m writing this blog post from within Lifestrea.ms, and I just posted to twitter from here too.

There’s lots more to Lifestrea.ms – openID integration, cool attention stuff, rss reading and so on.  I’ll post some more once I’ve played around

Stumble it!

Google recently announced OpenSocial – an Open API for developers to create apps that will work on Bebo, Myspace and many other social networking sites. This is huge, and everyone is wondering what Facebook’s next move will be.

Here’s a good introduction on the official Google blog.

Stumble it!

I enjoyed this tirade against Facebook:

I hope you’re beginning to see the light. This is your life, and it’s ending one click at a time. Facebook brings out the worst in people. You put so much time and energy into something that makes you a worse person. Do you WANT this? I’m surprised you’ve made it this far into the article without changing tabs to check if someone wrote on your wall…

Reading things like this makes me feel immensely glad to be past the intensely social years of my youth.  Not that I’m a recluse exactly, nor do I have one foot in the grave, but folk in long-term relationships in their forties don’t really have the same frenetic drive to socialise as single folk in their twenties!  I have plenty of good friends, and not enough time to see them all regularly enough, so the expansion of my social circle is not a high priority for me (not that I am averse to making new friends!).  Nor do I care so much about what people think about me.

The construction of a social identity for one’s self has always been a potentially fraught journey (but also potentially exciting and fun!) – it seems to me that it might be more fraught now than ever, and I’m glad to be past it

This post makes me sound like a tedious old sod – am I bothered?

Stumble it!