Thing #17

I completed the technorati search with zero results for School Learning 2.0 in blogs and only 3 results in posts (and one of those was about new video games at E3 that just happened to have all three words). I have not gotten very good results each time that I try the technorati search but I do like technorati just as long as you use their pre-determined categories.

Using GoogleBlogSearch I had over 500,000 results of which most of the first 5 pages were relevant results.

A general search using google gave 12,600,000 results a lot of the results are news articles about web 2.0 or information on conferences but not blogs.

The key tags that I saw were pretty standard obama, all of the sports, key figures. I thought it was interesting that Mark Zuckerberg the CEO of facebook was a popular tag and I began to wonder if he going to be the new wonder CEO similar to Steve Jobs at Apple. There was a lot of tags for John Wooden with his recent passing. The oddest thing that I saw was stand up paddling which there are apparently numerous races for around the country. There were also a large number of tags about the World Cup which does not surprise me considering the wide spread appeal outside of the U.S.

The obvious disadvantage of this technology is the fact that not all students have access to this technology at home and some of it is blocked at school for students. I am not likely to assign something to students in which 10% of the students have a severe disadvantage. There is also the disadvantage of time. The amount of time at the beginning to become proficient in these tools is significant. I believe in the end that these could save time over the course of the year but the initial investment of time to bring students up to speed (many of them probably have some of these skills but not all of them) would require changing the schedule quite a bit.

The advantages are that you can use the most recent, relevant information. The ease of use and multitude of resources. I think that the best advantage would be that the student could take responsibility for their own learning by individualizing what they need to learn or what they had difficulty with. They could also add to the existing blog and feel a sense of ownership in the class.