CWA New Media: Our Blog

If we needed convincing, and I’m not sure we do anymore, this item from Robert Scoble’s blog confirms that news gathering and dissemination is no longer in the hands of the traditional broadcasts and networks.

“Plane crash in NYC captured on real-time web”

“…One of the first phots (as report on Silicon Alley Insider) was made by Janis Krums on his iPhone and posted to Twitter. He was on one of the first ferries to get to the scene, just minutes after the crash….”

It also reminds us that access to knowledge and information is dynamic and ever-changing.  This is a powerful new element to the learning landscape that, if harnessed by expert teachers, could add an X factor to student’s engagement in the learning process.

Large numbers can attract the attention.   These figures come from a BBC report, and it advises that this is a 41% growth since last year.    Included in the report was that 117.6 million people accessed the internet using their mobile phones last year, up 133% from 2007.

Students are the main strength of mobile internet users, the study said: 43.5% of them use their mobile phones to read online news, download music, check email and perform a variety of other tasks.

At the end of 2008, the number of net users in China, which has a population of 1.3 billion, was almost the same as the entire population of the United States.

wow!

It’s that time again – when everyone makes predictions.  CWA’s team will share theirs soon, and in the meantime we’ll borrow these.

I’ m  a subscriber to Read Write Web and it is a great place to keep in the loop  about new products, services and thinking.  A pre-Christmas topic stirred up some interesting debate about where learning is going, with the tantalising title “Education 2.0: Never Memorize Again”

The wonderfully distributed web 2.0 world  has been accelerating over the past few years and many of us have little bits of our content, ideas, creations  and identity scattered across 2.0 places like Facebook, Bebo, MySpace, Flickr, You Tube, Photobucket, Google docs, Live Journal et al.

But this year could be shaping up as a shakeout year for some of the less famous of these online spaces.

While these sites are free to us, there is a cost for someone somewhere in terms of their staffing, server infrastructure and traffic costs.  As the recession hits their owners may  start to look more closely at whether the hoped-for returns on their investment are being realised.

I guess the best approach is to ensure that when we publish onto these sites we also keep copies of whatever is precious to us – just in case someone hits the off-switch.

I can’t imagine life without email, but others can.  This article touches on the possibility that millennials have moved on.

With 2009 well and truly underway, it’s a jolt to realise that next year is 2010 . No doubt it will be a year of review and future gazing.  Reading up on the NZ Secondary Futures site might provide a head start as this 4-year initiative has been considering the future of learning, and has produced a range of interesting theme-based papers.

Web 2.0 activity became frenetic in 2008 and while many web services came and went in the flurry of choices, others weathered the snowstorm to emerge as popular and  influential connectors.

Technorati is one these.

The site explains its purpose – founded to help bloggers to succeed by collecting, highlighting, and distributing the online global conversation. As the leading blog search engine and most comprehensive source of information on the blogosphere, we index more than 1.5 million new blog posts in real time and introduce millions of readers to blog and social media content.

From a learning perspective, its amazing to know that people around the world are sharing their knowledge and unique insights through their blogs, but finding the good stuff that serves a learning purpose out there is the challenge.  Technorati helps to bring a little bit of order to the wonderful chaos.

A few years ago CWA folks were invited to attend a conference in NZ which had a focus on education in the next decade.     We were asked to consider four  OECD developed scenarios (PDF) which were  presented in an easy to understand  “what if” way.    It was a simple and effective approach, and required us to actively engage our imaginations as we explored and immersed ourselves in what seemed to be very feasible possible futures.

In this coming year, CWA will be exploring the roles that scenario-building and story-telling can play in imagineering the future.   Could be fun!

I grew up with television as my window on the world. Now its the web. An example of the marvellous world of convergence is TED Talks – mini tv programmes, interesting topics, fascinating people – on the web, on tap and viewable when and where I want them.

I recently dropped into TED Talks to catch up on the status of the big and bold One Laptop Per Child project – two years on – with Nicholas Negroponte giving the update – you can view the video here.