LearnHub

I have tried WordPress, LiveSpaces, Edublogs and Blogger and I just seem to keep coming back to Blogger, it gives me the freedom to change things around as I want them, and not be restricted to what is available or having to pay for some parts of the service. It is as customizable as you want, there are plenty of widgets available and third party themes you can download/upload to meet your personal needs. Just did a review of 3 blogwriters if interested—Thanks Harold :)

Hi everyone – I haven’t been very active lately :(. But I am in the process of changing careers, I am going from being a teacher to becoming a government employee that works with Grant Administration and volunteerism in emergency situations. So I have had a great deal on my plate this last 3 weeks and I need to get through the next school weeks.

I also changed my blog back to: blogger http://hshawjr007.blogspot.com/

due to some independence issues at Edublogs (I am getting to be a crotchety old guy and want to do things my way on my blog) :).

So hopefully you will start to see more of me now that I have things somewhat under control professionally, what a rollercoaster ride it has been! Thanks Harold

I recently changed the location of my blog to Edublogs – http://hshawjr.edublogs.org/. I haven’t been around much lately, because of school and attempting to learn which applications to master instead of just the surface knowledge.

Hi – The conversation here is thought provoking and wise beyond my simple abilities. But here goes, today our memory is less what we have for gray matter or how quickly the synapses process the information we take in or need to retrieve, fortunately or unfortunately (dependent upon your point of view) much of what “we” as a species need to remember is now at our finger tips and facts and ideas an be retrieved as quickly as you can “google” it (or whatever search engine you decide to use).

More and more our intelligence is becoming how we access, process and finally synthesize this information into something that is useful to yourself or others. So are we reaching a tipping point in our development as a species of where our intelligence and how we think depends significantly on tools beyond our personal experience or body?

So our feet are slipping around on the use of the new technologies we have available us. Many of the thoughts, ideas and communications that we have had like this would have taken months to accomplish and yet we have done it in a few days and if we really wanted to could do it in a Wiziq session and talk to each other in person and discuss this subject together and still be miles or continents apart. So is this a good thing, yes. But it is very different than many of use grew up with. If knowledge continues to grow exponentially, where will it be in another 20 years? Did I go off on too much of a tangent? I seemed to have lost focus, if I did I apologize. Harold

Thank you Peter, I had tried this a while ago and when I bought my new computer, I didn’t have it saved anywhere and forgot about, because we were using Inspiration8 at our school. CMAP has some really cool features and is free. Thanks Harold

I disagree, I am a depth of post proponent, many of us have busy lives beyond Learning Hub and while it is a unique way to “measure” authority it does cause some to simply post— when if they were not trying to increase their “authority” ranking, they may have not added their thoughts in. What for instance would happen in the next week to my authority if I added over 400 posts (I am on vacation), would all of these posts be worth reading, and of the quality I expect from myself? Probably not, 1 of 7 or 8 might actually say something. No I am not going to do that, but based on the current matrix my authority level at this site would increase dramatically. So it is a somewhat artificial measure of who is an authority. No matter my authority level, I believe that I will post as time permits and when I actually have something that might add to the conversation besides “wind” Have a great night and I hope the “wind” isn’t blowing too much in this post :). Besides what definition of authority are they using? “That is the Question.” (I Robot – Asimov)

to learn more, still fairly new to this site. Learning to navigate around…Been talking with Nellie’s group a bit lately. I am a high school special education teacher in Hinckley, Maine. More about edtech and what actually works vs what’s cool, neat and new. A bit on overload right now…too much information going in, not enough time to process everything. :)

@CSRD – I agree with your statement “My blogs serve an inner mission” I like that statement it condenses my paragraph down to a very simple, yet powerful statement. Because my blog serves an inner mission. Thank you CSRD for your “few” words of wisdom have made a good “difference” in this a very long day.

@MAWSTOOLS – I too am moving into my second career, my first was as a career military enlisted person and officer. After spending 21 years in the military where I was the “liberal” maverick who was tolerated as a good problem solver, but got on the military establishment’s nerves after a couple of years. Being outspoken and liberal wasn’t always the best mix in a fairly conservative organization. But compared to the teaching profession, I have found the military extremely “liberal” and progressive in many ways. Leadership in the military was at least willing to try new things to see if they worked better, but like I have said previously and elsewhere – “Education is the only profession that you can refuse to use new technology and not be fired.” I will not go into what happens when you try to get new ideas into a classroom, that can be really “interesting” (per Tsung Tzu)

But this area that Nellie has provided to us, has allowed me to “meet” others who are showing the initiative to continue their education and learning, which is a great thing to me. I humbly applaud your choices to continue your education in the non-traditional manner we are using here.

Hate em or love em, they are currently a fact of most educational institutions. Until we get to the 1:1 with wireless for everyone. Schools are going to have a central place to use computers, it is simply a matter of economics and priorities at this point and time. Personally, I dislike them, but until they give me a bigger classroom and more computers in it, I have to use them and having the pain of hoping that no one else has scheduled the room before me. If I go to a training, my laptop goes with me, haven’t had an instructor ask me to close it yet :).

Spelling is in the eye of the writer and reader, they are sharing a personal journey together, if it is written so that the reader can understand the meaning and content that is enough. We have enough rules and authority in our lives, if our spelling is not perfect, that is okay by me. Besides I am not being graded on grammar and spelling – I hope – I am being read by others for content, ideas and responses to their comments. :). Hopefully what I write is worth reading once in a while— if not…please let me know, because I tend to get diarrhea of the fingers sometimes. :)

I believe that blogs are in effect a safety valve for many in society. It is better to get it off “your” chest than to allow things to seeth within you. Therefore, just on that alone, blogs have a great value in our society. Also they allow the dissemination of alternative ideas (many of which I don’t agree with), but believe that they should be available to be read and discussed to show good and bad points without censorship (or censored by agreement of the group they are in).

In the past only a relative few have had access to being able to publish their thoughts. The idea that you or I might be able to discuss openly with others (lots of others) our perspectives, scares the bejessums out of the elites in society (those who would control the masses by providing them only the information they want them to have). In the U.S. there are about 10 people that own 90% of the print media is this a good thing…no it allows a small segment of society to control too much information and as we know the old saying is that “Information is Power”. I have been involved with “media distortion” of events, what was in the paper was completely different from what I saw as someone standing watching the event.

So even if a blog is totally off the wall, it does serve a purpose, after all we don’t have to read it if we choose not to and we can comment and tell the author that they are totally off wall and the reason why we believe that they are. We are having a conversation only instead of face to face it is being done by writing.

But now we have a world as our audience, someone from Israel, India, China or Brazil could be reading my words and then giving me feedback on my thoughts and giving me a perspective that I did not enjoy prior to their entering into my blog conversation. So to me blogs are invaluable to the common people of the world, but scary as hell to those who are currently in power. Fingers got moving too fast again.

So I will remain an amateur and enjoy my egotism in my blog :)

Oh by the way here is my blog site: http://hshawjr007.blogspot.com/ Shameless promotion of site :)

Hi – I have been blogging regularly since January. I like it, it gives me a chance to reflect on things that I do, which clarifies things in my head. Then I can go back and really wrap my head around what is going on. I find that I am more relaxed (well except for this last month—too much going on). I don’t usually get too many comments and certainly nothing of mine is going to change the world :), but it might be of some use to someone and that is good. I have found that blogging is very “me” oriented and sometimes we just need that me time, in the past it might have been done in a journal, but now it done and others can participate in your thoughts. – Harold

I really like http://www.classroom20.com/, it gives teachers a great deal of information on things related to teaching.

I just went through an introduction to Moodle course, but haven’t set up a course yet…too busy. I have another Web2.0 course going on right now and the instructor is using Moodle as the LMS. I have used Blackboard, but wasn’t too thrilled by it. Cumbersome and clunky are words that I would use to describe it. There is another one, but I can’t remember the name right now that we looked at briefly, but decided not to use.

The voice blog is an interesting spin on the blog…I still like the text based blog right now. But that would really be cool if it speech to texted the message while you were talking, now that would be awesome. I still like that visualization, speech only kind of limits my processing ability and takes away my main way of learning – visually. A video blog would be great too, but I don’t know if I would want to have people look at me the way I dress when I am blogging now. relax pants or shorts and tshirt or fleece, especially after the gym, good thing no aroma blog, everyone would run the other way….wifey does :)

Video – This is my second week on twitter, I have found it to be a useful tool to keep connected to others in the educational community. I have definitely attended web training/meetings that I never would have otherwise. It has been a good thing for me. I have also noticed that more people have come to my blogsite in the last two weeks than they did in the first 3 months of having it. So it has increased my visibility on the web as well. I have just about the same number of comments, but a lot of hits. hehehehehehe. As a result of the video I signed up for Pownce, just to see what it was like, looked nice will know more later. I am willing to try new things out and then discard what doesn’t work for me….Harold

Nellie – I am not sure what kind of response you are looking for in regard to this post?

If you are asking does me using a site such Learn Hub or Moodle contribute to my learning. I would have to say that it assists in my learning. I have a very low frustration threshhold when it comes to navigating a site. If the site is not intuitive and I have many steps to do before getting to where I need to be, it affects the amount of time that I will spend in answering or responding to prompts. So therefore my subjective satisfaction of the system being used can have a direct affect on my learning or responses to learning.

Hope that is what you were looking for??? :)

I haven’t used Pounce or Jaiku yet…I only started using Twitter a little more than a week ago. Now that I am actually following more than 1-2 people and using Twitbin in sidebar, I am finding it very valuable. I am attending online conferences and professional developments that I would have missed otherwise. So I am very impressed with the Twitter service. – Harold

I have tried PB Wiki, Zoho Wiki and like dspear I found Wikispaces the easiest to use. But right now, I really don’t have a good use for Wikis and don’t use them in the classroom. – Harold