Digital Heart

Every time I am working on my dissertation, I find more and more articles, ideas, and examples relating to Web 2.0 that either make me think or that support different aspects of my study (this might also explain why I am making such slooow progress on Chapter 4!)  Here are a few finds I wanted to capture before they slipped into the web wilderness:

• From his top10freesites wiki, Steve Dembo’s “very loose” criteria for a website to “qualify” as Web 2.0:
  • Entirely web based
  • User focuses on content over form
  • Supports pull technology
  • Makes connections between people (social)
• Helene Blowers, the Public Services Technology Director of the Public Library for Charlotte  & Mecklenberg County has created a wonderful, self-directed exploration (akin to my study’s Web 2.0 exploration menu but much more comprehensive) called 23 Things.   It is a “Learning 2.0″ experience based on the website 43 Things, and Helene’s post of the Web 2.0 things she wanted to do.  She turned it into a self-directed professional development experience for the library staff and is generously sharing it with others who want to replicate this program for other groups. 
• I also did not want to lose two VERY interesting blog entries I came across this week:
  • Christian Long is President of DesignShare.com, a “virtual collaboration” of school designers/planners “designing for the future of learning.”  He calls his think:lab blog “a form of virtual fly paper to keep track of school design, education, and technology research…”   As I meandered through his entries, I was attracted to the items on the Philadelphia Science Leadership Academy (my daughter, Kirsten, is in her first year of Teach for America, teaching 4th grade at Samuel Huey School in West Philly), the link to Sir Ken Robinson’s TED talk, and the cartoon on Music & Life from the creators of South Park that my friend Marianne would call “simple but deep.”  I had also never heard of Alan Watts, whose work was the inspiration for the cartoon, but love the Watts’ quote Christian included in his entry:

  You were supposed to sing or dance while the music was being played. – Alan Watts

   

  • Inspired by the Music & Life cartoon, I followed a link from Vicki Davis’s Cool Cat Teacher blog to ToonDoo and created a cartoon of my own. My ‘toon is just piffle, but I imagine some of our students could create something much closer to Music & Life using this cartoon creation website.  
    
    by mjohnson118 | Create your own Cartoon at www.toondoo.com
  • ToonDoo reminds me of the Go2Web2.0 website, a directory of Web 2.0 applications and services that now contains 1088 individual website logos that you can search alphabetically, by tags or by typing in key words.  It’s interesting just to scroll over the logos and read the pop-up descriptors of the individual Web 2.0 opportunities and services available. ToonDoo is, indeed, among the many websites represented here.