So I have decided that I do all my best blogging at the airport, especially waiting for the plane at the gate. Great people watching, and the end of a vacation is always a very pensive thing for me. So as I sit at the gate for my flight home from Boston and the 9th Sakai Conference, I have the appropriate time to pause and reflect on things.
First off…notice the change yet? I migrated everything to WordPressMU from Drupal. That doesn’t necessarily mean that I am not a Drupal fan, but I honestly just don’t have the time and energy to maintain it anymore: upgrade, patch, upgrade, patch. My old webhost didn’t support PHP5 unless I started up an entirely new plan, so I just decided to bail. Plus we are playing with WPMU at work, so I felt I should live in it a little bit.
But I digress…
The Sakai conference was very enlightening. It was fun to go and actually not present, though a few attendees remembered my presentations from 1.5 years ago in Newport, which was awesome. I got a chance to dig into the concept of ePortfolios and OSP more, and explore some of the alternatives out there. We are exploring WPMU for some of the presentation layer functions, based on the goodness I have been reading at WPMUed.
God I want a cheeseburger.
I also spent a lot of time on Twitter at this conference and found out that I was one of the top three twitterers there. Slightly embarassed, but as you know I love twitter and have been finding it very useful as a backchannel for teaching and learning scenarios. I spent a lot of time catching up on some of the excellent Fluid work and new and exciting news about its applications for mobile devices and accessibility. I will have to watch that a bit more. So many of our students use the iPhone and the feedback I keep hearing is that students want more of a “Facebook experience” in Sakai (or even LMSs in general).
I heard more of the dreaded Digital Native chatter too. I got a chance to briefly compare notes with a few other attendees and my contention is that the terms Net-Generation, Gen-Y, and Digital Native/Immigrant are out-moded. This unfairly separates us from our students and puts them in a box. We are all living in a digital world, whether we use the resources or not. If we are consumers, then we have no choice in the matter. I would not consider the students I come in contact with everyday digital natives. They use Facebook and SMS, and not much else really. Throw a blank Wiki at them or ask them to upload a YouTube video and many don’t know what to do. I prefer the term Digital Tourist (CC ND 3.0, Me). We are all just visiting really… It should be our job as ed-tech/educators to filter through new tools, whether they live in our LMS or not, and help people understand their value. Who knows if Twitter or Facebook will be around in 5 years, 10 years…but the concept of sharing, digital literacy, and utilizing collaborative resources tools will still be there because of the trends in ownership that Web 2.0+ has started. Along with this we need to be cognizant of the proliferation of mobile devices, alternative devices, accessibility for everyone, and lowering the bar to “digital entry” for users that might be more touristy than we are.
Long story short, we need to be aware of these trends and play catch up in our professional lives to meet the needs (and demoands) of our audience. For those that are interested, here are some links for learning more about what happened at Sakai ’09:
- Sakai Conference 2009 main page and presentations
- Sakai 2009 Twitter stream
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