I had an experience I want to share when I was subbing in a high school classroom recently. In the waning minutes of a class period, we needed to find out the name of a YouTube video featuring some local kids; our keyword searches were not successful. Three or four of the students pulled out their cellphones and texted to friends around the school building for suggestions. We got the name of the video in just a couple of minutes. It was amazing and I'm sure totally against school rules. One of the students even said, oh, he won't answer; he's taking a test. This goes on all the time! And probably without teacher knowledge.
I also have reaped the benefits of video chatting lately. Our first granddaughter was born in November and she lives three hours from us. To keep in touch, we all get together on iChat on our Macs on Sunday evenings. That is one program not mentioned in the 23 Things, but it should be. It is included in the purchase of any new Mac, and runs intuitively and quickly. The Mac OS is amazingly simple and reliable. Libraries should think about purchasing Macs more than they do. The software that comes with them fits in so well with Web 2.0 and Library 2.0! I noticed in one of the latest postings of The Shifted Librarian, that she had visited the world's newest, coolest library ("library concept center") in Delft, Holland that the computers there were heavily Macs. Here's the link: http://www.flickr.com/photos/shifted/sets/72157604142377648
I set up my account in Twitter, but haven't lined up my "friends" yet. Since I don't spend just every minute of my working day at a desk in front of a computer anymore, it might not be as useful.
My last word on Thing #7 is this: Wow. It's just so much fun to stand by and watch the world of communication evolve! And my friends and acquaintances are all at such different stages of it and I get to do many, many different types of communicating. I guess since I'm basically a "chatty" person, it suits me to have this smorgasbord of tools.
No comments:
Post a Comment