Learning objectives; Social Media Classroom

In December, the busiest month of the year, I signed up for the the course “Social Media Classroom” by Howard Rheingold. I was made aware of this online course on Facebook by Arne Krokan a professor at NTNU, the university in Trondheim. He wrote: If you want to learn how to use social media effectively, you should participate in this course by Howard Rheingold. I can guarantee a great return on your efforts! Challenge accepted and here I go!

The learning objectives:

In this brief introductory course, the diligent student will:

1. Understand the origins of intellectual augmentation
2. Be introduced to internal and external tools for managing information flows
3. Be introduced to the theory and practice of tuning and feeding personal learning networks through curation tools and practices
4. Be introduced to the interdisciplinary study of cooperation and collective action

My first homework is as follows:

Infotention activities

1. I created an information dashboard using netvibes and have started with two tabs. One for RSS feeds of my favourite blogs to read, and also my del-icio-us bookmarks and my Twitter feeds. The other tab has search engines set up to search for information about my school. That is advice I found in the book “What School Leaders Need to Know About Digital Technologies and Social Media“. I posted a screen-capture of my dashboard below. 2. I created a twitter paper based on the following topics; the following hashtags. #plpnetwork #educon, #vflr, and some additional single twitter users I enjoy reading.

3. Reflecting on this process involves thinking about what kind of information I am seeking and what kind of tools I can use.  When I started working with this I realized that I need a mental and social strategy on how I am going to deploy my attention. I started off by searching information I think is relevant to me, but I have not till now been able to filter the information. My RSS feed has 851 new articles and it is clear to me that it is only a stress factor to subscribe to that many posts without filtering. I need to work on where my attention is when building these tools. I need to decide what I want to pay attention to and when. Only then will I be able to find the appropriate tools to use to move the information to a place where if needed my attention can use it later! Information overload usually means that you do not find anything at all.