This day’s challenge was the most overwhelming for me so far
in the Connected Journey. Whereas the
other days’ activities engaged and challenged my thinking by presenting ideas
(Will Richardson, Seth Godin), this day’s exploration of Diigo, RSS feeds,
Google Reader, and Flipboard challenged my ability to manage technology inundation. My overall reaction to these tools? To put it
simply, I find them all to be beneficial, “slick,” as Andrew Sams calls them,
and time-saving; however, I wonder how, again, as Andrew says, to “mash-up” all
of these technologies along with those I already know and use to gain the most
meaningful technology experience. I’m
starting to feel that many of these technologies overlap and serve the same
function and that many of the devices I own also serve the same functions. For example, I am a runner, as stated in a
previous blog post. In order to continue
to educate myself about my sport, I access information in the following
ways/places: I read the magazine Runner’s
World on my Kindle Fire; I like the magazine and other running resources on
facebook; I follow running related people/sources on Twitter; I added Runner’s World to my Flipboard; I receive
e-mails from running sources to my iPhone.
As much as I love running, do I really, in the fifteen hours I am awake
each day, need to access this much information about it?? Personally, I would
rather spend some of those hours having dinner with a friend or walking on a
trail than staring at a screen reading the information that was tweeted/posted/blogged
etc. fifteen seconds ago about how to improve my running form. Ultimately, I appreciate being exposed to
this technology, but some of my questions and frustrations that come along with
it have not dissipated.
To more directly address my experiences exploring the four technologies
mentioned earlier, I found three of the four of them to be relatively or
completely new to me, and I found them all beneficial. In
terms of Diigo, I have been using another social bookmarking site, Delicious,
for a few years after hearing Andrew present about it during a professional development
day, so I wasn’t as interested in it. I
would like to know, however, what the differences are between Diigo and
Delicious and which is preferred by most.
It seems to me that they serve the same function, so I don’t foresee
myself transferring all my bookmarks to Diigo.
What I learned about Diigo that
could be powerful is the connection with other users. I have only used Delicious to store my
favorite links, but how many more awesome sources could I have if I explored
other English teachers’ Diigo accounts? RSS
feeds and Google Reader seem to be technologies that could streamline my
accessing of information, and therefore save me time and effort. I got very intrigued by Mind/Shift and added
it to my Google Reader; in fact, I got rather sidetracked by reading articles
on Mind/Shift and therefore didn’t get to add too many RSS feeds; I’ll have to go
back and add more! This leads me to
another issue I was having with this challenge: feeling as though my attention
span had dwindled and that I was getting “lost” in some of the technologies. Perhaps because I am not a “digital native”
my brain is not wired to be comfortable with using numerous technologies simultaneously. During my exploration, I would see a source, article,
etc. and go to check it out, meanwhile straying from my original
task/purpose. This was frustrating at
times. Also, especially in Flipboard, I was
finding myself way, way down the rabbit hole of technology as I flipped through
so many sources in a matter of seconds, which led me to sources within those
sources and sources within THOSE sources.
Beneficial though these technologies may be, one of the drawbacks for me
and certainly for some of my students is that you can get easily
distracted. I have many interests aside
from teaching English, and now that multiple technologies exist to connect me
to these interests, it concerns me that I might be tempted to waste time that I
should be grading essays searching my vegetarian Flipboard for new recipes. However, I guess that this is all part of the
challenge for me and for my students of being a learner in the twenty-first
century.
