Tonight I recieved a phone call from a friend. She is finishing her Master’s Degree after being out of teaching for a few years. One of her courses is an Educational Technology course. The Professor is recomending that all of the students buy Dreamweaver and a book about how to use it. The reason? So they can learn how to buld an online portfolio.
I nearly wept. (Not tears of joy.)
She was calling me to get my opinion on whether she should buy Dreamweaver. I made it clear to her that this guy might have been on the mark 8 years ago, I honestly believe the days of needing to learn how to code a web page are over. I’m all about cultivating a web presence, but coding a page is not where to focus your finite efforts. As I mentioned in a post here last week – there are many free web sites that ffer high quality tools for building a web site today. Let them do the heavy lifting in the area of code. I encouraged her to investigate the “Social Web” instead.
Having to explain to her what I meant by “Social Web” really crystallized some things in my own mind, so I’ll share what I said to her here for posterity. Nothing revolutionary, but it will be nice to refer back to my thinking on these topics in the future:
When I say the social web, I am referring to a couple of distinct concepts. I’ll try to summarize them in a few sentences…
1) “The read/write web.”
We are finally beginning to reach a point in time when technical aptitude is no longer a requirement to put content on the internet. Because of that you are free to focus not on the effort involved, but on the conversation itself. When your web page (blog) has the capacity to receive comments, two things happen. First, you are more aware of your audience when you write. This fundamentally shapes the way you communicate. The obvious followup is that people can comment on your writing, creating a truly authentic dialog. As he name implies, the read/write web cycle really and truly starts with reading. Almost anything you write will be the result of something you read elsewhere. The power of comments in blogs is vastly underrated in education. They are not able to be easily tied to analytics, they don’t correlate nicely with standardized tests. All the same, their value is immense for both the reader and the writer.2) “The brains in your pocket.”
One of the things I am just starting to get my head around, but I think is a truly native idea for kids today, is the concept of the web as a portable brain. I don’t simply mean that there are tools so you don’t have to learn or remember, or that Google has the answers to everything. Though in many ways that is true. I mean that there is a new suite of “social” tools emerging. Technologies like Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce… these are sites that on their face look like ego stroking tools allowing everyone to constantly share their smallest thoughts with the masses. I think that is missing the forest for the trees. If you take the time to interact and build even a little rapport with the people on these sites, you are given in return a room full of experience and knowledge at your fingertips. Real humans at the other end of an ever-present line of communication. If I were teaching today, I would Twitter any question that a student raised that I did not know the answer to.
