Information in Education

I am just a huge fan of the way the internet makes information available from so many sources in such an easy way.  I use this in all areas of my life and I think education needs to change so as to allow students to become better at exploring their own interests in this way.  I am learning how to be a fully engaged internet citizen, I hope to be able to interact with my students in such a way as to make this a valuable component of their education.  The ck-12 book that I've shared here is one aspect of this, the information I'm teaching in class is available online at any time with additional resources for self teaching embedded.  I'm exploring other things with a new STEM teaching assignment I have, hopefully that turns into a blog as that unfolds.

Last summer, I was a little overwhelmed by this model, but it's coming together now.  I like cloud computing, Google, Dropbox, Spotify, etc.  I have the same model for most things, I find online sources of things I like and then I store them in the cloud in whatever format is best for that particular content.  Feedly brings me other educators ideas, those are stored in Diigo or Mindmeister.  YouTube brings me all sorts of things from all over the world, that is stored in YouTube playlists.  I also have a YouTube channel if the need to broadcast ever came over me.  Spotify music streaming is awesome, I follow people with similar musical tastes and make playlists of a wide variety of music.  Pictures are stored in Dropbox for easy access anywhere and sharing.

It's fun to find people that are broadcasting what I want to know and then learning from them.  It seems to me that this is a whole new model for people to learn from each other.  Isolated nodes of higher education seem like a thing of the past, I chose my own experts and learn wherever I want.  I imagine there will always be well documented education paths for things like open heart surgery, but it seems like the whole Ivory Tower, I've got the knowledge and you don't thing may become less powerful someday.

Bottom line, it's about finding sources of things you like and storing them in the cloud in a way that is easy to retrieve.  I have a Chromebook and a Galaxy S3 phone which allow me to access all of this fun and I enjoy it.