In this video presented by Mobile Learning Institute:

Alan November tours his hometown of Marblehead, MA and comments on the historical global vision of his community. Alan challenges us to think about the emerging role of “student as contributor” and to globalize our curriculum by linking students with authentic audiences from around the world. (For more, read Alan’s article, Students as Contributors: The Digital Learning Farm. http://novemberlearning.com/resources/archive-of-articles/digital-learning-farm/.)

Find more videos like this on NL Connect

This description caught my attention and I started playing the 13 minute video clip. The following thoughts from November resonated with me deeply as I watched and listened:

…[We need to ] convince schools, that we have to globalize the curriculum. We ought to have authentic conversation across the curriculum with people around the world over the Internet. Sadly, most schools use the Internet only to get information. People learn by having conversations and testing each other and trying to figure this out together. We are social beings. Engage kids socially across the web….

Authentic conversation with people from around the world… That is what I keep in my mind as the following project is evolving as a collaboration between myself, sixth grade students, their Social Studies  and Hebrew teachers.

Students are participating in a Jewish History Fair. Their topic is “Jewish Communities Around the World.

In the old days...

http://www.flickr.com/photos/24707395@N02/ / CC BY 2.0

In the old days… students would have been given a specific topic, sent home, to the computer lab or the library to “look up” information. They would then have to write a report, print out images, glue them on a backboard and “present” that to parents and visitors at the History Fair.

In the 21st Century...

http://www.flickr.com/photos/superkimbo/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

In the 21st century, we need to be looking for and addressing something more…

Information Literacy:

• Online sites and books are still valid information sources, but are they enough to engage students and give them “authentic” sources?
• Being able to get, evaluate and work with information from a variety of sources, such as books, almanacs, blogs, wikis, video, audio, interviews, etc.

Networking Literacy:

• Learn about accessing a network of people who can contribute information from their own experiences, on location and customized (personalized) to our own criteria, not the one a publisher or author chose?

Communication skills:

• being able to interview through a variety of media and communication methods and be familiar with their distinct etiquette.
  • face to face
  • e-mail
  • twitter
  • facebook
  • video conferencing (Skype)
  • texting
  • telephone
• being able to present the information obtained through a variety a media (video, images, audio)

The topic is “Jewish Communities Around the World”… what better way to allow authentic research to take place than go directly to those communities around the world…this is when it comes in handy to have a network of willing and able people literally AROUND THE WORLD! I was off to send a twitter alert to my PLN.

Cry for Help to my PLN

I received instantly responses. We will have Jews born or currently residing in different countries/continents being interviewed by our students. At this point we have Jews from 12 countries and seven continents who have agreed to be interviewed (Canada, USA, Costa Rica, Mexico, Argentina, Denmark, England, Scotland, South Africa, Israel, China, Australia) plus two people stationed (currently or in the past) in the Antarctica.

Here is the initial e-mail, describing the project, sent out to these contacts:

The 6th graders at the Martin J Gottlieb Day School in Jacksonville, Florida/USA are starting to research for a Jewish History Fair. They will be looking at different Jewish communities around the world.
Students will research with books and via the internet to develop questions that they want to ask Jews who are living on different countries and continents. We want them to interview with /through different media. Some interviews will be face to face here in town, but we would also like to give them the opportunity to conduct interviews via skype, email and twitter in order to strengthen information and media literacy.
One of our main objectives is for students to see commonalities among different communities.

Would you be interested in participating and willing to be interviewed? We would send questions ahead of time, if the interview is conducted via Skype or twitter? This won’t happen until close to the beginning of December.
Please get in contact with me, so I can answer any questions that you might have.

Thank you so much in advance!

After I received confirmation of their willingness to participate as an interviewee, they were then asked to send us a short biography:

We are continuing to work and prepare with our students for the Jewish History Fair: Jewish Communities Around the World. Thank you for agreeing to participate as an Interviewee.
As students are formulating interview questions, they would benefit from having a short biography from you, describing your background and involvement as a Jew in the country you were born in or are currently residing.
The bio only has to be a few short sentence to give our students just a little background.

Our projected time line to work with the students is as follows:

1. Introduction to project
2. Introduction to different media, students will be interviewing. Talk about required etiquette of different media…differences…similarities…
3. Student introduced to biographies of interviewees
4. Assign Students an interviewee/country/continent
5. Students will research background information that will help them form an notion of the community interviewee has grown up/is residing
6. Students will develop questions for the interviewees that will be send ahead of time
7. Setting up up date and medium of interview to be conducted
8. Students will interview
9. Students will connect the information gathered to create their own understanding of Jewish communities, especially commonalities, around the world.
10. Students decide in what shape and form their will demonstrate what they learned.
11. Students will produce final product to be displayed with globe and History Fair.

I am getting very excited to observe students and their research outcome as the actual interviews are being conducted. I wonder what media students will prefer and get the most out of? I wonder if certain student personalities/learning styles will naturally gravitate towards one or another media?

I am guest blogging on My Wonderful World Blog (National Geographic Education Foundation) in honor of Geography Awareness Week 2009 the week of November 15 – 21!

This year’s theme is “Get Lost in Mapping: Find Your Place in the World”.

I wanted to share a successful geography lesson that continues to grow throughout the school year.  I have blogged about the  News Events Assignments with a Twitst and The Logistics of creating a Current News Events Google Map previously.

The lesson was born out of a very traditional  “Current Events Assignment”, handed in to the teacher on paper, which had been part of the curriculum for years.

The Middle School Social Studies teacher at my school (Martin J.Gottlieb Day School) was not satisfied with the paper and pencil assignment and was looking to bring the old and tried task into the 21st century. She wanted students to not merely be looking up random and disconnected news events that were handed in to her on a weekly basis. She wanted students to be really making connections among these events by involving higher level thinking skills such as evaluating, analyzing and creating. The new assignment was to not only involve geography skills, but also bring into the lesson information literacy and global awareness.

We decided to create a collaborative map for each grade level (6th, 7th, and 8th grade) with Google Maps. Each student was assigned a different colored or shaped placemark within Google Maps . They were also given the class username and password to be able to log in from home.

Their weekly “Current News Events” assignment now consisted in:

• Logging into their grade level map
• Placing a placemark on the location the news event had taken place
• Entering the location’s country as the title of the placemark
• Using the description box to add a category the news article was falling under (Ex. politics, environment, entertainment, etc.)
• The source link to the original news article or citation if from a paper newspaper
• A summary of the article. Preferably in 140 characters or less.

Since the start of the assignment,  several weeks have passed and new lessons have been learned, input from educators around the world received and new dimensions to the lesson have crystallized themselves.

As more news events are added,  we are asking questions such as:

• In what category do most news events we added fall?
  
• In what continents and countries are these news items in?
  
• What area of the world do we know or hear the most or least about? Why?
  
• How can we expand our horizon to cover more areas of the globe?

It has been good to observe that students are branching out in their search for sources. They are reading newspapers from different locations around the world, such as the UK, Australia, and Japan.

They are realizing that:

• different sources bring different points of view, opinions and kinds of news items.
• not all perspectives are represented in one source
• to get a “fuller” picture of a news event, you have to look at more than one source
• location of a source influences the content and perspective of the article

We  are asking ourselves:

• What does it mean if the majority of our sources are US based by coming from CNN.com and Foxnews.com?
• How are other countries affected by events happening in different countries or continents?
• What is ( or is there) a difference in terms of validity of news when the source is BBC or Comedy Central?

Each week students, after they have entered their news event, present the location and summary of their placemark to the class on the SmartBoard.

As students present their news event, other students are working with their laptops at their desk and are editing their peer’s placemark. They are becoming collaborators and critical thinkers  by validating and cross-referencing sources, asking for clarifications if the summary was not understood and making suggestions to where to place the placemark best.  As Mrs. R., their teacher said:

In previous “Current News Events” assignment, there was never an element of self- and collaborative checking of their work. Students handed in their news event and summary on a paper. I was the only one reading it.  The collaborative web based map has brought a new dimension of deeper thinking.

Why are students motivated to go over and check their own and classmate’s work?

Students are aware that their Google Maps of Current Events have been viewed by over 10,000  people (all three maps combined). Over 20 comments have been left by others from far away countries such as Israel, Australia and Korea, leaving students with a sense of pride and that what they do in class matters. Other teachers are using their maps as examples to teach their students. Commenters have:

• asked students to add source links to the original articles
• requested that we double check location placemarks
• challenged students about the “worthiness” of adding articles in the entertainment category
• encouraged students to look for patterns about their news event locations
• shared links to images about a news event

As the Social Studies teacher and I reflect on this weekly task, we want to continue to add new elements and enter into additional phases of the assignment in order to prevent it from becoming routine or just another thing to do for the students.

We are contemplating:

• To give students a broad topic and asking them to find relevant news sources, representative of different countries? Is there a difference in the “facts” that are reported or omitted depending on location? What is their “take” on a specific event?
• Ask students to come up with a world news topic, add their opinion and take on the subject, then ask others around the world to contribute their unique perspective to that topic.
• Have students analyze responses from different locations around the world and consider responses on basis of geography.

What are your thoughts and ideas how to expand, develop and create even more facets to this assignment?

Take a look at the GoogleMaps at and leave a comment for our 6th graders, 7th graders and 8th graders.

Cross posted on TechLearning Advisor Blog

Just as I was about to create a Math Wiki and work with all Middle School students, I ran across the following article by Ruth Reynard in The Journal ” More Challenges with Wikis: 4 Ways to Move Students from Passive to Active”

1. Setup
2. Project Management for Wikis
3. Requiring Synthesis
4. Rewarding Engagement

The first paragraph of the article immediately struck a chord with me:

While wikis provide an interesting and accessible tool for collaborative work with students, there can be an easy shift back to regular teacher-driven methods in their use as it is difficult and challenging to continue to facilitate collaboration throughout a wiki project. That is, as we already know, the technology itself does not develop the skill, nor is it the teacher; the technology is only a tool, and teachers must remain committed to the collaborative process if students are to fully engage and develop the skills necessary to work collaboratively with their peers

I want to avoid creating a teacher driven wiki. I want to avoid that students simply follow their textbook with its units and chapters to create a depository of formulas and vocabulary.

I am “dreaming” of collaboration and connections with content from previous and coming years being made.

Students and their teacher should not simply see the wiki as a website, that can easily be edited by multiple users. The wiki needs be more than a compilation of documents and links added by the students of the class or course. As  Ruth Reynard explains, in addition a wiki should be about the collaboration skills students are “living and learning” through the work. We need to distinguish between “adding information (as part of a group)”and actual “collaboration”.

Collaboration is defined by Merriam-Webster Dictionary as:

to work jointly with others or together especially in an intellectual endeavor

The emphasis for my is in the word “jointly”.  Jointly means connected. So, in addition to the collaborators working jointly as one, not just as many who are depositing their contribution one next to the other. The information, that is being “contributed collectively” needs to be joint/connected through ideas, thoughts, sequence, links, design, hierarchy, that make sense for understanding. The information on a wiki should not just exist together, merely for the fact that the files that contain the information are under the same domain.

The information needs to be connected in order for us to make sense of it. Otherwise it will just be a pile of information and information overload will set it.

In another article, 3 Challenges to Wiki Use in Education, Reynard lists the following:

Creating meaningful assignments: Motivation

Well designed assignments are clearly based on the learning outcomes of a course and also present meaningful purposes for students in their completion. [...] gaps in design and purpose are not only demonstrated through lack of (obvious) participation by students but also lack of viewable connection to the overall purpose and meaning of a course.

Grade Value for Constructed Input: Affirmation

Affirming students through grading values that adequately reflect the process is not new to education; however, in the area of new technology use, it is essential. [...] The effective use of Web2 tools requires students to be active throughout the process and that work should be reflected in the final grade for an assignment.

Collective Knowledge Use Learning.

Actual learning takes place when what is understood is applied in some meaningful context of use. [...] The power of using the wiki for collective learning is that it builds on a collective collaboration of knowledge construction and also visibly and logically captures the progress of thought and application for the participants and observers.

In an attempt to overcome these 3 challenges as I am working with Middle School students and their math teacher, I am working to:

1. Creating meaningful assignments: Motivation
   • by showing students that there is a connection between all the math classes (the ones they are taking, have taken and still will be taking)
   • by making this a collaborative, cross grade level and math level project where more advanced students create help and tutorials for lower level and younger students.
   • by reminding them of their responsibility to participate
   • by demonstrating how the wiki will be a new tool and resource for them to learn with, trough and from.
   • by placing a clustrmap on the wiki and opening it up for other Middle School math students from around the world to view and learn from.
2. Grade Value for Constructed Input: Affirmation
   • by keeping track of students’ contributions to the wiki, such as:
     • Adding existing information (from other resources)
     • creating new information
     • connecting contributions of others
     • creating multimedia examples and tutorials
     • contributing ideas and out-of-box thinking to make wiki a better learning tool
     • visual design
     • organizing information in meaningful ways
     • Reflecting on the effectiveness of the wiki
3. Collective Knowledge Use Learning.
   
   • by allowing students to realize, that it is not only about individual knowledge, but the knowledge the group is able to put together and connect.
   • by reminding students that the wiki will be what THEY make of it. There are no pre-set examples to copy nor models to follow.
   • by continue to remind students that the quality of the wiki is a process and will depend on the collective participation of all contributors.
   • by acknowledging that the wiki is not a unit or chapter to go through, but an ongoing process and will continue throughout the school year.

Stay tuned for upcoming blog posts about setting up the Middle School Math Wiki and experiences in working with the students and teachers.

Last week I posted a lesson with the Middle School social studies students, “News Events Assignments with a Twitst“.

Students and their teacher have really taken to this assignment with incredible enthusiasm and creativity. Since each grade level has started entering current events onto their map, they have discussed, edited, and revised their entries. The printed- on- paper predecessor version of the assignment never had engaged them in the same way before.

I sent out a  link to the map on my Twitter Network and within a few days, the viewer count of the 8th grade map was above 500o viewers. Some of them even left the students a comment.

The motivation of having a worlwide audience was a decisive factor for them to work harder at finding AND choosing relevant news events, summarize them better and enter them on the map.

I have had requests from other educators to post directions how to set up a map for your students.

So here it goes: (You can also download a .pdf version of “Current Events on Google Maps“)

Guide to creating your own Google Maps News Events with your students.

Create a google e-mail (http://www.gmail.com ) for yourself

Create a google e-mail for your students to use. The entire class will use this username to sign in to edit the map.

Sign in with your google account into Google Maps

Click on “My Maps”

Click on “Create new map”

Enter a title

Enter a description
Choose between “Public” or Private”
Click on “Collaborate” and enter the email you created for your students while setting up the google account in Step 2.

Sign into the student account e-mail and click on the link sent in the invitation. That will place the map you created in the student account “My Maps” list.

These 10 steps conclude the set up of the map and sign in accounts for you and your students.

Go to Google Maps http://maps.google.com/ and sign in

Click on My Maps, then choose the map you want to edit (the map you invited the student account to collaborate with should show up as a link!)

Click on “edit”

Students will zoom into the location on the map, where they want to place their current event
Click on the blue placemark, which will make a floating placemark pop up. Click on the map to anchor the placemark to the map. This will make a new window pop up, where students will enter a title, description and choose a color for their placemark.

We chose to use for the:

• Title: Country the news event took place Description: First line: Enter the category the news event falls under (Politics, Entertainment, Environment, etc)
• Then enter a summary of the news event (try to use 140 characters or less in an effort to practice precision and focused writing.
• Enter the link of the article, the student is summarizing. (Click on Rich Text) in order to insert a link into the description area)
  (Thank you to all who suggested this part through the comment section!)
• Icons: Each student was assigned a different icon/color in order to know who contributed each news event.

You can now use a code to embed the map into your classroom wiki or blog.

2nd Graders have moved on from their Maps and Globes unit to learning about communities. Their investigation started out with looking at a map of our planet Earth at night.

We zoomed in to look at urban and rural areas and compared cities, like Jacksonville and Buenos Aires. the teacher then guided the students to come up with nouns that were found in rural and urban areas. These nouns were entered in a Wordle to create the Word Cloud below. The more one noun was mentioned by the students, the larger the word appears in the cloud.

The school subscribes to the Discovery Education Video Streaming service. We picked an age appropriate video clip about City, Suburb, and Rural Communities.

Each movie was divided into several segments. The objective of the lesson was to learn to extract information from a different media than a text book. In addition to learn about and work  with different media information, students also were working with different note taking methods.

Students were equipped with a paper, pencil and a clipboard, while watching the first segment, introducing the different communities and explaining general differences, . We started watching the video until a student yelled out “Atzor” (Stop in Hebrew), then summarized what they had heard and everybody wrote it on their notepaper. We had a notebook paper up on the big screen too to help with spelling. Students then called out “Lech” (Go in Hebrew) when everyone was done to continue to video. Notes were full sentences.

The second video clip was about life in the cities. Students, again, stopped the movie when they felt important information was being communicated. We then took a screenshot (with Skitch) and dragged it into a SmartBoard Notebook. The class made sure, by forwarding or rewinding the video,  to find just the right image / screenshot that was representative and was going to help them remember the information.

We watched and listened to the third video clip and extracted keywords to help us learn about suburbs.

The next step will be to continue watching the Rural segments of the video, taking notes and then compare and contrast all three communities in a Venn Diagram by moving the images or text in the appropriate areas according if they belong in one or more categories or not.

So, what is that digital footprint everyone keeps talking about? Wikipedia defines the term:

Digital footprints are traces left by someone’s activity in a digital environment. There are two main classifications for digital footprints: passive and active. A passive digital footprint is created when data is collected about an action without any client activation, whereas active digital footprints are created when personal data is released deliberately by a user for the purpose of sharing information about oneself.In social media, “digital footprint” can refer to the size of one’s online presence as it relates to the number of individuals he or she is interacting with.

In short your digital footprint is your online data trail.

All of us, like it or not, are creating these trails. You might not be actively doing it, but as more and more information is being digitized and easily searchable, there is all kinds of information ABOUT YOU to be found online.

Will Richardson wrote an article titled ” Footprints in the Digital Age“  in Educational Leadership:

As the geeky father of a 9-year-old son and an 11-year-old daughter, one of my worst fears as they grow older is that they won’t be Googled well. Not that they won’t be able to use Google well, mind you, but that when a certain someone (read: admissions officer, employer, potential mate) enters “Tess Richardson” into the search line of the browser, what comes up will be less than impressive. That a quick surf through the top five hits will fail to astound with examples of her creativity, collaborative skills, and change-the-world work. Or, even worse, that no links about her will come up at all. I mean, what might “Your search did not match any documents” imply?

Consider what Richardson is saying (and I am not talking about the aspect of having a negative and incriminating digital footprint here):

What does it mean when a potential employer, college recruiter or client googles your name and does not find anything or much?  What if a principal searches for a potential hire’s name and work and does not find anything? What does it mean NOT to have a digital footprint in these cases? Is it positive or does it shed a negative light on your portfolio/resume? What does it say about you, if you do not have a blog, a twitter account, nor other social network identities? What does it mean if you, as a teacher do not have a Digital Teacher Portfolio?

Jeff Utecht takes it even a step further than the individual teacher when he tells Schools: Take Control or Forfeit your Profile:

You need to take control of your online presence, because if you don’t…someone else will!

He says that it is the school’s responsibility to create, watch out and protect their online footprint or their students will. He calls for schools to take control of their online spaces such as Facebook and Wikipedia.

Have you googled your own name or the name of your school lately?  Are you googling it on a regular basis? For what content are you responsible for? What content was posted without your input? “Protecting” your digital footprint is becoming increasingly important as it is becoming common practice for ANYONE to google you or produce content ABOUT you.

Through the Library blog, I stumbled upon the he Pew Internet & American Life Project’s “Digital Footprints” report from 2007

Four categories of online adults based on online footprint concern:

1) “Confident Creatives are the smallest of the four groups, comprising 17% of online adults. They say they do not worry about the availability of their online data, and actively upload content, but still take steps to limit their personal information. Young adults are most likely to fall into this group.
2) The Concerned and Careful fret about the personal information available about them online and take steps to proactively limit their own online data. One in five online adults (21%) fall into this category.
3) Despite being anxious about how much information is available about them, members of the Worried by the Wayside group do not actively limit their online information. This group contains 18% of online adults.
4) The Unfazed and Inactive group is the largest of the four groups—43% of online adults fall into this category. They neither worry about their personal information nor take steps to limit the amount of information that can be found out about them online.”

Now the report is almost 2 years old. I am wondering if perception about digital footprints has changed?  Have we moved from trying to limit and prevent information about us to be published online (out of fear of privacy loss, identity theft or misrepresentation) to making sure that some trail of us, who we are and stand for can be found online?

Ask yourself the following

• In what category do you fall?Worried, confident, concerned or unfazed?
• Are you as a teacher thinking about, developing, building, monitoring, and protecting YOUR digital footprint?
• Are you thinking about your footprint when  (or not) posting or commenting on blogs, uploading student projects, participating on twitter, nings and other social network places?
• Do you keep your personal and professional digital footprint separate?
• Are you one to “hope for” or “not wanting”  parents, principals, students and others finding a trail to and about you?
• Do you think that teachers are (will be) at a disadvantage in the future if they do not have pertinent search results when googled?

Over the years (from Elementary to High School) , I cannot tell you HOW many times each of my own daughters had to find news articles to bring in to class to share. These assignments came in all shapes and sizes. Sometimes they were required to write a summary, print out a representative image and hand both in to the teacher to receive an all important check mark each week that they had “done it”. Other times they had to stand up in class and actually read the article, maybe even answer a question or two from the teacher about it to show some kind of understanding of what the article meant.

The social studies teacher at my new school has the same assignment for her middle school students….

… BUT…

Simply cutting out or copying and pasting, then printing an article to hand in is not enough for that teacher. She wants her students to make connections. she wants them to connect dots to geography, cultures and categories and how they are interrelated to each other.

In comes Google Maps.

Each news event is added with a placemark to a Google Map. Students are categorizing the events as well as providing a short summary which are added to the placemark. We are striving to make the summary to be 140 characters or less in an effort to practice precision and focused writing.

The map provides an incredible visual and is a medium to further explore geography, information literacy and global awareness. Questions such as these arise:

• In what category do most news events we added fall?
• In what continents and countries are the news items in?
• What area of the world do we know or hear the least about? Why?
• How can we expand our horizon to cover more areas of the globe?

You can follow the map as students continue contributing and expanding it during the school year.

View News Events Around the World in a larger map

As I was writing my last blog post about “The Need for Storytelling Skills“, the connection to the problem of Information Overload surfaced.

Wikipedia attributed the term “Information Overload” to Alvin Toffler:

which refers to an excess amount of information being provided, making processing and absorbing tasks very difficult for the individual because sometimes we cannot see the validity behind the information

I remember…in the beginning… of the Internet and World Wide Web.

As a freelance “private computer tutor”,  I used to go to people’s houses and helped them set up their first family PC, introduced them to Word Processing, set up Quicken for their personal finances  and helped them select from the first “edutainment” programs for their children .

Many of my clients, friends and neighbors used AOL as their ISP (Internet Service Provider). What  frustrated me though was how AOL’s shell (browser) was perceived as “THE Internet” by many of them. AOL’s News, Games, Bulletin Board, Lifestyle, Homework Help, etc. sections was where many families were going to search, read and browse the Internet.

Image by verbeeldingskr8

It bothered me, because I felt that the open stream and choices of information that was available from the web, was being filtered, edited and condensed to fit AOL’s choices. What would be placed on the main site, which links would be included, etc. was not under my control. When I mentioned this concern to people, many responded that that was the way they liked it. They did not know where to find the information online and appreciated AOL’s service to make it more manageable for them. They already felt “Information Overload” back in 1995.

I do know, that I don’t want anyone to make decisions for me WHAT kind of information I should or should not be seeing. I want that to be my choice.  Since I have the choice to be able to get most information free and at lightning speed, I also have the “Qual der Wahl“, the “Agony of  Choice”, when it comes to:

• Where do I get information?
• When do I just skim over information and when do I need to be more thorough when looking at sources?
• What kind of media do I need to include to get a more well rounded pool of information?
• When do I have enough information and when do I stop looking for more information?
• Which sources do I trust for information?
• How do I evaluate sources of  and information in itself?
• How do I deal with the knowledge, that I will never ever be able to look at ALL the information out there? And be ok with that…

Chris Pirillo mentions  his solution to Information Overload at 7:25 min:

That is the future, that is the solution for me. Information overload… turning to my friends. YOU are my solution and I am very grateful that Internet exists to help me get to information. I am grateful that you exist to help me make sense of that information as it relates to me.

[...]

I have so many people that I love following that I can’t take it all in. So I rely on you to tell me what is good.

Wes Fryer , Moving at the Speed of Creativity, wrote an interesting post recently: “How are you dealing with TMI (Too Much Information) ?”

Google Reader, Diigo/Delicious, my blog and Twitter account are my best friends when it comes to filtering, accessing, sharing and collaborating with digital information today– but I’m the first to admit things ARE overwhelming and it’s easy to get overwhelmed in the sea of information.

He seems to be in agreement with Chris Pirillo that the human factor that connects us through tools to the information is what helps us deal with information overload.

While searching for information to write this post about “Information Overload” , I asked my Twitter Network, searched other blogs on Google Blog Search and my Google Reader. I looked through presentations at SlideShare, video clips on YouTube and images on Flickr.

Too much “stuff is coming up”. I could go on and on looking for more information. I am wondering:

• What backs up my train of thought?
• What brings in new perspectives?
• How does it connect to my blog post?
• Does the connection make sense?
• Is it relevant?

Image by Will Lion

Information overload is a fact of life today.

Are you looking to machines and program tools to help you, find,  filter and organize all of it or are you relying more and more on humans to help you cope with all the information that is spraying like water out of a fire hydrant?

How do you deal with it? What tools do you use to minimize it? What about the human factor? What are your thoughts?

Technorati Tags: Information

Daniel Pink in “A Whole New Mind” describes how the need for storytelling skills in the information age has increased.

As information and

facts are  ubiquitous, nearly free and available at the speed of light [...] What begins to matter more is the ability to place these facts in context and to deliver them with emotional impact.

Jason Ohler, in his book “Digital Storytelling in the Classroom“, talks about how stories

help us remember important information that might be forgotten if it’s delivered to us in the form of reports, lectures, or isolated bits of information.

Ohler sees storytelling as an information organizer.

we desperately need tools to navigate and coordinate the immense amount of information available to us.

Pink and Ohler are not the only ones putting information abundance and storytelling together.

Bernajean Porter in her book Digitales- The Art of Telling Digital Stories writes:

Artificial intelligence research is showing that the more people are buried in the mind-numbing avalanche of today’s information, the greater the importance of stories in making sense of the endless pieces of data. While storytelling does not replace analytical thinking, good stories do provide an essential process for conveying information in an easily absorbed form.
There is increasing urgency to develop communication skills that translate raw information into valuable knowledge for ourselves as well as others. Discovering the personal meanings of topics or events helps us create memory, meaning and understanding of the data and complexity in our lives.

ISTE SIG group for Digital Storytelling.

The more people are buried in the mind-numbing avalanche of today’s information, the greater the importance of stories in making sense of the endless pieces of data. It is the act of telling our personal story – of creating an emotional connection to information and experiences – sharing in story form what we know and understand from an event or topic that provides a “sense-making” process enabling our brains to organize a myriad of factoids.

Image by Will Lion

If we look at the above image that visualizes a quote from Mitchell Kapor:

Getting information off the Internet is like taking a drink from a fire hydrant.

It is easy to understand that we need to find a tool that allows us to channel the water, a tool that prevents us to waste all that precious water that is being squandered and not to be blown away by the pressure.

What if the skill of storytelling  can be the tool that helps us organize, remember and connect facts from the ocean of information that is coming out of that fire hydrant?

1. There is more INFORMATION out there than ever before in human history. We (and our students) need to learn how to find, evaluate and make sense out of all this information that we are bombarded with through many types of different media.
2. WHAT HAPPENS when we have obtained this/these  information/facts? What do we do with it? How will we remember? How will we archive for future retrieval?
   It is precisely THAT ability (organize/connect/remix/create) that we need to foster in ourselves and our students . The ability to put these facts in context. The amount of facts alone (without context)  just overwhelms us.
3. Storytelling (putting information in a narrative context) might be the answer to our need to make sense of this vast information that is available to us anytime, anywhere and anyhow.

A few days ago, I read a tweet with a link to the following video clip from  Rachel Maddow’s The Revolution will be Digitized. If I remember correctly, the original sender’s intention was for the clip to be shown to any reluctant educator who insists that there is no need for change in what and how we teach information literacy in schools.

My thoughts are not addressing or analyzing the political revolution that is taking place in Iran, but is trying to look at it from the perspective of what it means in terms of the (r) evolution process of receiving/obtaining/searching/ distributing/manipulating/ monopolizing/ censoring information.

The US State Department asked Twitter to delay taking their service off line for a scheduled maintenance, recognizing that it is a vital service to Iranians AND the world to find out WHAT is going on.

Iran would loose one of the important ways they have to communicate with each other and the outside world about what is going on in their country right now.

Traditional media, such as television and newspapers are restricted in what they are allowed to air or publish. Rachel Maddow says:

[...] Iranian government media restrictiosn mean that this revolution might not be televised, but it is definitely tweeted, blogged, youtubed and flickered. These sources, these means of posting citizen journalism online are collectively the most comprehensive, up to the minute way of following this huge news story.

[...] As traditional journalists are confined to their offices, prevented from filming on the streets and are blocked from the protests, what we are able to get to supplement their reporting is raw material, essentially from the participants in this uprising. We are 6000 miles away from where I sit right now, but we have never been closer.

My thoughts are coming together, as I am trying to wrap my brain around what all this means.Without citizens participating in social media such as twitter, youtube, blogs and flickr (the ones that Rachel mentions in the video clip), we (the international public) would be

• restricted to bias information from governments through censorship
• confined by traditional media to what they seem “newsworthy”
• completely left out of receiving information  when traditional media is not “allowed” to cover

What does this mean to the traditional way (television and newspaper (paper AND online) most people in the world (still) rely on as their primary means of receiving information? What does it mean, when we can’t rely on these traditional media anymore to receive the information we are looking for?

What if we will rely more and more on social media as the up to date, most authentic and reliable source of information?

What happens to the people who don’t know how to search, view, read, evaluate, connect and contribute to/with/from/for that kind of information? What if these people will be left out of “What is going on in the world, in their own country, in their own city and neighborhoods”?

Will they still be considered to be literate in today’s world?

Business Week’s article Iran’s Twitter Revolution? Maybe not yet cautions to attribute too much to Twitter’s role in the Iranian’s revolution.

Some Iranian election protesters used Twitter to get people on the streets, but most of the organizing happened the old-fashioned way

but admits that Twitter played a crucial role in raising INTERNATIONAL AWARENESS

… the main reason to use the tools is the attention it generates in the international media. Indeed, one of Twitter’s primary contributions in the Iranian elections has been to raise awareness of the issue among tech-savvy users outside the country.

Here are some twitter thoughts about what “The revolution will be digitized” could mean: