Reeling....

9/27/2005 11:31:00 pm

In August Will Richardson posted this, the first three paragraphs of which are reproduced below:

English teacher Tom McHale sets down his cup of coffee and boots up the computer at his classroom desk. It's 6:50 a.m., and he's got about 45 minutes before his sleepy Journalism students will begin filing into his classroom.

He logs in and opens up his personal Weblog on the school intranet. There, he does a quick scan of the New York Times headlines that are displayed on his homepage and clicks on one of the links to read a story about war reporting that he thinks his student journalists might be interested in. With a quick click, Tom uses the "Post to Scuttle" button on his toolbar, adds a bit of annotation to the form that comes up, and adds it to his journalism tagset at the ScuttleEDU intall on his school server. With this one step, he archives the page for future reference and automatically sends the link and his note to display on his journalism class portal for students to read when they log in.

Next, he clicks the link to open his Bloglines aggregator and he scans a compiled list of summaries that link to all the work his students submitted to their Weblogs the night before. Seeing one particularly well done response, he clicks through to the student's personal site and leaves a positive comment about her submission. (He notices that a couple of his students have already left some positive feedback to the author as well.) He also "Scuttles" that site, adding it to his "Best Practices" tagset which will send it to the class homepage as well for students to read and discuss, and to a separate Weblog page he has created to keep track of all of the best examples of student work. It's 7:00.

Ten minutes. Think about that. Then go read the rest of what Will wrote. It's a powerful vision of the future.

Using RSS and the latest AJAX technologies we can personalize and manage vast amounts of content incredibly efficiently.

I've recently started subscribing to blogs and news feeds from Australia. I love what the Australians do. One of my favourite math resources, SMARD (Secondary Mathematics Assessment and Resource Database), comes out of Australia and so does Leigh Blackall, whose blog I've been following with interest -- I almost always learn something from Leigh. Tonight someone from nearby New Zealand hit this blog and I followed the link back to Netvibes. My head is still reeling from that discovery .... "The future is here," and it can be evenly distributed!

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