Tuesday 4 October 2011

Random fragments, on to the Collective

So much for feeling virtuous cuz I got a head start on the change newsletter and website postings. I was reading Martin Weller's open copy text before I received any scrapings from other bloggers in the course or the weekly newsletter. But I got sidetracked as to which webchannel I wanted to communicate on.
I'm currently irritated like hell with GoogleDocs. I've been a user (and an enthusiastic one) for years but they seem to have changed the way the Docs save and I'm finding it makes them useless for me when I'm building Notes pages. I'm a fast typist and when I'm trying to capture ideas from a number of web sources I tend to pop in and out quickly and add chunks of text and my comments as I go. However, the constant saving interrupts me when I'm typing and doesn't save the word I've been keyboarding, instead it is lost so when I look back there are holes in my narrative. Until I figure out a different web-based tool I've gone back to my trusted Tiddlywiki which works in my browser and I can access anywhere from my Dropbox.
I also found I didn't have time to do a thoughtful blog post last week so I relied on microblogging - my Twitter voice #Northerntweeter. (a little backchannel thought: I looked at some of my blogs and I found that there is a clear demarcation from when I started tweeting - seems it sucks me away from doing really thoughtful postings about issues - instead I send bursts of 140 chars or less - what does that say about my ability to think deeply about anything anymore???)
But I'm curious about this weeks topic and why I should change my thinking about crowdsourcing to calling it collective learning. I have some deep-seated discomfort with terms like "collective knowledge or learning"; similar to my response to "friends" and "like" in Facebook.
So I'll see how it looks if I use this blog and a couple of other channels and resist tweeting for this week. Curious to see whether I feel like I've really "thought" about the subject by the end of the week. Hmmmmm.

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