Readers of News on the Web: Not Short on Attention

Here is one for you brought to attention by my friends at U-Tech Tips! :

“Web news readers have greater attention span: study says”

You have to laugh! Don’t you?

I did a workshop last week with rousing crowd of four parents on how to use a new aggregator to collect, and read news from the choice stories available on the web. In each of the three sessions one of the attendees asked me “how much time do you spend reading blogs and news each day. I am very busy and don’t probably have the time that you do.”

Common sense would tell you that a principal of two schools with over 700 students, a father, husband and soon-to-be deputy superintendent is a pretty busy guy. “Spare time” is a commodity that I exploit to its fullest because I have so little of it. Thus , you can figure out the reason why I don’t have too many recent entries on this blog! Without a news aggregator and me continuing to collect feeds from news sources, blogs and professional journals, I would be hopelessly lost on current events, professional news and what my colleagues are doing out there in the “real” world. I would guess that the only real time I would get to “read” would be on my morning jaunts to the john!

As it is the RSS feeds that I have keep me informed and I can read them on the fly as I wait for meetings to start, when I am BORED in meetings when people are talking about things that do not apply to me, and when I am sitting in my cozy chair at home in the evenings enjoying a glass of wine or tea and winding down. My “newspaper” is my laptop and I can keep up with the world using the sources I want when I want them.

The great news for me is that in this study, I am purportedly reading more content that those poor folks stuck to traditional news sources. Granted, I still miss that 7 pound paper on my lap on a Sunday morning, but that is just the way it goes. My lap top is always available and doesn’t get damp and drippy on the front door step unless I really lose my cool and put it out there after an annoying email!

Technorati Tags: Attention Spans, aggregators, RSS Feeds, redefining literacy

Web Compliment Day!

David Warlick called my attention to Jennifer Wagner's idea for Web Compliment Day, the antithesis of No Cyberbullying day! My compliments to fellow blogger Jennifer at The Technospud.

She writes: If last Friday, March 30th, was Stop Cyberbullying Day, then I would like to make THIS FRIDAY — April 6th – CYBER COMPLIMENT DAY!!

She is working on a good idea that I am trying to spread here as well. It is tough being on the other side of the world and being a day late, but it is the thought that counts.

So....here are my compliments!

I would first like to compliment my good friend, teacher, colleague and go to man Jeff Utecht. The man at The Thinking Stick and U-Tech’s tips keeps me thinking, rolling with new ideas and amazed at the power one Mariner’s fan can possibly have in any given day. He recently spent a great amount of time figuring out how to get the M’s games to stream through at work, and frankly I didn’t have the heart to say….”ahhhh… dude… we’re suppose to be teaching here!”. He gets done in one day what takes mere mortals like me a month. GREAT WORK Jeff! I look forward to changing the world with you!

Thank you to Doug Johnson and the Blue Skunk Blog! Great thinking stuff which I read with enthusiasm each time. He comes up with great quotes. Doug… here is one for you:

"Try as hard as we may for perfection, the net result of our labors is an amazing variety of imperfectness. We are surprised at our own versatility in being able to fail in so many different ways." -Samuel McChord Crothers

To David Warlick who visited us here in Shanghai in February for some heavy lifting and hard work. My compliments to you on your thinking, your energy and your great thoughts around educational change. Your words continue to have an effect on our work here at SAS!

To Christian Long at Think:Lab and Beckett-to-be for keeping me mentally stimulated and celebrating fatherhood! GREAT WORK Christian! His educational manifesto idea will be one that keeps me coming back and reading it again and again. I apply the ideas in my daily work.

My compliments to Scott Mcleod and his 100 Principals/100 Blogs project and the blog Dangerously Irrelevant I am not sure where he stands with the project, but this principal now has three blogs (one for each of his schools and one for himself). I think you can do three tally marks for me thanks to your encouragement! His collaborative blog Leadertalk is one of the best blogs going!!

Technorati Tags: cybercompliment, cyberbullying, Blogging

David Warlick Visits Us on Pudong- Session 1 in the PM 2/16/2007

This afternoon, I am blogging from the live presentation from David Warlick currently being presented here on the Pudong Campus.



I dropped in a bit late, and man.... am I sorry I did!



He is now speaking about how information has changed-



In the past 10 - 15 years:



- we've added networking,

- digital media

- it is overwhelming

- flowing without containers.... information that is!



In the past 3 years:



- Conversations have been added worldwide

- Informaiton is reader controlled

- People are connecting with infromation.



CONTENT is Conversation-



Blogging is the best example of blogging 2.0. This is the most popular model of digital communications. What's special about this simple, simple technology is the way it has changed the way we communicate and view the world.



Most interesting to me is the effect that Blogging has become a great way for kids to communicate and write. Kids are begging for writing assignments and that their audience is now expanded beyond the teacher and student (with a few parents added for good measure).



Shanghai American School is really encouraging blogging for teachers and students. What a wave of enthusiasm for our kids and teachers and thanks to my friend and colleague Jeff Utecht thanks to his work with our own blog pages! Hurray, Hurray! We are building a community of learners both in our buildings and on our blogsphere at SAS!



It is common sense to see that an audience of our colleagues (and peers) brings us to be 1) VERY careful with our verbiage and 2) Very motivated to write to a high level---- current blog entry is probably immune from these two points (ha!).

David just noted that 8 million editors of Wikipedia are very powerful. One must believe that this certainly must not be for the faint of heart, but there does seem to be millions of brave folks out there!



RSS- REAL SIMPLE SYNDICATION!

I have not setup an XML or RSS feed button on this blog yet. Ok... you can click the link above, but that is not as fancy and cool. I am going to work on it today and see what I can do to damage this site more!



RSS is causing a major shift to find out information about our world. Information is finding us (if we ask) and we can train the web to do stuff that we have been doing ALL BY ourselves. The staggering thing is the tool del.icio.us which the connections of interests and other's connections and links made. We are making what David is calling "personal learning networks". This PLN will help us learn and do our jobs better! I agree with David when he says that he believes teachers should be using this to learn.



His final example www.wearenotafraid.com... when else in our life time is something like this possible. Common Sense would tell me that this will change our world and that of our children!



Thank you David!







Technorati Tags: redefining literacy, David Warlick, techfest, SAS, Shanghai American School

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