This morning I’m giving a presentation at the local Academic Computing Conference entitled “From Twitter to Wikis: Why Your Students Should Care about the New Web Tools.”
There are basically 3 parts to the presentation:
- First, I argue that too many people–not really tech people, but the sort of person who believes labels like “millenials” are meaningful–conflate things like Facebook/MySpace with genuinely new tools for managing information. Claiming that today’s students take naturally to social software, and pointing to MySpace and FaceBook as your examples, is equivalent to claiming that their crystal meth addiction prepares their palate to enjoy fine Bordeaux.
- Then, demos: del.icio.us, the Victorian timeline (which you can see in action here), wikified class notes, twitter
- Finally, two students have volunteered to be a part of this. (One of ’em is Alex, who did this presentation on a Twitter+Facebook poetry mashup yesterday as part of Undergraduate Research and Creative Achievement Day. The other is a student who wasn’t familiar with any of these things before my various classes, but who has become a big convert to del.icio.us and to TAPoR.)