Open Ed Conference

I'm not part of the Facebook generation.  My niece is, though, and I've even started to hear cool stories about people meeting significant others and reconnecting with old friends, etc.  My daughter would spend hours on YouTube if I didn't make her put it down and do something else.  She even posted a cheesy video that actually got tons of hits.  One man said his wife had laughed for the first time since the death of her father.  I was floored.  Today in Relief Society the RS president , who has to be in her sixties at least, said she had tried to bring a posting from YouTube to use in her lesson, which just goes to show that it really is for everyone.  My students use Wikipedia, although I doubt they've ever posted anything on a wiki.

 

Browsing through the topics from the OpenEd conference, I chose a presentation on what Web 2.0 can teach the Open Ed movement.  I actually found it kind of frustrating to try to figure out what they might have said while looking at the slides I was looking at.  It did make me wish I could have been there in person.  I had thought I would be able to watch videos or something like that.  But it doesn't really matter, and I already know that these new technologies are having an impact on education.  I think that the implications are enormous not just for open ed, but also for the standard classroom.  I've even been thinking about doing some aspect of this topic for my research paper.  As a writing teacher, there's got to be some value there for encouraging literacy and enthusiasm for writing in my students, and also for generating discourse.