Task 4, or, Wow--I'm really into this now.

After hearing Alan November at yesterday's faculty meeting and returning to the Pi2.0 work, I feel energized. I've now made the leap...I get it. The internet itself, the mechanics of it all, has always been overwhelming to me. But with the right teacher(!), it seems far more manageable. The best teacher appears to be Lee at Common Craft. He breaks it down, idiotproofs it all. I didn't have to spend hours reading, scrolling really, through all the instructional information. I can always go back to get more detail, but I'm no longer stymied by too much information.

Thanks to Alan, I'm now on Twitter. I've not figured out how it will be useful to me in teaching or in my life, especially since I cannot get it on my mobile. And, I've already had to block some random person (Susan, a self-described shaman) from following me. Still, I am now following Scott Simon, which is pretty fun.

I now see how addictive all this information gathering can be. I think I'll have to set some of the same limits on my own screen time as I set on my children's video gaming over the years, as I could "waste up some time" on this. This, it seems to me, is really the key. Are we actually more productive? Are we doing things faster and better? Are we adding value to our teaching or complicating it? Or are we merely wading through the equivalent of everyone's mail and the Library of Congress without any guides? I'm in a search now for on-line "librarians" who have vetted material, or for better ways to search.

Speaking of better ways to search, just learning about site: countrycode or edu etc. was revolutionary for me.

As for the task at hand: I've started the Google Reader and read through one of the required three subscription sites, where I found an interesting article. The author posted sites that have original source media content. Although I don't see myself using these sites at the moment, I was happy to see someone interested in finding original sources and writing about fair use.