Email alerts are an important part of my personal learning network (PLN).
I set aside an hour each morning to work through feeds from the Northern Hemisphere from the previous day’s activity.
I start with the daily Cowbird story. Today it was Thanks! But Keep the Smokes.
I followed up with some links shared by Anne Weaver from the Diigo Teacher-Librarians’ Group. Anne linked to a a helpful post about personal learning networks. The post includes a link to a Comprehensive Guide to to the Use of Personal Learning Networks in Education and to Shelly Terrell’s PLN resource suggestions.
By coincidence, one of my alerts this morning was about the launch of Pathbrite’s Portfolios for Education . Another alert was from Mightybell‘s 2013 developments. After reading Richard Byrne’s post about Blubbr I will be keen to investigate how I might use interactive quizzes in my teaching.
From Paper.Li today, I found Natalie’s post on Technology, HE and spoon-feeding students prompted by Alison Seaman’s post. She asks “Does the way that we generally use technology in higher education tend to support spoon-feeding and traditional sage on the stage approaches to teaching and learning rather than helping students to develop digital and web literacies to support more self-directed learning and skills for lifelong learning?” … and discusses her approach.
A post that took up most of my reading time today was from The New Yorker. In a very detailed article, Adam Green writes about Apollo Robbins, a theatrical pickpocket. I think this is a great addition to the discussion of skill acquisition as well as being an absorbing read. I liked this paragraph:
In pursuit of his craft, Robbins has ended up incorporating principles from such disparate fields as aikido, sales, and Latin ballroom dancing. He is a devotee of books like Robert B. Cialdini’s “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion,” and has also immersed himself in the literature of criminal lore. The book that made the greatest impression on him was a paperback, published in 1964, called “Whiz Mob: A Correlation of the Technical Argot of Pickpockets with Their Behavior Patterns,” by David W. Maurer, a professor of English who devoted his life to the study of raffish subcultures …
This morning I am still recovering from the New York Times’ Snow Fall experience. I am even more enchanted after reading Brook Ellingwood’s look at the creation of the Snow Fall story. I have some other posts to read about Snow fall today: Katherine Schulten, and this memo from Jill Abramson.
Photo Credit
CT231 Wordle (Catherine Cronin, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)