TED: Ideas woth spreading to your students

One of the reason's why I started on this digital history adventure just over three years ago was that I was going to graduate from University. I wasn't worried about the work place or what the future held - that actually excited me and I was hopeful of trying new things. But what I was worried about was loosing touch with a larger academic community. I felt that through technology I could still continue to learn - learn about history, about technology, and about just great ideas that still made my brain jump the way it did in University.

Fortunately the number size of the online idea community is continuing to grow, and one that is readily available to your students. We talk often about issues of civics and engagement, making sure that students are informed about what is happening in the world. Surely a great endeavor that is of the utmost importance. But at some point students also need to learn about more that what is on the six o'clock news or in the local paper - we have to have some connection to a wider current of ideas and thoughts.

Which brings me back to TED: Technology, Entertainment, Design. I love hearing interesting and smart people talk about things they find interesting and are passionate about. Anytime you can hear or spend time with a passionate person, you will grow yourself. In life we often have too few opportunities to share in this community.

TED let's you meet interesting and passionate people everyday. They inspire people in a wide variety of fields but share common threads that somehow relate back to each of us. Never in history have we had such opportunities - through TED and other projects - to learn and share in the wisdom of others. They do it because it matters to them and they are passionate about their work.

Every classroom should take a few moments out for a TED talk now and then. And of course they have a school program as well - so start finding the special lights in your community.

Popular Relevance

As part of an Introduction to Learning Technologies course at the University of Manitoba I've been exploring the program Digg. We drew our projects from We Are Media, a website designed to help non-profit organizations better use new media in their endeavours.

Digg is a social bookmarking tool that you may have noticed before on many news or information websites. The tool allows you to "digg" content that you are in to (if that's what you're into). Content that is most popular, in theory, rises to the top and shares information with a larger audience, focusing in on the best and most interesting stories.

There are some great advantages to Digg that make it very accessible. The program allows to you install a toolbar and follow sites live as you visit them, seeing who and how many people are interested in a website.

But for educational purposes, and arguably for any purposes online, Digg provides more of a popular than relevant story. Content is largely pulled from mainstream media websites with stories "Dugg" by a core group of supporters.

Creating communites of practice and learning communities doesn't require mass participation. I trust the websites and blogs of my colegues to post material that I'm interested in and that is relevant. I don't really expect it to be popular with a wide audience. If I wanted that I would have stayed with traditional media sources - they are surprisingly good at covering all things popular.

The other thing is that Digg let's you build a community of "Friends." But this suggests that I only learn from my friends. I often times learn from complete strangers. It's the thousands of people circling the globe, people I never would have met before, that are often working on and considering simliar thoughts and issues.

For now I'm sticking with Del.ico.us, in fact I think I'm even going to start tagging even more.

Charter of Rights and Freedoms via Wordle

A couple of months ago I posted about a program called Wordle which allows you to create "word clouds" from a body of text or a blog. I had a couple of ideas but hadn't really thought that much more about it.

I was just listening to Eric Langhorst's podcast over at Speaking of History and he instantly got me interested in it again. Teaching about American government, he ran the US constitution through Wordle and created a great starting point for a class discussion. It's fun and engaging and immediately provides a windown into the focus of the document.

So of course I reached for our Canadian equivalent and ran the Charter of Rights and Freedoms through Wordle and got the following result:

Click on the link and try putting your own historical documents into Wordle - let's see what other results we can come up with.