Pay attention damn it!

Have you ever been out to dinner with someone you haven't seen in ages and they spend half the evening playing around with their iphone? Annoying isn't it? I mean, am I really that uninteresting? Well...maybe, but that's not the point. The point is, its really rude and annoying and seems to be becoming more commonplace. If you were to believe Maggie Jackson, you might think that this is a sign of our society drifting in to a new dark age. She argues that sustained attention is the basis for important mental processes such as critical thinking, deep learning, reasoned civil discourse - without which society as we know it crumbles. What she hasn't counted on, however, is the teaching awesomeness that is UWA M. Teach class of 2010. That's right friends, its up to you and me to save society from itself and here's how: Internet filtering.

What is internet filtering I hear you ask. Well I'm not sure, but I think it has something to do with these RSS and folksonomies thingies we talked about in class. The idea of a folksonomy really appeals to me - I have recently set up a Delicious account and started tagging the hell out of the internet. Being a relatively messy and indecisive guy, I love the fact that it is quite unstructured, flexible and also a really quick way of organising information. One of the biggest problems with the internet for me is the fact that I end up jumping around all over the place, being bombarded with images, hyperlinks, ads, various font styles etc. with my brain being turned into a scrambled mess. Folksonomies, I think, might help get around this by keeping track of the useful bits. The other promising thing about Folksonomies is the social sharing aspect. Now I can ride the coat tails of my smarter and more diligent peers and colleagues as I poach their tag clouds for useful educational titbits.

I'm sure I'm not saying anything original when I say that folksonomies are consistent with social constructivist pedagogies. They could provide great opportunities for collaborative research activities in which students negotiate ways to organise information. As was mentioned in class, they could also generate reasoned discussion around key words. This illustrates the link between emerging and traditional literacies with successful use of folksonomies requiring some of the skills have traditionally been taught around printed text.

RSS feeds have been touted as another way of filtering the internet. This is debatable. Without really judicious and selective choosing of feeds you want sent to your page, there is still the danger of information overload. Personally I prefer the method of just turning the bloody thing off. I think one of the main benefits is the potential to save a bit of time jumping around from site to site. In terms of education, however, I can see some potental uses. For S&E or Literature lessons based around what's in the newspaper, I like the idea of being able to set up feeds that only take articles from sites I think are appropriate for developing minds.