Wednesday 16 July 2014

How the Web Tamed Me!

http://okofrancisco.deviantart.com/art/Information-Overload-293890815
I have been thinking of late i need to get myself organised. I am about to undertake the completion of my Masters studies, and really i should have some sort of orderly system of bookmarking & filing that will ease my way as i foray further into the information superhighway. Well after 17 years of learning & teaching online you would think i would get that right by now but it only get worse and now i am going to throw my hands up in defeat - instead of taming the web - it has tamed me!

What NZ teachers remember Mark Treadwell's Teachers@Work resources? Every month a resource update of teaching websites, cataloged by age group & curriculum area would be posted (talking snail mail) to subscribing schools, put into large arch binder folders and be available to teachers in the staffroom or the workroom to use while you access one of the few computers in the school. At this time all the files I had ever created, including my backed up emails would fit on a few floppy disks. Yes life was simpler then... BTW Mark still creates & shares resources for teachers  though this is legacy work compared to the successful educational consultancy Mark has grown since this time.

I was a religious Delicious bookmarks user, curated & shared with my PLN,  then moved to Diigo with the added features of annotations & screenshots, with Google chrome syncing across all my devices, i then went back to old fashioned browser bookmarking, and have been tempted of late by slick looking drag & drop bookmark & curation tool Dragdis.

To be honest i very rarely even go back through my bookmarks so what is the point in so much angst about having my digital house in order. There just isn't enough time in the day to find, catalogue, curate or share this overwhelming amount of material I have saved over time. If i am serious about needing something relevant, current and at my finger tips I will search for it every time. 

So therefore i have decided to let it go with the 'Just in Case' curation of the internet and focus on the 'Just in Time' search when i need it - the good stuff will always come to the top as long as we all keep hitting the share buttons - tweet, G+, like. Now that is achievable!

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