Landing : Athabascau University

Reflections on Cathy Anderson's Way-Making Activities

I am intrigued by the narratives of others as they explain their own personal learning networks. The act of identifying one's own learning spaces reminds me of Mezirow's description of the process of educational biography. I will defintiely be following up more on Mezirow's work in Fostering Critical Reflection in Adulthood (1990), and apply his ideas to the development of instructional strategies using edublogging. As a follow-up to a description of my way-making routines, I recently found a blog post written by Cathy Anderson describing her own PLN (Personal Learning Network). I found her link through the CCK Daily email newsletter sent to those signed up for the Connectivism course. I found her edublog because she is taking the Connectivism 2009 course.I am especially interested in her narratives on the use of Twitter, and her use of the LiveScribe pen, in some ways superior to the use of the FlyPen I was describing in my post on field blogging. I have only begun to use Twitter, so I am definitely interested in reviewing the Twine and Evernote technologies.I have been attempting to play around with Digg, and am a bit frustrated with how it does not lend itself well to my own note-taking style. I guess my preference for the use of gadgets and hands-on devices precludes the use of this type of online tool, at least for now. I may look about for a more extensive tutorial on digg when time permits.I am reluctant so far to use Google Docs - I think that sharing documents have been limited to attaching them to emails, or uploading them to posterous.com, or uploading to a shared drive or folder within a closed intranet. In my experience, content that is specific to an organization should stay within the virtual spaces of that organization. Time will tell for me on whether I will adopt file-sharing apps from web 2.0 tools.