Learning with the Fang

Yesterday I tried to ‘tune in’ to the Howard Rheingold event that education.au put on in Melbourne, while working from home in Adelaide. It was a really interesting (and rewarding) experience. From what I can gather, there were issues with internet connectivity from the venue - so instead of a steady stream of blog posts, flickr photos etc, there was just a trickle. But the small amount of info that came through on the day of the event led me to some really interesting connections.

First ‘live’ blog post award goes to Garry Putland - his post about the ’shifting of authority’ was thought provoking and closely linked to one of the main themes from Michael Coghlan’s great little reflective podcast on his encounter with Howard late last week. In fact, left a comment on Garry’s blog post with a quote from Michael -

‘The locus of responsibility for verifying facts has shifted from the author to the reader’

Even though I knew several people who were at the event, the only online contact was via Laurel (aka SilkCharm) - mostly via FaceBook (which she accessed via the mobile phone client) and SMS txt messages (again via FaceBook). She did manage to fire of one twitter post that gave me the clue that I might not see much live blogging from the event:

SilkCharm Dissapointed that wi fi access is intermittent 3 minutes ago from web

I wonder if Garry was one of the few people who did not have to rely on the venue wifi for internet access???

The upside of having much less information than I had expected was that I could hunt around and savour the things I did find. So, armed with my trusty yahoo pipe and some hacking of search terms, I discovered this excellent podcast of an interview with Howard by my mate Cam on Gday world back in 2005!! While listening to that I started digging around the flickr photos tagged with ‘eduausem2007′ and found some really bizzare connections.

The first was this sensationaly grim shot by alex hayes:

That had been commented on by the aforementioned Michael Coghlan.

The second was a shot by ‘Samela’ and had been commented on by an education.au staff member.

What is interesting here is not so much the rather nice snap of Howard, but the caption on the next photo from ‘Samela’ -

Flickr’s own George Oates visiting The Advertiser in Adelaide (her home town).

That really sparked my interest on two fronts - what connection does George from flickr have with Adelaide? and, could this be Samela Harris from our local newspaper - the Advertiser?? I am sure that by the time I have the answers to those questions, I will be practicing what Howard preaches and enjoying the rewards of this wonderfully connected world via my information literacy skills.

Fang - Mike Seyfang

technorati tags:seyfang, mikeseyfang

technorati tags:eduausem2007, howardrheingold, moblog