Sue Waters

Mmmm most people when their friend comes over to visit gets to ….???? Not sure any more. I know one of my other friends had a friend up for the weekend and they went shopping. Sounds nice? My friend, Evil Sue, comes over, brings her PC (not Laptop) and settles into my work space for a night of …..? (watching TV shows on her computer with her headset on). Now I may be into technology but there is no way I would visit a friend with my computer (I love it too much) although she is telling me she does this all the time because she is a gamer!!

Oh well – this is a good opportunity to catch up on some reading!

So back I go to read through more of Sean O’Driscoll’s Community Group Therapy and follow the excellent links he provided. Which was good because I now know that sex is on the decline (the line labeled Adult on this graph reflects visits to online pornography sites) . But look at social networking – and how rapidly it is rising.

From this link I went to hitwise and grabbed some more great Internet statistics which provides a great picture of current trends (the table is at the bottom of this post). Which makes you reflect while reading Web 2.0 Takes On Colleges And Universities: The Dawn Of Education 2.0 (Gabriela I have sent this link to you through del.icio.us check out your link for you box – thought I would save you some time). What a thought provoking article! There is way too much great information to do it justice to discuss it properly here however here are some points that engaged me:

1. Generations weaned on television may have been happy to sit back and passively consume information fed to them from above, but those days are over
2. The social networking site of choice for most students is Facebook.com, which describes itself as a social utility that helps people better understand the world around them.
3. Net Generation students arrive at their universities as experienced multitaskers, accustomed to using text messaging, telephones, and e-mail while searching the Internet and watching television. They are ready for multimedia learning to be delivered on a flexible learning schedule, one that is not tied to a set time and place.
4. The new generation of learners:

• Can network with contacts through sites like MySpace, broadcast their presence to the world with Twitter, and create and remix media with YouTube and Jumpcut, it’s unlikely that they are going to be content to sit through a three-hour lecture delivered in the one-way, top-down tradition of old modalities.
• Demand to be engaged, active and part of a collaborative knowledge building community.

While I was reading through the rest of the links Sean supplied I came across the social software honeycomb diagram which is discussed in detail at Social Software Building Blocks.

To finish off the night I watched Sean’s interview about Community by Jonny Chambers for Solshare.net. Considering it is 11.41 pm, and I am listening to this interview, and Evil Sue is having fun gaming, I consider this true dedication but I was very keen to listen to Sean’s talking about tag-drafting. Actually it was absolute dedication because it is a video podcast which is 40 minutes long, that I had to first download through Windows Media Player before I could even watch (mmmm….. sorry Sean I liked listening to your video but…..being an (ok) podcaster…mmm… I would personally break it into chunks…).