I have known about podcasting for about 2 years or so. An ex boyfriend turned me over to them. I at first thought it was some weird MAC thing he was into. No clue till we started listening to podcasts from NPR and WNYC’s Radio Lab. I fell in love!!! How cool is it that you can access this for FREE with literally no real effort. I for one like listening to other peoples views and learning about what other people may not talk about much. It’s better than a radio for me. I often don’t get signal and often miss the timings. For me it’s easy to just type in an address and find the subject or channel I want to tune in to.

One web site compared it to a TiVo. I never really looked at it but it makes sense. Which brings me to my next point. Seeing as how I never really payed attention to RSS Feeds before this class, I never thought to get a feed for podcasts. WHAT?! That blows my mind. I only wish I could find the USB to my iPod now. It somehow got lost along with the ear plugs. Both which I believe are stuck at my ex’s house so I have lost hope in retrieving them!! Ha.

Moving on, I love the thought of learning of what I want, when I want, where I want. I can basically take the podcasts with me wherever I want and use them in which ever way I choose. The more recent upgrades are vodcasts and screencasts. Both of which I had never heard of. Vodcasting makes a lot of sense to me. Reminds me of You Tube. Plenty of people do it, just hasn’t gotten around as fast I imagine. Or at least from what I see it hasn’t. I for one don’t have a decent enough webcam to record such casts for that matter. I did learn a new word though. Podcatcher is another word for aggregator… its the same thing only its  more specific to podcasts. Tah-dah.

Screencasting is the newer but simpler concepts. It’s not new and it reminds me of a “how to” idea. A screen showing what the narration is saying. Basically it just shows what it says in its name. I’m sure there are more ideas for it, although none of which I found to be useful or even interesting. I think its pretty simple. Nothing more to add to that for now. I guess I need to explore it more.

I have more than 3 resources this time:

O’Reilly – Screencasting

Podcasting Tools – Podcasting

About.com – Podcasting

DWWorld – VodCasting

Film Making – VodCasting

So most people Trap Information everyday. I guess it DOES have a technical name. I have tons of subscriptions to things. I also have like 4 different email address that get different feeds depending on their matter of importance. I have to say the most useful Information Trapping tool I use is the RSS Feed on my iGoogle page. I never used it much before but I like how I can instantly see the updates come up. I can’t say subscriptions are my favorite. A lot of sites tend to tie extra offers in with these subscriptions and I find them quite annoying.

I have mostly found information trapping to be useful when looking for a job. I get my daily alerts from Monster and Careerbuilder. I customize them to come only a few days a week. The only other time I actually keep up with all of my updates is when I have a specific project due, or when I’m looking for a good place to go to for nightlife. We all do it in some form. I think the best way to utilize it, would be to use as many resources to do it with and stick to the one that better suits your needs. In the end Information Trapping does affect me, but not as much as I would think it could in the future.

Future Public Publishing – Information Trapping

The Mendicant Bug – Information Trapping

Research Buzz – Information Trapping

Not really… in the end it went away. Just the concept of it was what kind of baffled me. I spend a lot of time on myspace and facebook… both which have a similar idea integrated. At first I wondered what anyone could possibly get out of constantly revealing every little detail of their life… then I thought about it again and realized that I do that a lot on Myspace… Its not noticeable until you really think about what you do with these updates. I tend to notice other peoples status updates and sometimes conversations do occur. You don’t really know a friend until you can make small talk of the small details. It seems so unlikely… the whole just talking about anything, but it DOES happen. I’ve learned things about friends through their updates and sometimes we find that we have similar problems or things in common. In my opinion, I would think that finding commonalities would be the benefit. It’s like getting to know someone but without actually having the conversation per say.

I can’t really say that I would be on Twitter all the time. It seems ok… its not hard to navigate but I find no real substance to it. I already have it on my page, where I already have friends, and on my facebook where I have my old friends. I don’t know if I’d even remember having it open on my screen. Which brings me to another good point. I could add it to my PLE and it’d be a different version on myspace for me. I can see myself updating my status while learning… which could very well draw attention to my online identity through Twitter…. this is how I got my headache!!! haha… it’s actually not that bad because I already went through my “AH-HA!” moment. Wasn’t that part of the experiment anyway? I just need to find everyone else on it… no biggie.

For me there is a fairly thin line with a community practices and collective intelligence. They kind of go hand in hand. Sort of a cause and effect situation. The Intelligence you gather from your community of practice is basically what this blog is about. I’m trying to not sound like a broken record. Collective intelligence is people coming together to network their knowledge. Sort of like compounding a database for a particular purpose. A lot of what we know in this world is from experience or troubleshooting. Writing books about it nowadays isn’t nearly as effective and coming together, more than likely online, and putting it all together as one. Wikipedia brings a good point up about copyrighting. This sharing is so broad that it would be hard to copyright but people do have opposing views as to whether it should be done for protection. The Wiki site wasn’t as concentrated as I would have wanted it to be, but it did highlight some good points. There are groups that see Collective Intelligence as participation in the theft of ideas or individualism. I can see how that would be seen as a problem but it really isn’t what’s going on. Sure everything is in the same place but no one else is recognizing it as their own. You can’t be negative to greedy when it comes to intelligence. Wouldn’t make sense to be selfish and just be a know it all anyway. The idea is simple but not new. MIT has compared it to the time when we had a hunting and gathering society. Back then you couldn’t read a book or look it up. It was an experience or experiment with a new technique that was shared and made known or popular. Word of mouth was the distributor. In today’s era, we type it out, but all in all the process is shared even today.

Social Text – Collective Intelligence

MIT – Collective Intelligence

Blogging has now broadened our sources for help. Communities of practice are an excellent example of how coming together, even if you’re across the country, can help solve even the most complicated of problems. The U.S. Department of Transportation is a good example. They have dedicated a page to how a Community of Practice is helping in their effort to make roads safer and put the word out for their mission. A community of practice basically concentrates the knowledgeable to problem solve. The possibilities of a community are endless. It can be engineers coming together to solve a specific problem. It could be that one last organization that has a mission and wants to spread the word of what they are encountering. I often use the internet to fix problems. Sometimes that “Help” tab just doesn’t really help me at all. If you word your search right you can most of the time find the right group to help you. If you start your own theres usually some kind of response. The good thing about the net now is that search engines can easily network you to the world. I have solved many printer and computer problems this way. The important thing about a community of practice is that the people involved should be practicing. That’s the difference between some kind of web log and an actual community. They have to share that mission and add what they can to the effort. Commonalities in communities are people asking questions, seeking answers, sharing sources and actual discussion of the subject at hand. How many communities are you in?

Learning Theories

Wenger