I think it would be interesting and positive if students and teachers were able to use a range of tools rather like the Martin Weller PLE

Which looks something like a toolbox, in each of the categories there are competing software offers and there’s obviously room for a trivial discussion about the relative merits of different sites for blogging, sharing etc. My own mindmap is available in interactive form here.

Bringing the idea into formal education, in my opinion, requires addressing some more questions, I think these three are really aspects of the same conflict between the personal and the social:

1) make a distinction between interacting with materials and communicating with peers. In H800 I began by keeping my planning and reading notes in a publicly accessible website, and also writing blog posts that were more similar to personal notes, probably quite impenetrable to the casual reader. The idea of the PLE doesn’t suggest the distinction which I now think is key between note-taking and finished commentaries ready for sharing.

2) the defence of literacy which Brabazon seems to be calling for here (from week 17 of the course). Weller notes that the tools don’t require much training in technical terms – their interfaces are all quite similar, so they probably seem “intuitive” to people who have spent enough time with a web browser. However, that doesn’t mean that it’s easy to produce a good didactic slideshow, podcast or contribution to a forum. There needs to be a lot more training for students and teachers in these new genres. Perhaps more so when using public tools where the main examples of their use are uncritical, simple-minded or downright offensive in tone.

3) support the process as well as production. Time is a big factor in my environment – which makes tools for planning important. A second process point, which seems to be lacking in Weller’s picture, is the process of drafting and improving texts before publishing them, a necessary stage which is somewhat lacking in the culture of web 2.0 as Lanier’s analogy with the unstructured primordial soup indicates.