Week 2 in Review

I’m feeling a bit overwhelmed, thank you for asking. How are you?

I have the unnerving feeling that we are running a marathon at a miler’s pace. I tried out a different strategy this week, completing all of the reading before joining the Discussion Board. As a result, I avoided the awkwardness of weighing in on a topic only to discover later that the authors have done a better job of making the same point, however I instead arrived fashionably late to a well-populated discussion in which my points had already been made (again, probably more eloquently) by my colleagues. :-(

So what did I accomplish this week?

• Completed all of the assigned reading. I enjoyed all of it, though my progress with Benkler was particularly slow and I’m not sure why.
• I read all of the Discussion Board entries posted before 0900CDT today. I contributed five posts, with particular effort directed towards the topics of the internet as democracy and on reframing “lurkers” as “customers”.
• I read all of the class blog entries and comments posted before 1400CDT today. I also followed all of the links and watched all of the videos. (I don’t know if I can keep that up—some of the bloggers are pretty prolific in their use of links.) I lost count but believe that I offered in the neighborhood of fifteen or so comments on various blogs. I committed myself to helping make sure that everyone knows that they really are being heard (“read”), but am also unwilling to simply make “David was here” comments. Of course, sometimes you just can’t think of something substantive to add….
• I researched Diigo, Flickr, DimDim, Utube and some others that escape me at the moment. I joined LinkedIn and (with trepidation) Twitter. I hope the latter is not the time-waster I fear it is….
• I investigated several blogs of school teachers using Web 2.0 in their classrooms, and applied to join a Ning Network of such. I originally thought that might be the W2.0 community in which I would actively participate for the community observations assignment, but they haven’t yet approved my membership so I moved to a different topic.
• I selected three discussion forums to follow, and joined one. They are unrelated to education/training/performance, but are of current interest to me. More to come….

Okay, gotta go—the final game of the World Cup is in overtime. ;-)