1. Reduced ability to synthesise information which may lead to copy-and-paste behaviour by students;
2. Students need to be fully equipped with research skills such as critical literacy and summarising, skimming skills (these skills are more important than ever);
3. Action needs to be taken to filter the mass of information available on the web, so that only the most relevant and reliable information is made contact with. In the case of social networks, you can hide a 'friend' who's status updates are wearing down your patience or in the case of micro blogging on Twitter you can delete unwanted feeds.
1. How does information and communication overload affect you and how do you/could you deal with it?
My normal tactic is to hand pick what I deem as the most relevant and reliable sources of information (whether that means limiting the number of journals used, social networking sites logged into etc) and limit my research to these few sites. In this way, I can more easily synthesise and regulate the information I need to sift through to complete the task. I can definitely see an application of RSS feeds to bring together the different social networking sites I like to use, so in just one log in I'll have all the information I want (rather than 5 different logins)
2. How might information and communication overload affect your students and how could you help them deal with it?
When I was in primary school completing assignments meant getting out the Encarta CD and completing my research. Nowadays, students have a staggering amount of resources available to them so sorting and filtering information is a necessity. I can imagine that when conducting research for an assignment they may stagnate in their assignment completion from the sheer abundance of websites pulling them every which way. As a teacher I can attempt to minimise this horrible feeling of information overload by using search vehicles such as Rollyo where you can limit the sources from which the search results come from. By creating a delicious style tag cloud I could limit my student's search to that of reliable, relevant information only. Using customised folksonomies/tag clouds in conjunction with instilling competency in summarising and skimming may alleviate the extent of information overload encountered by my students.
3. When might folksonomies be useful in education?
Folksonomies are a collaborative indexing system where the ordering is built from the bottom up. It is pretty much the exact opposite of a taxonomy as a folksonomy starts with the information that is then organised by topic or theme so that a pool of resources can be easily accessed. Site organisers such as delicious.com are useful in education as they can also be shared and are visually represented in tag clouds. I like how tag clouds break away from the traditional boring list format of search results, into a bright spatially organised cloud!
c) Network filtering: A way of connecting a range of networking sites onto one site
4. When might RSS be useful in education?
Really Simple Syndication (RSS) is about bringing into one space information of interest from all over the web. Newsfeeds are an example of RSS. RSS feeds are a source of instant up-to-date information from sources you select i.e. the Herald Sun and The West.
RSS feeds can be used in education to provide up-to-date information on curriculum topics and to incorporate different perspectives on the topics. A class RSS feed could be set up to facilitate group work/class discussion.
5. When might folksonomies and RSS be useful to you professionally?
Just as folksonomies and RSS feeds are useful for students, they can/are useful to me in a professional capacity. I can remain up-to-date with different sections of newspapers, certain twitter feeds on education topics through use of an RSS. Folksonomies would be a great way to organise the resources used to plan and execute classroom activities.
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