Free is good? Or is it…

 

Apologies for the cheesy title! I couldnt resist. I blogged recently about the “demise” of Delicious and the outcry on Twitter with a number of people rushing to export their bookmarks to Diigo and other online providers. A similar outcry was apparent when Wordle and iEtherpad suffered similar issues not long ago. Of course all 3 sites still exist, in Etherpad’s case it still exists in various OSS versions.

As i remarked in my previous blog post“Delicious or Unpalatable”a huge number of professionals rely on these tools in and out of the classroom to become both creative and collaborative with their audience. In some cases these tools work seamlessly and of course in others because they exist in the cloud, the connection can be flaky at times but of course available to all (should the permissions be set!)

Over the past 2 years i have used a huge number of these tools with my students after being inspired by my twitter PLN with practical examples of their application in and out of the classroom. Notable shout outs of course to Tom Barrett for his crowd sourced Interesting Ideas Project and also to Ollie Bray whom gave me a lot of inspiration after I witnessed him deliver the best workshop i have seen of Web 2.0 tools at Handheld Learning 2009.

Inspired by these and others I have delivered a number of e-learning CPD sessions with staff in school which have gone down a storm. I hope to modify and repeat these sessions this year but also look at other areas such as storytelling inspired byIdeas_Factory and Steve Bunce.

Below are the 2 presentations I have delivered previously.