Whirlwind Tour of New Technologies

I got to give a presentation to a group of about 15 anthropology grad students today, about new technologies for teaching and learning (the official topic was "new technologies for the classroom," but that's rather limited, no?). I had initially planned on talking for only 15-20 minutes of the hour we would have, and we booked a lab so every person could hammer away at weblogs, wikis, etc... I wound up giving the whirlwind tour of new technologies - intro to blogging (3 people read blogs, 1 has one already), wikis (huh?), Flickr (one user), social bookmarking (huh?) I showed them the new weblogs.ucalgary.ca service (which worked fine in the demo, but the LDAP connection died when they tried to login - think that's been fixed now). The students were quite interested in the tools, and we had a discussion about how they could be using wikis to collaborate with other students and colleagues. I told the story of Small Pieces Loosely Joined, TheFuss, and Pachyderm (showing the paper we wrote for Museums and the Web 2005 in a wiki). Next time I do this, I'll have to remember to break it into smaller bite-sized pieces. Perhaps a session on weblogs. One on wikis. One on RSS. One on social bookmarking... Links and resources for this session are online here and here.