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ReImagining: Developing a toolchest for 21st century information management

On September 24, 2008, David Warlick over at 2¢ Worth posted a very interesting question: If “It’s not about the technology,” then What is it about? As you might imagine, a lively conversation followed. The conversation pushed my thinking about re-imagining learning. What should we be doing?

Scott McLeod caught my attention when he posted on September 29, 2008 about what’s on the back of his business card. He explains that most cards have nothing on it. McLeod saw the empty space as an opportunity and put the following on the back of his business card:

… and they all crossed their fingers, hoping … despite little to no investment in their leaders … despite making conscious, intentional decisions to keep it out … that somehow their students and staff would be prepared for the digital, global world that surrounded them …

The End?

And I was confronted again with the nagging question of what we should be doing for and with our students to help them confront the tumultuous 21st century with verve and confidence.

It came together for me like this. A tip of the hat to Stephen Abram over at Stephen’s Lighthouse for his post on Zotero. When I read Stephen’s post I immediately went to the article he recommended at Educause: 7 Things You Should Know About Zotero. I read Educause’s piece and was astonished to see this free addon to Firefox (also free and cross-platform) automated lot’s in researching a topic of interest. This is an invaluable tool for researchers, writers or anyone working on a complicated project. Educause notes that,

By automating the tasks of gathering, managing, and citing online references, Zotero and other online reference tools facilitate a more efficient research process. 

Shouldn’t our students and teachers know about this? Shouldn’t they be trained to use this simple tool? We educators have got to get aggressively intentional about teaching students (and our colleagues) how to use tools like this for their personal and work lives.

All of us are bombarded with random information. We often feel overwhelmed by it all. All this information coming at us so quickly represents a kind of chaos. Tools like Zotoro can help professionals and students build documented digital personal libraries that accumulate and organize information for their own purposes. It’s one tool in the challenge to develop a personal information network.

You can find Zotero’s Firefox extension for free here

Thanks to the three of you for pushing my thinking.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 30th, 2008 at 8:57 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “ReImagining: Developing a toolchest for 21st century information management”

  1. Thanks for the kind words. The best part of the blogosphere for me is finding folks that stretch my thinking. Glad my business card gave you some food for thought!

    I noticed over in your Amazon list that you liked The Global Achievement Gap too. It’s an excellent book that more school leaders should be reading…

  2. I enjoy your blog and the book group this past summer. In the interaction this summer, you suggested that I read “Disrupting Class”. I really liked that one as well because, as is true of “Global Achievement Gap”, the ideas seem new, hopeful, and provide direction for the future. Do you recommend any others to read?

    Skip

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