I had the opportunity to attend the NECC 2009 conference in Washington D.C. at the end of June. In each of these posts, I would like to share one of the sessions or share something I found interesting. In this first post, I will share some of the points that Jamie Mckenzie made in his session: "Beyond Mere Gathering: Converting Social Networking into Collaboration and Synergy". You can go to his website to view his thoughts.
One of his key points was the importance of synthesis and the need to train people on how to synthesize. He spoke about Edward De Bono's "six colored hats". It's a great model for thinking. Jamie mentioned that we are great at "vertical thinking", but most of us need to become better at "lateral thinking". That's the intentional wondering, how we find another way of doing something. He highlighted this by using a visual thesaurus. You can type in a word and get synonyms for it. Click on a synonym and it takes you to other synonyms. It branches out in many interesting ways. There is a fee to subscribe to this program, but it is quite powerful in developing this kind of "later thinking". I would imagine it would be a powerful tool to use when studying content in any subject area.
There was reference to allowing some trial experiences of social networking. Microsoft is trying something that mimics Facebook, but in a safer environment. It's called "Sharepoint". It might be worth taking a look at this to see if it could be used in our schools.
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