A new book by Charles Leadbeater, 'We Think' explores the potential of the latest developments of the internet

A new book by Charles Leadbeater, 'We Think' explores the potential of the latest developments of the internet

The last week I am reading two books concerning the social media. The first one is “we-think” by Charles Leadbeater and the second is “groundswell” by Charlene Li and josh Bernoff. Both books give you an insight for social media, how it works and why it became so essential in our everyday life. The books give you many impressing examples on how social media are used by the world and the business to evolve their communication. The reason that attracted my attention at the first place to read these books is that both are actually written “in the web”. What do I mean by that? The authors of both books were publishing these books chapter by chapter to their individual sites, and used the comments of the e-readers as part of the book. Actually Charles Leadbeater in the first page of his book writes that the author of the book is himself and other 257 people. He explains later on his book that he uploaded the first draft on October 2006 and till the late 2007 he was mentioned in 250 blogs, he had received 200 e-mails from people pointing in useful information and every draft was downloaded at average 53 times a day. At the end the book title and his name in the Google search came back with 65.600 hits! What a wonderful way to write a book! I couldn’t believe it so I just visit both Charles Leadbeater site and groundswell site ,in which you can actually see all the procedure they followed. It is amazing how interaction and collaboration of the people create one of the biggest forms of power I have ever experienced.Posted in social media Tagged: author, book, Charlene Li, Charles Leadbeater, collaboration, Groundswell, Josh Bernoff, power, site, social media, We-think, web

 creditToday Mick P and I surveyed and observed students as part of Principal Mark’s “Personal Control and Responsibility” Teacher Professional Learning (TPL) session at our campus. It caused some reflective thinking, good.Teachers had choices to learn and participate by either;research ‘engagement in learning’, individually or in groups particpate in “Head Games” orcomplete a group work activity.Three different learning methods focused on the common aims;explore the benefits of choice in educationshare ways of providing this choicegather ideas on Personal Control and Responsibility and what it means for teachersprovide a basis for staff welfare targets.We choose to research the student perspective on what they do if given “free choice”. Students had been given time on computers as teachers engaged in this TPL. Students were totally engaged in what they were doing. Why?This is what they’d selected during our 20 minute observation;arcade games = 5 (from the simple to extremely complex)quizella = answered collaboratively by a pairchat roomsmotorsport news online newspaperediting google pictures, “a mash up”Japanese Culture and online Christmas shoppingresearching personal interests eg Maitland GaolOnly half had actually selected games, which is what you may expect all to choose. Others selected educational, practical or text based sites. The overiding feature was their collaboration, engagement, learning and sharing.Many watched and spoke to others about what they were doing and followed their recommendations (”check this out”, or “that looks good, whats the address?”) There was chat and sharing, laughter and learning, collaboration and networking. It was certainly not just single students working in isolation at a screen. They appeared to be personally in control and engaged.It may not be traditional classroom syllabus based learning, but lets face it most of our life long learni...