David Warlick workshop

Today I was lucky enough to attend a workshop by David Warlick on redefining literacy. Instead of the 3 R's, he contends that the basics are the 4 E's: exposing truth, employing information, expressing ideas compellingly, and ethical use of information.
In the workshop he started by showing us some tools that enable us to continue to be life-long learners. No longer do we need to seek out information. We can construct a personal learning network that has information come to our personal networks.
The first tool was del.icio.us. What was really cool is that he demonstrated a search on del.icio.us on learning 2.0. Guess what popped up in his search results? School Library Learning 2.0 and Classroom Learning 2.0! Yeah!
He showed a way to search in del.icio.us to find sites that others have tagged. For instance if you wanted science articles you could type in the url
Netvibes is an aggregator that is geographically laid out, making it ideal for school use.
He also talked about social networking using nings and diigo. In diigo, you can sign up members (your class) and then they can see your sticky notes.
VoiceThread is a free service to record your voice comments to pictures. One idea was to post a group of pictures and then have students put the pictures in an order that could tell a story and then narrate it.
PicLens is a estension that works with Flickr to show all the pictures that share a tag in a museum display. Flickr Storm gives you the ability to copy images from
Flickr at home and then students can access them in Flickr Storm (which may not be blocked). He talked about Creative Commons and how that differs from copyright.
For wikis he suggests wikispaces, pbwiki, wetpaint.
Blogpulse is a way to search the blogosphere. When doing a search in blogosphere you can click on trends and it graphs when your search term was most mentioned. It will graph several terms - ie when was Clinton, Obama and Edwards blogged about last month. Ustream.tv is a site where you can broadcast your own TV show.

Notes on the presentation are on http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dfvv7h4m_1047stm9t8q were taken by Sarah Diruscio of Grant school district.

So much of what he talked about today, especially using information ethically and efficiently, falls under the umbrella of information literacy that is taught by teacher librarians. How sad that 21st information literacy skills are being recognized at the same time that teacher librarians are being laid off due to the current budget crisis.