Education and technology

I am working on a longer post about Carmun (http://www.carmun.com/) for sometime in the next week. Needless to say, my post, and this business I founded in general, are about utilizing technology in new ways to enhance learning, connections, and learning connections.

Thus, I regularly read the work of Clarence Fisher, a teacher who writes wonderfully interesting materials on his site called Remote Access, about technology and learning. His thoughts are particularly insightful because he is a practitioner, an educator, and can therefore speak from firsthand experience.

On his site today he wrote about the familiar concept of signal vs noise, but applied to learning:

"When students are aggregating streams of content in many forms, from many sources each day, the ability to lift out certain pieces from that stream to examine them further, or to simply tag them as important to their understanding of an issue is a skill to consider. It is essential information management that has yet to make it into classrooms in any wide spread form. Understanding that a picture from flickr goes with that blog post, which built on a podcast from last week and a comment before that is a difficult, mature understanding of how content is created, distributed, and built upon."

While my longer exposition here is being written, I would also like to suggest that the tools and applications to manage this type of "information management" (the ability to take disparate, and multiplied sources of info, and make connections among them efficiently and appropriately) , in the context of education and learning, have only begun to emerge. I believe that those tools, in turn, will help spread information management into many areas, classroom included.