By Stephen Downes, National Research Council Canada
The following list was inspired by eLearn Magazine Editor-in-Chief Lisa Neal’s blog post “Ten Things You Can Do in Ten Minutes To Be a More Successful e-learning Professional.” We’d like to offer the “Web 2.0 Edition” of Lisa’s list:
1. Listen to a conference presentation. When you run across conference presentations while reading your RSS feeds (EDUCAUSE Connect is a prime source, as is OLDaily), save the conference site as a bookmark and revisit it to hear a presentation.
2. Record a 10-minute presentation about something you are working on or learning about, either as audio (use Odeo) or video (use Ustream), and post it on your blog.
3. Do a search on the title of your most recent post or on the title of the most recent thing you’ve read or thought about. Don’t just use Google search, use Google Blog Search and Google Image Search, Amazon, del.icio.us, Technorati, Slideshare, or Youtube. Scan the results and if you find something interesting, save it in del.icio.us to read later.
4. Write a blog post or article describing something you’ve learned recently. It can be something you’ve read or culled from a meeting, conference notes (which you just capture on the fly using a text editor), or a link you’ve posted to del.icio.us. The trick here is to keep your writing activity to less than 10 minutes—make a point quickly and then click “submit.”
5. Tidy your e-portfolio. For example, upload your slides to Slideshare and audio recordings to Odeo and embed the code in your presentation page. Or write a description and link to your latest publication. Or update your project list.
6. Create a slide on Zoho. Just do one slide at a time; find an image using the Creative Commons licensed content on Flickr and a short bit of text from a source or yourself. Add this to your stick of prepared slides you use for your next talk or class.
7. Find a blogger you currently read in your RSS reader and go to their website. Follow all the links to other blogs in their blogroll or feedroll, or which are referenced in their posts. Well, maybe not all the links, or it will take hours, not ten minutes.
8. Write a comment on a blog post, article, or book written by an e-learning researcher or practitioner.
9. Go to a website like Engadget, Metafilter, Digg, Mixx, Mashable, or Hotlinks and skip through the items. These sites produce much too much content to follow diligently, but are great for browsing and serendipitous discovery. If you find something interesting, write a short blog post about it or at least a comment.
10. Catch up on one of your online games with a colleague—Scrabulous on Facebook or Backgammon on Yahoo. Or make a Lolcat. Or watch a Youtube video.