I want to thank Dave Cormier for a brillant idea. Although he was rushed and met with one ill-prepared website, Dave’s presentation at the FOE (Future of Education) online conference was excellent and could change the way we see the aggregator.
First, I can’t say that I am a big fan of the online conference. It’s the blur of a chat room, the bad audio, and sometimes disasterous presentors that keep me watching re-runs rather than participating in real time. (By the way, thank you to the person that thought of recording and posting presentations. It’s like TiVo’d education 
) However, Dave did it right. He demonstarted a tool within the context of potential use.
Dave used the aggregator, PageFlakes, as a web portal. (see it here) He set up each of his ”flakes” to aggregate certain tags (in this case foe2007scm.) He then encouraged the students to create a blog post or tag a flickr pic. After a few minutes and a quick page refresh, links started to pour in from the attendees. I literally sat slack-jawed in my clunky K-Mart recliner. It was so simple, yet so cool.
Sure wikis and even expensive web-portals can do similar things but here, right in front of our eyes was a FREE 10 minute answer to keeping everything…and I mean EVERYTHING, in one place. Just off the top of my head. This is reseach, assessment, collaboration, community, and even entertainment placed into a nice neat package.
Here are two communities I am working on. I cannot stress how ease this was. I hope that I can energize others the way Dave unknowingly energized me.
For teachers at DuBois http://www.pageflakes.com/kpruitt/11176389
For PA tech Teachers http://www.pageflakes.com/kpruitt/11201963
Obviously, I am only working on local items. I have no idea where this is going nor am I sure what the impact will be. I can tell you one thing, the success or failure will be clear. In fact, it will be availble for millions to see.
