Mindtools

Originally when I heard the term "mindtools" I associated it with concept maps or schemas, like the kind you would create using webspiration. I didn't see how Excel could be considered a mindtool. Having read the Jonassen chapter on mindtools I realize that anything that forces you to reflect on and organize your thinking is a mindtool. Looking at it from that perspective, I can absolutely see how excel could be considered a mindtool in that you are forced to consider discrete pieces of information, how to categorize them, organize them, and how best to create visualizations with charts and graphs. I think a mindtool really has less to do with the tool itself and more to do with the crystallization of thinking.

Some other tools we've talked about, like flickr and delicious are really good researching tools. I have used flickr to get first person perspective on big events like Katrina and the Iranian election and subsequent protests. I have seen people use flickr's tagging capabilities, including museums and art history classes, to underscore important elements of a photo. In a photo taken during the Iranian election protests a photo taken of a woman in the protests tagged the cellphone that the woman was talking into, highlighting that the cell network had not yet been disabled at the time the photo was taken.

Besides the ability to do research by performing searches for pre-filtered results, the thing I find compelling about delicious is the folksonomy that you can see emerge. When I am researching a new area, it is helpful to me to see the tags that people have associated with the area. You can see the vocabulary that people use in association with the topic and how they've organized the hierarchy of information. That may not be an ideal means of knowledge creation, but I think it certainly is ideal in being able to quickly get an overall understanding of the landscape of a topic which enables you to conduct more pointed research.

I think what is most important about using these resources is the way they are used. I think it is most effective when these tools are used in the service of facilitating a larger initiative or project, not just tools for tools sake. When designing collaborative, knowledge constructing projects there are some things that I think are worth bearing in mind. The first is to consider what the tools afford. Some tools lend themselves to researching, others to collaboration and others as an information repository. Flickr and delicious are great for researching and sharing, but not for collaborating. In google docs and the now retired google wave, multiple people could be in the same document/environment working simultaneously and collaborating real time. Webspiration allows multiple users to work on the same piece of work, but only one at a time, which seems like asynchronous collaboration to me. One tool we haven't discussed is IM. I think there is potential for instant chat to be the thread of synchronous collaboration across even asynchronous tools.

Another consideration in using these tools has to do with account management. It becomes a bit overwhelming to have so many accounts with so many tools. I imagine that students over the course of time will have to manage not only a blog account, google account, flickr, delicious, wiki, and maybe even blackboard or ning accounts along with multiple email addresses - but also multiple accounts for most of those services for different grades, or even different subjects. We may end up needing another tool to keep track of all our accounts!