Is this how you feel right now? Confused and overwhelmed? Tangled up in Web 2.0? Take a deep breath and relax!
One of the biggest challenges I face as a learner and a teacher is handling the pace of information. It's what Christine and I are referring to as the "Goldilocks dilemma." We're struggling with that right now. What is too much information? What is too little? What's too fast or too slow?
Some of us are chomping-at-the-bit learners. We find some new capability or concept or tool and we want more, more, more. Others need the info fed out a bite at a time; if we get too much at once, we choke, get confused, and drift away.
I felt a little overwhelmed by the potential of Flickr. Not only is there Flickr itself, but there's all this stuff I don't know about gadgets (my cell phone, my MotoQ, etc.) and a whole slew of stuff I don't know about digital photos (cropping, colors, size, etc.) It's pretty overwhelming, especially because I really am a print person. So I'm going to take it a step at a time. I'll probably write quite a few posts this week, playing around with pictures and the mash ups Christine introduced. I have some interesting ideas I want to explore, but I think I'm going to have to take this in pieces.
Similarly, I have this same quandary as a teacher. How much information is too much? How much is not enough? Should I present all the information at once, or dribble it out as I think students need it? Some students are really irritated if they learn something at the end of an assignment that would have solved a problem they identified early on. 'Tis a puzzlement. If I present the information all at once, some students race through it to "finish it up" without thinking as they go. Some students don't undertake a project until the last minute, so while all the information presented at once might serve their needs, it also overwhelms other students who want things a piece at a time. It reminds me a bit of the hot-dog eating contest this weekend; the winner ate 59 hot-dogs in 12 minutes. That's one every 12 seconds. They don't actually eat them; competitive eaters have learned to stuff the hot-dogs down their throats by controlling their natural gag reflex. Boy, is that a scary metaphor for learning!
Many of us now recognize that we're going to have to figure out how to keep up with all these blog posts. We'll introduce some strategies for doing that next week. However, the folks who are frustrated by the leisurely pace of 23 Things should read Alisa's blog I'll dub her Queen of the fast pack. You can peek ahead to her mash up that she told me about in her comment to my post about "Do you go to the store with a list?" Then you can read co-Queen Marla's experience forging ahead.
The point is that we have to find our own pace, and that our pace might differ depending upon what we're learning. I'm a lot faster learner when I'm dealing with text than I am with photos or audio or video. I think teachers need to find a way to accommodate both the turtles and the hares.
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