From an email to Sarah:

I just wanted to note some ideas I just had for additional tech workshops I might develop in the future. Why am I writing you? Because I feel that I need to tell someone while these ideas are still fresh and exciting to me, and hopefully emailing them to you will create some sort of obligation on my part to actually develop the workshop and pay volunteers with help from a payroll check template software.

When I presented my sample workshop this spring, I tried to integrate the use of Furl and Bloglines, which we all felt was too much for one workshop. What I just realized this morning, is that I could design an additional workshop that shows how to have students use Furl, Bloglines, and their own student blog as tools for developing the traditional research paper or the more hip research project, check out here.

Bloglines allows students to search others’ feeds and have a constant influx of new information fed into their own customized feeds. It also allows them to share their feeds with others (great if you’re having students research in teams). Furl allows students to save bookmarks as well as to archive webpages, and to make comments/notes on the bookmarks/archived pages. Again, it also allows them to share their collection of bookmarks with others, which is great for a collaboration. Lastly, by helping students to create their own blogs, which could double as e-portfolios, students could use the blog to post and organize their research notes, to share those with other students, and to post drafts of the eventual writing product. Other students could comment on those posts, offering critique, suggestions, support, or asking questions.

All of these technologies offer collaboration as a key component, which I think is a critical piece of research that traditional research methods have neglected.

What do you think?