Reflections on 'Could the Web be a Temporary Glitch ?'

In their paper 'Could the Web be a Temporary Glitch?', Carr, Pope and Halford conclude with these words:

'Openness is a property of the Web architecture and a contributory factor in the success of its adoption, but it is not an inevitable property of the user experience in the coming decade.'

This 'inevitable' clearly implies that the current situation is both dynamic and fluid. Everything in web history is about periods of transition. We don't live through periods of transition, as in the past, we live in transition. We see that in the recent past teens have moved and are moving away from facebook towards WhatsApp, WeChat and KakaoTalk. Their reasons appear to be greater privacy, restriction to friendship groups and avoidance of selfies, silly self portraits. Yet we know that despite many protestations to the contrary in the end economics take control as in almost all aspects of life (not creative commons hopefully)...so just maybe we are currently enjoying the Indian Summer of the web. Thanks to Mark Nash for his highly relevant links.

Reflections on web use and how I deal with the information I find

My perception of my web use is like this.

When I browse I tend to check out many news sites using www.aldaily.com as a good homepage for that. I often look through TED  for inspiration and lateral thinking and I use You Tube generally in the same way. For social networking I use facebook and twitter (somewhat reluctantly because of all the question marks against them in my mind) and LinkedIn. For educational networking , google+ educational groups mainly. Email and combined activities are done through google (waldorfy@gmail.com with web science in the subject line please). For music listening I utilize soundcloud, lastFM and musicovery. I subscribe to selected figures like Siemens, Downes and Hart in particular and either bookmark them in firefox or organise them in netvibes. Other information is stored in evernote, pinterest and dropbox (while networking is in progress). As a family we use online banking. I search quite specifically with specialist engines (also the invisible web) and more generally academically with sweetsearch, Google Blog Search and Google Scholar. For general searches I use google or DuckDuckGo

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Personal Learning Environment tools: preparation for Southampton MOOC Personal Learning Network

As there aren't any MOOC guidelines in my hands from Southampton yet, for the learning experience I researched what I think I will need as a minimum to prepare to be successful in the way I want.

I set up a blog (this one) as a place to reflect on my experience so that I am in a position to share it with others in a spirit of compare / contrast / grow. I gathered feeds about MOOC experiences from the instigators and participants; of course Downes and Siemens loomed large amongst them. I am instinctively  drawn towards the necessity of connectivism as a digital age dynamic theory. In my information gathering I need ways to organize and refine what I got, so I found myself trying out a variety of sources. The best amongst them were netvibes, rss feeds, bloglines, evernote and pinterest (for thematic graphic storage). Sources of inspiration were mainly You Tube and slideshare. I figured that my most detailed sharing would likely be done through something like dropbox after I learn who my like-minded fellow students are. I have used delicious as a bookmarker for years so old habits die hard. I'm not really proficient with google+ yet and I haven't really forgiven them yet for the death of various cherished tools. For getting the answers to my basic questions I have chosen a bundle of sources which I have used in the past - although on this occasion Techopedia has helped the most so far. That's my plan - let's wait and see how well it works. I guess the official estimate of 3 hours per week for 6 weeks will prove to be a massive understatement!

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