Collaborator, Becoming a Read/Reflect/'Rite

I currently have 72 feeds in my Bloglines account. Most of them are made public (on the right) for all three of my readers. For about six months, I have been in read and save mode. I am just beginning (again) to enter back into the writing activity. The primary reason I stopped writing my blog was the thesis I was writing as part of the Ed.S. program at Valdosta State. Now that I have completed that phase of my life, I am ready to talk/write again.

The blogging break has done me some good. I am gaining new perspectives from the variety of my blog reading. David Warlick, discussed the need to reflect or think before we write. It is a part of Information Literacy I think we sometimes neglect. I have had a lot of think time.

In response to David's post, Will Richardson was pumped by David's first question...

1. What did you read in order to write this blog entry? Yee Haw! Blogging starts with reading, and I read David’s post, which leads me to blogging. (I read some other stuff, too. See below.) And I think an even more interesting question to add is “What was your process of reading?” ...

I have been reading a lot of material.

Back to my point...I realized last night that I have marked over 200 blog entries so I wouldn't forget to go back and read them. Yikes! There is so much good material from so many smart people. I learn so much from the blogs I read. My natural tendency is to synthesize all the seemingly different thoughts into a single world view. It gets messy some times. How can all these ideas, from various sources, from many places, form a singular and complete philosophy of education? Enter George Siemens and his thoughts on Connectivism. There is simply too much to say about connectivism to put much here, other than it is the connecting of people that is quickly becoming the greatest educational opportunity in the world.

So What? Let me see if I can tie all these remnant thoughts together. Standard 9 of Information Literacy is about Social Responsibility.

Standard 9: The student who contributes positively to the learning community and to society is information literate and participates effectively in groups to pursue and generate information.

Indicator 1: Shares knowledge and information with others.
Indicator 2: Respects others’ ideas and backgrounds and acknowledges their contributions.
Indicator 3: Collaborates with others, both in person and through technology, to identify information problems and to seek their solutions.
Indicator 4: Collaborates with others, both in person, and through technologies, to design, develop, and evaluate information products and solutions.

Will, (I've read his work so long I think I know him), calls it the read/write web. If I may be so bold, I would like to call it the read/reflect/write web(the new 3-Rs). Whatever one wants to call it, the opportunity for give-and-take is tremendous.

I have been able to "take" for some time. I hope I can "give" something back, and become a socially responsible, information literate collaborator.