Last week, I had a couple of virtual chats with Krista Kennedy’s Emerging Technologies in STC class at the University of Minnesota.

It was a lot of fun. I prepared a short “talk” using VoiceThread (though, continuing my aversion to audio — I seem unable to get past ‘I can read faster than I can listen’ — I did it all with text). We used the university’s Moodle installation for the group chat. They were talking about facebook, twitter, and workstreaming this week, and had been reading Anne Zelenka’s Connect!. (Good thing the book turned out to work so well for them, because I suggested Krista use it for the class. It was just published in January.)

None of this would have happened without blogs.

See, Krista and I have never met. We’ve been reading each other for years, though. Last year, we connected on flickr. Then facebook. We sent a few emails, and started talking on IM. She knew I was interested in the kinds of things she was teaching because I talked about them on my blog — so we started chatting about that, and next thing you know, we’re discussing her syllabus and I’m chatting with her class. Plus, now I get to see a few Minnesota students discover and explore this space, as they’ve added/followed me on twitter and facebook.

They’re even posting to a course blog.

tagged: learning, social software