Armor Geddon - Networked Learning

[Leigh Blackall]

Armor Geddon, by Neil Prakash - A soldier in the armored corp of the
US military in Iraq at the moment, makes for some interesting reading.
But what's more interesting about his blog is it's role to play in the
whole 'Blogging-challenges-everything' phenomenon.

MilBlogs as they have come to be called are a very interesting
development for obvious reasons, but Neil takes it a step further when
I he links to movies being made by other military personnel on their
operations and daily life.

Now, I don't see the making movies bit as anything new really,
soldiers have always been documenting their experiences with various
technologies, true though the technology available these days makes
these documentaries quite mind blowing for spectators. But it's the
network communications supporting all this that opens up new
possibilities.

Neil posted back in February about a suicide bomber attack on his
company that was miss represented by the broadcast media. Aside from
it being interesting to see how often the mainstream media
broadcasters get it wrong according to the milblogs I read, Neils post
about this attack contained a small request to his reader that blows
my mind,

...The BEST part is that his jackass terrorist friend was videotaping
it... If anyone can tell me where to find that video clip on the
internet, a lot of us in my company are curious as to whether they
taped it while hiding in a certain village.

There is something about this request that both excites and disturbs
me. Neil is requesting intelligence assistance from his Inter-network
to help him locate a target, to help him learn something. If it wasn't
such a dramatic subject with potentially fatal consequences for some
people, then it wouldn't be such a concern. The excitement is of
course in the use of the Inter-network to learn.

We see it very often in the TALO egroup. Members have often posted to
the eGroup requesting links, names, comments, and resources. I assume
they are asking the group because they can't find it themselves, but
perhaps its more productive to just ask the network then the Google
machine. I mean, if I asked Google, I'd spin out in all sorts of
directions, discovering stuff just as useful and/or interesting, but
not what I was looking for. With such experiences with search engines,
it would possible be more productive (in terms of the objective) and
less time consuming for me to simply flick an email to the eGroup or
some other network and see what comes back.

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Posted by Leigh Blackall to Teach and Learn Online at 6/9/2005 09:27:00 AM