I can definitely say I had never heard of this term before I was assigned this topic to blog on. Steve briefly introduced this term in our week 9 lecture notes. As the AT &T webpage on this topic says,
"Filamentality is a fill-in-the-blank tool that guides you through picking a topic, searching the Internet, gathering good Internet links, and turning them into online learning activities... In the end, you'll create a web-based activity you can share with others even if you don't know anything about HTML or serving web pages."
Basically it looks like Filamentality is a brand name for a tool developed by AT & T that allows users who don't know anything about making webpages to make a web page! Neither Wikipedia nor YouTube have any entries that mention Filamentality -- which indicates to me that this is a phenomenon that quite a lot of people (besides me) are not "in" on.
As this (quite old) review states, "This is a great place to start for users new to the Web or to the concept of using the Internet in education. "
Filamentality can be used to create a variety of educational resources, such as... Hotlists, Scrapbooks, Treasure Hunts, Subject Samplers, and WebQuests. Users of the Filamentality site may either create their own activities or they can find/use and potentially adapt activities made by other users.
If you want to see some examples of websites created by Filamentality users, click here, and type the search term of your choice into the "Search Filamentality" box.
My first thought regarding Filamentality is that this tool would have been very useful and valuable over 10 years ago when it was first introduced... but now that there are more software programs that make designing one's own website much less arduous, I wonder if Filamentality will continue in its current form, somehow change and adapt or disappear. What do you think?
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3 comments:
I'm with you Natalie. It's so basic,it's pretty passe. However the simplicity of it might be attractive to some - perhaps people working with adults to introduce a topic that would not be enhanced with graphics - let's say applying for death benefits. :-)The crazy name though, doesn't fit the bare bones interface.
Personally, I can see using it when I didn't have time to create a WebQuest and I wanted students to visit a bunch of sites in a particular order. What this allows that a shared bookmarking site like del.icio.us does not is space for test/headings to introduce a group of sites.
From my experience in schools, I think there are enough teachers-usually of the older crowd- with very minimal tech skills. These people, if they are going to integrate technology, may like a site like this. But I think that in time, Filamentality will have to change its angle to stay in the game.
Natalie,
I took a look at the examples of Filamentality websites on the link you gave us. Maybe I’m just not searching the right topics, but the ones I looked at seemed to be just text about a particular subject with links attached to other related resources. These seem more basic than even your basic webquest. Maybe I need to look at these a little more, but in answer to your question, I think Filamentality will have to change from its current form and adapt into a resource that allows things like video and audio clips, RSS feeds, wikis, etc., if it is to continue being used into the future. I wasn’t familiar with Filamentality before this class and your blog, but my first impression is that I would use other forms of webquests to develop my lessons before using Filamentality simply because I’ve seen others that would be more interesting to use and offer students a lot more motivation/stimulation.
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