Serendipitous route to Milq & beyond

I enjoy the world of serendipitous discovery of technology for learning and teaching uses. I looked over the recent Twitter email telling me things that I might be interested in. One was a Tweet from Mashable about Milq.

Milq instantly struck me as an interesting concept. It’s a user-driven curation system that potentially could help you organize the web. Launched in April after a year of beta it appeared as one of Apple’s Best New Apps.

A Milq user poses a question, and this constitutes a Bead. Others respond by posting videos and audio clips.

I can see the possibilities for education of a community of users offering up useful material. This is a way of tapping into what others, interested in the same topic, are finding informative. It’s a way of dipping your head into the information stream without it being ripped off, or at least developing your own tributary. I can see parallels with a curation community developed in Diigo for example, but it seems more dynamic. Also it feels like a more intuitive way to follow items that might appear via Google+.

On using Milq, I immediately started looking for examples of Education curations. First I found the CHANGING LEARNING? bead.

Screenshot of 'Changing Learning?' bead from Milq

Then I tried the search function. That led me to Paul Anderson’s ‘Classroom Game Design’ at TEDxBozeman video where he talks about engaging students using a gaming approach to the classroom. Paul also talks about the need to allow failure to enable learning and growth to happen. This links in nicely with my previous post about #safefail.