Trend Sources and Reasons

Created with Wordle using some of my tags.

When trying to choose which sources to look at during my trend tracking experience I first began with setting up Google Alerts. The results that I believed were interesting, a trend or a possible trend setter I would tag and add to Diigo. As I started to review the results that came in I started to create more specific alerts as well as deleting some that weren’t giving me the kind of results I was looking for.  As my background is in education and my focus is on technology most of alerts ended up being based around that. Therefore, I had to refine my search results to these as the information was becoming so abundant and varied.

Here is the list of alerts that I currently have:

• Education
• Education and learning
• Education, learning, technology and trends
• Education technology
• Education trends
• iPad and learning
• Learning and trends
• Tablet and learning

Once I found that certain sites were providing several results I would subscribe to them on Google Reader.  The results I found in Google Reader that fit what I was looking for I would star and tag. Unfortunately, up until about two weeks ago, I hadn’t thought to tag and bookmark these articles in Diigo.  Below is a list of the subscriptions that I have and some of the stats since I first started trend tracking.

Although my alerts and subscriptions were limited to the lists shown above, the types of results I was getting were related to other fields such as politics and research; and from an assortment of perspectives such as those of parents, educators, students, journalists, the government and so forth. 

In addition, many of the results that I have added to Diigo were articles from various online newspaper sites from all around the world. For example, The India Times, The Mercury (UK), The Irish Times, The Montreal Gazette, Bangkok Post, Edmonton Journal, Daily Nation and so forth… As you can see, by having set up different alerts I have been able to gather articles from all around the world.  This gave me the opportunity to see if trends are specific to certain locations, races, cultures and so on.

When looking at the wealth of information that was coming I always made sure to take into consideration the validity of those sources. The majority of the bookmarks and starred items were articles from online journals and websites of different professionals (i.e. The eLearning Coach and Edtech Digest).  With the aim of having a full balance of perspectives of the trends (and possible trends) I have tried to include sources from different blogs (i.e. Linking and Thinking on Education by Joanne Jacobs, and Clive on Learning). One of my new favourite websites is Pew Internet.  Unfortunately I have only realized this after I had completed my second Trend Report.

As I continue to track trends I will continue to add alerts and subscriptions. Perhaps I may even start looking at trends in different topics and areas.