Modelling Knowledge Acquisition (aka Blackboard vs Twitter)

I've got an idea brewing I'd really welcome some comments on.

I want to find an audience participation model to
a) make my conference presentation more memorable (sorry - vanity)
but
b) help people experience the differences between the way students acquire knowledge when using Blackboard and when using a social networking model (think twitter or facebook). Then what I want to show is a future vision showing how my finding the 'best of both worlds' (adding a little control to the openness) we can achieve something really useful for Higher Education.

At present I'm imagining representing units of knowledge as wristbands.

In the Blackbaord model the tutor basically hands them out to the students one at a time when they come down the paths (folder/structure) to get them.

In the twitter model, everyone has wristbands, and they're all chucking them into the mix and retreiving them, although of course they can't tell which ones the tutor provided very easily...

Then in the future vision, perhaps we colour code the bands, to represent the tutors contributions. Or ideally, we let the tutor sit in the middle of the throwing and sort the received bands - applying some moderation/structure to the collaborative stuff going on.

I don't want to get too deep into connectivism/constructivism learning theory here, although happy to touch on it. I really want to demonstrate the richness/mess of the social model and the clarity/restrictiveness of Blackboard.

Any thoughts? If the paper is accepted, I'll be delivering this at the Durham Blackboard conference in January - so need to order enough wristbands in whatever colours I decide before then.

Things I love about Google.

Tonight I was asked to create an online database with a search interface that presented results within a blog and that the entire dataset would need regular updating via a txt file export from iTunes (it's a song database).

Well, I did what any lazy web girl would do when FlashForward is on in half an hour - I looked to see what Google would do! And lo and behold, Google docs offers a complete querying/visualisation API to redeploy results from your google spreadsheet via a few lines of sql like code. And Google spreadsheet imports my txt file nicely too.

What I cooked up, as a rough starting point is this:
http://firstnight-cabaret.co.uk/nowlookhear/database.php?search=Whitney
(try changing the search term on the end).

Next job is to embed this in a page with a search box, which is easy!

I'd paste the code here, but the blog editor doesn't like it - happy to share it, or create it yourself from the links below. I only used the table visualisation, but there's much, MUCH nicer ones too for graphs and maps etc.

And referring to my title, the thing I love about Google, is that I expected this API to exist, I expected it to be easy to use; and it did, and it was.

Links to the Google resources I used:
http://code.google.com/apis/visualization/documentation/querylanguage.html
http://code.google.com/apis/ajax/playground/?type=visualization#using_the_query_language
http://code.google.com/apis/visualization/documentation/gallery/table.html