Aloha Everyone,
Week 5 was in interesting week. Our topic of discussion was Intellectual Property and Copyright. This topic came up last semester too in ETEC-442. I constantly battle with my teenage daughter over movie and music downloads off the Internet. Really it’s a losing battle that the entertainment industry needs to adjust to. Like I said in my discussion post, the industry needs to come up with different business models to make money, like ad based web pages, or the subscription model like NetFlix.
My team of Mia, Myla and myself stared to work on assignment #3: Web 2.0 How –To. We tentatively selected FlashCard Exchange as the instructional tool, and Jing as the production tool. I was thinking the assignment could get interesting if the actual topic on the flashcards was about Web 2.0 tools. So Jing would help us create a video on how to use FlashCard Exchange, but the info on the flash cards would be overall information on Web 2.0 tools. Or we could do something fun like “Family Guy” or “American Dad” trivia.
Now on to week 6….
Cheers,
Carl
Thursday, February 17, 2011
Saturday, February 12, 2011
ETEC-647 Week 4 - Learning and Social Media
Learning and Social Media was the topic of the week. We started a very good discussion on the class wiki and I am looking forward to reading and commenting on my classmates’ postings. This week was hectic as for various reasons I almost had to drop the class. As it turns out everything settled down and I am in the class to stay.
Without retyping my wiki post entirely, I want to point out that from my point of view Social Media is here to stay and needs to be fully embraced by the educational community. In my ETEC-442 class last semester Dr. Grace Lin had us participate in a Twitter experiment. In this experiment we needed to tweet at least 75 times during the semester with about half of them tweets being related to educational technology. The idea was to see how useful Twitter could be to the class. In the end I found it useful. My classmates sent links to various educational technology websites and the resources were invaluable.
From my background in Information Technology (IT) I find that as new technology emerges we all get used to it rather quickly. Ever keep an old computer around after upgrading and then realize that it was so slow? As we get better, newer and faster computers we cannot see how we functioned with the old ones. Last night when I was catching up on my Week 3 blog I was using my daughter’s laptop at home. Usually I stay after hours and do my homework at my office where I have dual-monitor PC. It drives me crazy to have only one monitor where I have to minimize and maximize or go between programs. The same thing goes for new educational tools such as VoiceThread, and Moodle. Once we get used to these tools we cannot see how we lived without them. Even more telling is that younger students have always been used to these tools in some way. So it is incumbent for us to keep up with the times.
The Masters in Educational Technology program is a fantastic way to train educators and technology coordinators alike so that education overall can keep up with emerging technologies and the next generation of learners.
Without retyping my wiki post entirely, I want to point out that from my point of view Social Media is here to stay and needs to be fully embraced by the educational community. In my ETEC-442 class last semester Dr. Grace Lin had us participate in a Twitter experiment. In this experiment we needed to tweet at least 75 times during the semester with about half of them tweets being related to educational technology. The idea was to see how useful Twitter could be to the class. In the end I found it useful. My classmates sent links to various educational technology websites and the resources were invaluable.
From my background in Information Technology (IT) I find that as new technology emerges we all get used to it rather quickly. Ever keep an old computer around after upgrading and then realize that it was so slow? As we get better, newer and faster computers we cannot see how we functioned with the old ones. Last night when I was catching up on my Week 3 blog I was using my daughter’s laptop at home. Usually I stay after hours and do my homework at my office where I have dual-monitor PC. It drives me crazy to have only one monitor where I have to minimize and maximize or go between programs. The same thing goes for new educational tools such as VoiceThread, and Moodle. Once we get used to these tools we cannot see how we lived without them. Even more telling is that younger students have always been used to these tools in some way. So it is incumbent for us to keep up with the times.
The Masters in Educational Technology program is a fantastic way to train educators and technology coordinators alike so that education overall can keep up with emerging technologies and the next generation of learners.
Friday, February 11, 2011
Week -3 Blog Learning and Web 2.0
Week 3 was an asynchronous week. I confess it is easier to remember to type my weekly blog on a week with an Ellimunate class session. During the week we had to rate the other team’s introductions. All of them were very interesting and varieties of tools were used to create the introductions.
We also had to evaluate and rate each of the other team’s assignment proposals. All of them were very good. The one that lost the vote was the assignment that required the use of Smart Phones. In retrospect, the project idea is an excellent one. Too bad, the assignment was not practical since many did not have access to Smart Phones.
As we can see by this example, emerging technologies can be tricky to implement depending in the circumstances. In K-12, one might want to implement the use of Google docs and blogs, but the school may not have enough resources or equipment to do so. Over time, this will correct itself as more and more school systems come on line with the proper technology.
We also had to evaluate and rate each of the other team’s assignment proposals. All of them were very good. The one that lost the vote was the assignment that required the use of Smart Phones. In retrospect, the project idea is an excellent one. Too bad, the assignment was not practical since many did not have access to Smart Phones.
As we can see by this example, emerging technologies can be tricky to implement depending in the circumstances. In K-12, one might want to implement the use of Google docs and blogs, but the school may not have enough resources or equipment to do so. Over time, this will correct itself as more and more school systems come on line with the proper technology.
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