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.