new blog for month 11!

Hey guys, my blog for the Media Asset class is here: http://laurasmacblog.blogspot.com Come on over and visit!

Week 4 - Blog Posting #8 -Reflection on Blogging

I would like to point out that I am well aware that "stream-of-consciously" is not acceptable as an adverb. It just came out!

Thanks to everyone who read my blog. All the best!
-Laura

Week 4 - Blog Posting #7 -Second Life

(**Note: one of the suggested SL sites, EduIsland, was not accessible from either the FSO link or the Discovery Education blog.)

I should first come clean about my Second Life bias. I'm sorry to admit, I have yet to be sincerely impressed by SL. My first experiences with it were in previous Full Sail classes, and I found it to be confusing, clumsy, awkward and hard to navigate. During my first experience, I was very taken by the graphical interface, and how much work had gone into many of the "worlds" we visited. As someone who considers herself to be an early adopter and advocate of any new, interactive and social web tools, I had a very hard time controlling my SL avatar. I walked into things, almost drowned a few times, and then at one point I somehow lost my hair and have never been able to get it back.

While one could consider these to be minor annoyances that are part of the learning curve, my deeper exploration of Second Life was still a disappointment. Some of my classmates had worse luck than I trying to function as SL avatars, and I would often invite people to visit me in a world only to find they couldn't get there, didn't know how to use the chat function, etc. We had a class meeting once in SL that was complete chaos. While I was avoiding awkward conversations with non-FS Second Life visitors who had limited English skills or were otherwise incapable of appropriate communication, I found myself in lands that had appealing, promising names but the content would range from just interesting, nothing more, to downright silly and frivolous. I'm sure it had some meaning to someone, but I seldom found what I was looking for. Again, prompted by our assignment to visit SL lands for educators, I traveled to Second Life, and again I felt the same disappointment.

"joannamkay"'s MindMap of Second Life in Education (Wollongong 2009) was very encouraging; looking at the very thoughtfully planned and crafted locations, it gave me hope that there are valid arguments in favor of using SL in education. For me, however, I don't see how SL does anything that other web tools do better: CMS/LMS systems, social networks, social media sharing sites, and so on. Perhaps my resistance stems from being a learner with a low-ranking preference (a "non-preference", if you will) for interpersonal learning. Patricia Glogowski states,
"...using Second Life for educational or other purposes involves a steep learning curve that involves learning how to function in the environment and how to build the physical content. In addition to basic skills, building educational spaces and bringing learners into Second Life requires creativity, time, patience, and innovation. Moreover, there is no guarantee that the content created by residents will be educationally valuable. A further criticism of teaching in Second Life is the misguided pedagogy of using Second Life and other newest technologies to teach in old ways; often it’s the traditional, teacher-centered, unidirectional teaching transferred into a new environment." (2009)

I haven't given up on Second Life yet. Perhaps this is a good challenge: the tables have turned on me, and now I need a good technical guide to help me navigate a frustrating, but nonetheless worthwhile, universe.

Glogowski, P. (n.d.). Digital Technology in Education/Second Life. Wikibooks. Retrieved September 20, 2009, from http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Issues_in_Digital_Technology_in_Education/Second_Life

Wollongong, J. (2009, January). Educational Uses of Second Life 09 [Slides for use in SL and RL]. Retrieved September 20, 2009, from http://www.flickr.com/photos/jokay/sets/72157612171568581/show

Week 3 - Blog Posting #6 -Communities of Practice

A few months ago, I was posting on Twitter (like just about everyone else on the site) about what I was doing--which at that moment, was trying to purge some spammy comments from several of the networks I belong to on the social networking portal, Ning.com. I posted an update something like "[what is] up with spam on the Ning pages? Anyone else seeing this? #ning". Within an hour, I received a DM (direct message) from a representative at Ning asking me to email her details about the spam, with a promise that she would look into it. It was the first time that social networking had introduced me to a new type of "customer service", one that was at first a little creepy (after all, I didn't actually seek resolution from anyone at Ning directly), but ultimately refreshing: companies and businesses ARE listening to their consumers.

Chris Brogan, a consultant who (according to his blog) advises "businesses, organizations, and individuals on how to use social media and social networks to build relationships and deliver value" (Brogan 2009) writes very eloquently (and prolifically) about how businesses need to "grow bigger ears" and "start by listening". It should come as no surprise, then, that many of the more progressive (and successful) corporations such as Starbucks, JetBlue, and Dell have been using

Twitter to reach out to their consumers for some time now (Twitter Brand Index 2008).
While business is just now "getting" the power of social media, it still boggles my mind how so many teachers, administrators and other stakeholders in the educational community are terrified of it. I'm still trying to figure out why...
Well, we certainly wouldn't want school to be too much like the business world, would we? :)



Brogan, C. (2008, November 22). If I Started Today [Web log post]. Retrieved September 19, 2009, from http://www.chrisbrogan.com/if-i-started-today/

Twitter Brand Index. (2008, August 08). Retrieved September 19, 2009, from http://blog.fluentsimplicity.com/twitter-brand-index/

Week 3 - Blog Posting #5 -Social Media

Social media has impacted the way many of interact on many levels: how we communicate with friends, how we interact among ourselves and with instructors in schools, and how we collaborate and exchange ideas and market in the business world. This shift has impacted not only the digital natives and "millenials", but affected all age groups: grandparents adding grandchildren on their Myspace friends list, professors and students on Twitter, co-workers sharing LinkedIn connections (and searching Facebook to screen prospective hires).
Karl Fisch's "Did You Know" series of videos, which began to circulate on the internet in 2007, highlighted some of the staggering facts surrounding the rapid adoption of the internet and its communication pathways such as social media. The technology has evolved so rapidly that the video contineus to be updated regularly, with its most recent iteration (see above), version 4.0, surfacing in mid-2009.
When Twitter.com was launched, critics scoffed, calling it an unnecessary addition to the many other means for people to update on the web, asking, "[what are you doing]..who cares?"(Lawley 2007). However, less than three years later, people look to twitter much in the same way they once looked to broadcast news and later, internet search engines. Microsoft's newest search engine, Bing, now integrates twitter search; this year's litany of high-profile and celebrity deaths were searchable on twitter and Wikipedia before news stations like CNN were announcing them to the public.

The community is talking, and the community is listening. The community is winning.

Fisch, K. (Director). (2007, November 01). Did You Know? Retrieved September 19, 2009, from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K04o2ic4g-A

Lawley, L. (2007, March 06). Thoughts on twitter [Web log post]. Retrieved September 19, 2009, from http://many.corante.com/archives/2007/03/06/thoughts_on_twitter.php

Week 2 - Blog Posting #4 -21st Century Skills & Lifelong Learning

I definitely agree with Prensky's suggestion (2001) that students have to "power down" at school because of the way that most content is delivered. I have observed it myself working with students over the last few years. While we as teachers can find many more current ways to deliver content, promote communication, and administer assessments digitally, one of the biggest challenges is still inspiring students to simply enjoy learning. Cultivating a love of learning at a young age is something individuals can carry with them throughout their lives, and help them to evolve into lifelong learners.

An interesting report entitled Voices of Students on Engagement (Yazzie-Mintz 2006) suggested that students felt that school was not "intellectually challeging" (as opposed to "academically challenging") and the researchers attribute that sentiment to a feeling of lack of engagement. Note the following statistics that the researchers reported:

Engagement is about interaction; 21st century learning modalities promote this interaction. When used in conjunction with education, social networks, blogs, photo sharing sites, microblogs (such as Twitter) and online discussion forums all demand more interaction, and therefore can result more engagement.

While the older teachers that Prensky refers to as "digital immigrants", i.e. those who didn't grow up with the internet, adoption of these technologies may be slower but the results (with regard to engagement) can be comparable. A study conducted by Tomorrow.org (2007) addressed online learning trends in both students and teachers, and found that teachers were growing more and more interesting in participating in online staff development and coursework:



In my "perfect world", teachers will begin to accept and embrace the power of 21st century learning strategies, and by using them to continue to be lifelong learners, will model for their students how to be lifelong learners themselves.

References:

Learning in the 21st century: a trends update. (Rep.). (2007, Fall). Retrieved September 12, 2009, from Project Tomorrow website: http://tomorrow.org

Prensky, M. (2001, October). Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants. Retrieved September 12, 2009, from http://www.marcprensky.com/writing/

Yazzie-Mintz, E. (2006). High School Survey of Student Engagement (Rep.). Retrieved September 09, 2009, from Indiana University School of Education website: http://ceep.indiana.edu/hssse/

Week 2 - Blog Posting #3 - Media Literacy

I particularly enjoyed watching the video segment from TED about Gever Tulley's Tinkering School. After I watched it, I went through some articles I had saved on delicious.com because the video made me think of an article I had spotted a few months earlier in the New York Times.

I usually only bother to save articles on Delicious that are distinctly about education, social media, social media in education, Web 2.0, and so on, with the exception of maybe a few odd articles of special interest to me or the subjects I teach. This particular article, however, a book excerpt titled The Case For Working With Your Hands by Matthew B. Crawford, spoke volumes about education in a world blown sideways by new technology.

In this excerpt from his upcoming book, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work, Matthew B. Crawford makes a very compelling case (I think) for bringing back shop class, and for us to consider the return of the value of manual trades. I particularly loved this paragraph:

"A gifted young person who chooses to become a mechanic rather than to accumulate academic credentials is viewed as eccentric, if not self-destructive. There is a pervasive anxiety among parents that there is only one track to success for their children. It runs through a series of gates controlled by prestigious institutions. Further, there is wide use of drugs to medicate boys, especially, against their natural tendency toward action, the better to “keep things on track.” I taught briefly in a public high school and would have loved to have set up a Ritalin fogger in my classroom. It is a rare person, male or female, who is naturally inclined to sit still for 17 years in school, and then indefinitely at work."

click here if you'd like to read on...

We all want our students to be media-literate. We have an obligation to teach them to post responsibly on the internet, comment respectfully, collaborate equitably, quote and cite honestly, and seek information mindfully. Yet there is another type of "literacy" that has value as well, and this is the place where the message of Crawford and Tulley might very well meet. What we do with students and computers in the spirit of active engagement is no more "fluff" than shop class.

(photo by me)