Wednesday, February 4, 2009
Task #1
I feel like the whole interactive aspect of the internet is a great thing, though I do have some concerns. I can see how a group of colleagues/community of learners can share ideas very easily, but I wonder how outsiders could read the content. My students have difficulty with saliency content with in the classroom. How will they be able to ascertain the validity of posts? I feel like some of them may be prone to short cuts. How will they process it? I am completely overwhelmed.
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Overwhelming...yes! Hopefully this class will help you feel a little less overwhelmed and let you pick the one or two tools that would work best for you. In order to deal with outsiders reading content, there are various privacy settings on most web 2.0 applications so only the people you want to see it, see it. And I do think your concerns about students using blogs are very valid. However, I think it is also part of our jobs as educators in the 21st century to teach some of these skills.
ReplyDeleteI fee the same way you do. Perhaps that is why it has taken my 3 try's to really get in to this course! Your blog looks great. I almost chose this background too1
ReplyDeleteI agree with you about validity -- is a blog post a valid source for a research project? I suppose the same rules apply as when validating a website. One of the things students may do is process at a faster and shallower rate. These might be things that Alan November addresses when he comes next month.
ReplyDeleteI'm on my second try and it's getting easier. I am going to adopt you now.
Task #3
ReplyDeleteI like the idea of a virtual conversation about academic work. If I only had the opportunity to offer the great comments that I managed to formulate as the bell rang to end class! I do worry about losing something when the face to face conversations decrease in frequency. What do we lose when we don't know the writer? I have always found online universities a bit suspect. While I see the advantage of removing time constraints for students, I wonder how much more the same folks could gain if they spent more time together.
I agree that face-to-face interaction is superior to interaction through technology, and I don't think it necessarily has to decrease in frequency. However, if you add the online collaboration WITH the live interaction, then you can build a real community that extends outside the classroom walls. It also allows the learning community to be extended further than just the school's teachers and students. As an added bonus, with things like Skype, we can now have a "face to face" with someone on the other side of the world and get their viewpoints.
ReplyDelete