Thoughts, Research and Module Activities of Amanda Newton
Tomorrow we have our presentation on blogs wikis and eportfolios. We had our wiki draft due a couple of weeks ago and our comments were quite good, only a few things to fix up which we have done. Our presentation is going to be an interview style asking questions on the three technologies we are doing. We are being filmed which I do not like at all. However I think our approach to the presentation is quite effective and should be easy to follow.
Social Networking
‘What is your experience of social networks?’
My experience of social networks involves the use of myspace and facebook. In Boyd’s article she implies that only teenagers set up these social networking accounts. I disagree here, while i would assume that yes, it is mainly teenagers that do have these sites, a lot of younger people do use them. She also suggests that parents are panicking because they are unaware of this technology and do not have control over it. I have experienced this with my parents and my younger sister.
I believe it does make communication a lot easier as well as a lot more frequent. I loved myspace when i used it and now i love facebook.
‘How could these be used in learning environments?’
Learning through social networking is done fairly informally. Ie my workplace has its own facebook group where we share ideas and comments. This is a form of learning by socialising. Otherwise, generally I do not think facebook and myspace should be used for formal learning. However, if UTS Online is classed as a social networking site, which im not sure if it is, then yes that is used for learning. Discussing ideas, informing people of important notices, providing readings and workbook modules.
References
- Boyd, D. 2007, ‘Social Network Sites: Public, Private, or What?’ <http://kt.flexiblelearning.net.au/tkt2007/edition-13/social-network-sites-public-private-or-what/>
Synchronous Communication:
‘What is synchronous communication?’
‘What is the benefit of synchronous communication?’
‘What do you think are some of the drivers in the current environment?’
Asynchronous Communication
‘What is asynchronous communication?’
‘What is the benefit of asynchronous communication?’
‘What do you think are some of the drivers in the current environment?’
Today we had people come in to talk to us from DoCS (Department of Community Services) to explain about their organisation. The talk consisted on what the department does and their current situation on training for the staff. This information will be useful to help us with assignment two.
We also talked about Activity 1.3 which is looking at RSS feeds and aggregation (check). We have a little experience with RSS feeds from Elearning Experiences when we set up our netvibes account. Anne showed us a little video about RSS in easy terms and it mentioned something called Google Reader, which I have never heard of before. Sounds similar to netvibes.. in which all the information from your favourite sites can be uploaded to one web page. I think I may have a look into it.
It was actually a bit annoying today when I went to log into my blog to write a post, it said something about enabling cookies – which I dont actually remember what they are, however remember hearing the term in elearning experiences. It sent me to instructions to change settings on my computer. However they did not link with my computer so that was annoying, but i tried later and it worked.
Im going to have to see what I can do to better organise my blog. Because now that Elearning Experiences is finished, I dont think the separate pages need to be there. Maybe I can join them together under the one page. I also would like to have a page where I can write casual posts like this, and another one for the module activities for this subject. I also need to wrtie on my ‘about’ page, which I do not actually remember being there before! Must have been.
P.S Really do not like Mac computers.
Also.. This post was in a different section. I attempted to make a new page for this subject however all the posts keep automatically going onto this page. So ill just add it in here. There must be something that can be done to change it, but it is too late now.
“Last week was the first class of the new subject ‘E-Learning Design’ which follows on from ‘E-Learning Experiences’ which I completed last semester. This subject requires us to continue making use of our blogs. I havent used or looked at my blog since november last year and was very surprised when I came back to notice that the background had changed! I don’g remember doing that so not sure what happened there. I quite like the new set out so will leave it the way it is”
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