‘Blogging is all about connecting the dots (referencing, linking and aggregating).’
I like this quote from the week 2 instructions. And it’s timely for me as I tend to use my blog for my own musings and forget that it is about connecting. Otherwise I might as well be writing in my diary. I’m always pleasantly surprised when someone comments to find that I do have an audience occasionally! So thanks for the reminder : )
Social media – involves people communicating. [Am tempted to add 'with a purpose' but that might exclude Twitter! Need someone to explain to me why Twitter is so 'cool'! I just don't get it : ) Age on display, perhaps! ]
What have I used before?
Blogs – very successfully. Students seem to feel ‘empowered’ when they discover their own voices in this way.
Wikis – not used as much, but beginning to think hard about collaborative potential for students.
Podcasting – this year’s goal. To stop playing round myself and get students on to it.
All of the above I feel positive about, and hope that my students can get as excited as me!
I just browsed back to my January entries in 2007. Wow - I did learn a lot back then, and much of it I think now that I ’just know’ it. So the learning curve aspect is quickly forgotten and frustration with getting my head round new skills disappears into the dim dark past.
Have joined the requisite communities/sites for this year and am intrigued to find that I joined a number of them last year as well and then never used them (always telling when your user name is not accepted!) Community Walk looks FUN. Whether it is my machine or my skills or the site itself has improved since last time, I’m not sure, but can definitely see potential for using this with my classes.
One of the reasons I like doing these workshops is the ’playing’ aspect. What I wrote about in January as ‘messing about online’. I look forward to playing more with some of these communities.
Yahoo – we’re off again! Looking back over the last year I realise how much I learnt with the Open Web Publishing sessions EVO 07 and look forward to being part of this group again in 08. I do like the new title Social Media, and look forward to more of my personal learning curve…
Having just read David Warlick’s blog posting I asked myself these questions.
My children exemplify the social network phenomen among teenagers. Daughter(19) has been through MySpace and is now onto Facebook, which links her to her work colleagues and to her brass band friends as well as her some of her social contacts (ex school friends around the world who she had lost touch with and now has a finger on). For her (as a social butterfly) it is integral to the way she operates. Son (16) is more comfortable on Bebo but his band uses MySpace. Son (14) is less of a social being, but enjoys the widgets on Facebook, playing games and scoring hugely on some of their quizzes.
How do I harness this as a teacher? Are my immigrant/international students a party to social networks like this? Is my classroom a social network learning space? Can I shift this online? Using Blackboard or blogs? How can the focus of online social networks shift to learning? Which comes first: the network or the learning? Can they co-exist?
I enjoy the EVO sessions (where this blog derived from early this year), as a social networking opportunity, but there are always time limits on it. We see it as a finite commitment. I haven’t properly subscribed to the Webheads as a learning community for various reasons, not least of which is time. Maybe the commitment is the issue. What makes people buy into social networking?
A bunch of confused questions! Publish and be damned, or sit on the above and ponder it for a while? Interested in feedback from anyone who reads this. But maybe I will revisit at a later date and rewrite it (and check the facts on my kids’ social networking habits so that I am a bit more authoritative)
Such a buzz to meet people who are reading the same books and thinking similar thoughts and with similar research interests. The symposium rolled out perfectly to plan – only a couple of technological glitches and everything else was wonderfully smooth. My only complaint would be that organisers don’t have enough time to chat. But the symposium dinner was a good space to catch up, and I so 
enjoyed the sessions that I managed to get to.
Just reflecting on Siemen’s words about learning in relation to the symposium opportunities…
“Learning is a rich, multi-faceted experience, where the whole picture of a discipline or space is held in the connected elements of individuals. Each individual in a network holds a part of the entire piece.” (Siemens, 2006, Learning in synch with life:new models, new processes)
It was nice to see the pieces coming together : )
How open do we want to be?
I’ve subscribed to Kathy Sierra’s blog for a while now – I enjoy her idiosyncratic images and comments on marketing etc. even though it’s way out of my field. But recent events (death threats made to her on other blogs) are sad, and particularly relevant to those teachers who work with (especially younger) kids and have wondered/discussed in various forums how ‘open’ our open web publishing should be in the field of education. Recently (well OK it was back in April but I have been very busy!) Kathy and Chris Locke (front man for the threatening blog) put out a pre-media release statement which reflects on the curtailment of freedom in public spaces like blogs. Food for thought and part of my learning curve, I guess. My naivety wants to believe that this sort of thing doesn’t happen!
Why is it in the holidays that you seem to have the energy to ask these questions?
Recently read this posting Student Self Directed Learning: What makes a good learner?, which reminded me again that learner training is crucial and that we can’t expect students to magically know how to learn. Also just read a chapter in Teacher Education in CALL by Kolaitis, Mahoney, Pomann and Hubbard called Training ourselves to train our students for CALL along the same lines.
So encouraged again to consider how self-directed my students are – and to think further about student motivation, metacognition, self-efficacy, self-regulation, locus of control, and goal orientation. A number of my students, particularly from China, seem to think that just living in an English-speaking country will help them acquire language. Many consider (on the basis of the number of years they have already been studying English at school in their own country) that they already have the basics (ie grammar) and that being in NZ will overnight (or perhaps over a term) improve their speaking and listening skills to the point that they (or frequently, their parents) think is necessary for a suitable career in business back home. Within this kind of framework, words such as student motivation, metacognition, self-efficacy, self-regulation, locus of control, and goal orientation simply do not belong! Perhaps a good learner starts with the realisation that learning a second language to the point of being able to use it effectively and comfortably is something that just might require hard work!
Part of my learning curve over the past nine months has been helping to organise the CALL symposium here at Unitec. Now it is only ten days away, which is exciting. I’m thinking of starting a list of ‘Things NOT to do when organising a conference’! Most of them relate to doing things the slow way, when there are short cuts out there : ) I’ve learnt all sorts of things.
I’m really looking forward to meeting the participants and especially the presenters, some of whom feel quite familiar already having been emailing them over the last few months. Meeting people in the same field is always a buzz and hopefully there will be time to talk to all the people that I want to. The abstracts for our keynotes look interesting and it will be nice to meet them again and hear the ‘experts’. A lot of the presenters look pretty expert themselves and there are a huge range of topics in the abstracts.
If you’re coming, I look forward very much to meeting you!
Valentina made some suggestions on ideas for creating a podcast. Our open webpublishing class got up to 11 on the 99 ways to use podcasts.
Valentina also made some useful comments about Chinswing and using it for language teaching/learning. Suggestions for EFL teachers (presumably initiated by Webheads) in the language channel had some nice ideas and showed me some of the features ie. length can be as long as you like, the way that it automatically plays in the order that comments were added, has RSS feeds. Nice the way you can move across pictures at the bottom. Dwinet commented on the need for interesting topics.
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