Week 7 Evidence of Learning: Social Bookmarking with Delicious

Above is a screenshot of my delicious account, which I started late last week. I started with some of the bookmarks that I keep on my computer at work, and I'm loving that I can now access it at home too. What a great idea!

I've spent the weekend exploring the website, looking at the fresh bookmarks, popular bookmarks and tags. It's been good to get a feel for the website, and I'm planning on adding bookmarks in the future - no more "home bookmarks" and "work bookmarks"!

Week 7 Reflection: Social Software in Education

There was certainly a lot of information in this week's reading, covering a wide range of topics all under the social networking umbrella. I chose to focus on the social software report, as I am interested in how these tools will play a part in my actual teaching experience. It has been so neat to learn about all these sites, but kind of like a pro-d day where you get a whole bunch of new ideas but haven't actively planned how you are going to use them, I wanted to see what this report said about social software's role in education.

The report has a lot of useful information (such as a very detailed explanation of different kinds of social software), but the most important part to me is the list of social software's key characteristics. The report lists qualities of social software that explain why it is important in the realm of education. Prior to this list, I was reading sweeping statements: that it enabled people to "to learn together, to collaborate and to build knowledge" (Owen, Grant, Sayers & Facer 2008), and so forth. But the list of characteristics are concrete ideas and statements about exactly how social software fits into the education system, and I really need that. It answers the question of "why" for me.

Another part of this report that stands out for me is section 3.3, which addresses the question of "How do we educate for creativity and innovation in the ICT age?" (Owen, Grant, Sayers & Facer 2008). As you've seen in my prior posts, I did worry that the expectation for amazing digital tools would result lack of creativity and a scorn for anything simple (See my Week 3 Relection; after all, what's wrong with just telling a story? Why does it have to be digital?). It is nice to see this issue addressed in the report.

Thus, in section 3.3, the creative process in Japanese industry is described. It shows that in order for creativity to blossom, there needs to be a way for thinkers to externalize their thoughts. Without externalizing their thoughts, ideas remain tacit, personal and essentially unseen. By having a space for dialogue and creating a place to collaborate, creativity is enhanced. Ideas, though perhaps repeated throughout the creative process, become refined, challenged, and openly discussed.

This week, I hope to try out some more social networking sites and think about how to use it in my teaching. So far I have twitter, facebook, and a blog. I've posted a video on youtube and am working on my wiki. What's next? Stay tuned!

Reference:
Owen, M., Grant, L., Sayers, S., & Facer, K. (2006). Opening education: Social software and learning. Futurelab: Retrieved June 21, 2008 from http://www.futurelab.org.uk/resources/documents/opening_education/Social_Software_report.pdf

Week 6 Evidence of Learning: Wiki in Progress

My partner set up a wiki for us, so this week I have started learning about it and editing it. Above is a screenshot about what we have so far; it outlines the key concepts and purpose of our article. Hopefully as we continue we can make it look a bit fancier. But I think we're off to a good start!

Week 6 Evidence of Learning: No Wiki for Now . . .Trying Out Prezi Instead

Stay tuned for a link to the research article wiki that I'm working on with Kathy for March. For now, I'm learning about using Prezi, another free online tool that I learned when attending a VSB Web 2.0 workshop this week. Prezi is the "free online zooming presentation editor" and is growing in popularity; before attending the workshop, I'd had more than one colleague mention it to me and encourage me to use it.

I think the mistake that people make is thinking that Prezi is just a better version of Power Point. It isn't. It has a different purpose than Power Point, in my opinion, and should be used for presentations where seeing the big picture is important. If slides just need to be shown one by one, then I'll be honest, I liked using Power Point better. But Prezi allows you to zoom in and out, to draw your presentation in different shapes, and it looks prettier in the end. So for example, if your presentation was based on a timeline, Prezi would be perfect. People could zoom in to learn about an event, and then zoom out to see how it fits into the timeline.

I've started the basics of a presentation that I plan on using this summer when students start registering for English 12 online. Enjoy!

title on Prezi

Week 6 Reflection: Wikis in my Online Course?

I've been thinking about how I would use a wiki in the courses that I'm teaching right now. I'm currently teaching at the Vancouver Learning Network, and though each teacher essentially has autonomy in what happens in his or her own course, something as big as adding a wiki to the curriculum would definitely be a group effort. Some questions that may arise:

1) At the moment, everything is attached to a gradebook. For example, we have online discussions, and each discussion can be assessed with a mark out of 10. We punch in this mark every time we mark a discussion post and the gradebook is automatically updated. This kind of set-up allows students to continue discussing - every time I assess a discussion posting, their mark goes up. They see it go up, and as a result, it's very clear cut about how they can succeed (what kind of posts count as 'quality', the necessity of responding to others and not just posting your own thoughts, etcetera). With a wiki, I'm not sure how these grades would work - I would have to manually go into the gradebook each time to update their mark based on their most recent edit. This could cause problems when it comes to multiple edits (for example, what I've marked and what I haven't). I can see from this week's links that WetPaint allows you to track the participation of students. At the moment though, I have approximately one hundred and fifty English 12 students. Would managing this kind of participation be overwhelming?

2) Monitoring polite behaviour on discussion boards is an ongoing task. I've had to delete posts, send e-mails to students about discussion etiquette; I know that one teacher has had a very serious situation on the discussion boards simply because students weren't taking each other's criticism constructively (and weren't giving criticism constructively either). I'm already thinking about removing the Sharing Short Stories discussion board from my course next year. Would having students edit each other's work be a lot of trouble in this regard?

3) My department, at the moment, is thinking about creating a blog as part of the course next year and already this is quite the subject for the discussion. How many posts? How can it be monitored? In our course, students can join any time between September to April. How can we make these kinds of "external" assignments manageable, so that the requirements are clear and we aren't pulling our hair out at the end?

4) I'm participating in an inquiry team at the moment, and we're investigating assessment for learning at our school. One question that has been brought up is the problem of everything in our courses being attached to the gradebook. This is yet another issue here: does the wiki have to be attached to the gradebook? Maybe it can just be a participation thing? Terry The Tennis Ball, the link that Patrice provided on her discussion board this week, is a good example. Collaborating online in this way is fun, and perhaps can be just a participation mark instead of a mark on grammar/writing.

Despite all the questions, having a collaborative wiki is an exciting prospect. I'm in charge of English 12 at summer school this summer, and it will be a good time to pilot this kind of project. That way, if it is too much, I won't be stuck with it for a full year. But an exciting prospect? Definitely!

Week 5 Evidence of Learning: Updating my Blogroll

I've had my blogroll since I started my e-portfolio, but I just updated it with some more blogs so thought I would post it with my recent additions. I've just added Moira Ekdahl's blog after attending her professional development session here in Vancouver, which I really enjoyed. I've also added a friend's blog, which she has for her courses; I'm particularly interested in hers as it's a good example of what I can aim for when starting a blog for my class. I've also added the BCTLA blog, which I hope will help keep me in the loop!

Week 5 Evidence of Learning: Editing a Wikipedia Entry

Above are the before and after shots of a Wikipedia entry: before I edited it, and after I edited it. It was so easy! I just watched the tutorial and just like that, I knew how to edit a Wikipedia entry.

In becoming an 'editor,' I learned something new about myself: that I really don't know very much about anything. It was a real struggle to think of topics that I would know anything about, and when I did think of something, there was already a ton of stuff written about it. This was relatively disturbing.

My boyfriend suggested that I write about my school, the Vancouver Learning Network, which I did. The entry about VLN was very short and had a few spelling and grammatical errors. I guess that plays on what Robert McHenry said about the quality of writing on Wikipedia being questionable. I added a little bit and tried to improve the existing entry by fixing the mistakes. I hope I wasn't too biased in how I portrayed VLN; I think it's a great school and that might have come through in my entry - not very encyclopedic of me!

Week 5 Reflection: The Wikipedia Debate

Above is the welcome video to my topic presentation this week on Wikipedia and its role in education. I ended up finding it to be such an interesting topic, and thus wrote a little bit about three main issues in the Wikipedia/Wiki debate: the debate on Wikipedia's legitimacy, teaching students how to deal with the amount of information online, and using Wikis in the classroom.

For me, the most interesting part is the debate on Wikipedia's legitimacy. Not many people have posted in my discussion board yet (hopefully they will soon), but I really understand both sides here. Essentially, the debate has two arguments: pro-Wikipedia (it's an amazing wealth of information, collaboratively edited by people all over the world) and anti-Wikipedia (the quality of this information simply cannot be truly regulated and guaranteed). I really do see both sides. It's wonderful that people can collaborate on such a global level, sharing information and working together. However, you simply can't guarantee how accurate the information is. True, a study showed that Wikipedia only had four errors per entry as opposed to Britannica's three, but Robert McHenry makes a good point when he also critiques the quality of the writing, not just the accuracy of the information.

That said, for all the teachers that support Wikipedia, most will not support using it as a reliable source, or will at least tell students to use it as a starting point and to not rely on it completely. Many say to not bother citing it - just check it for a place to start and then look elsewhere for the real information. That's just been my personal experience from working with other teachers (maybe others have had different experiences). This also plays on McHenry's point, about the writing being poor even if the information is accurate. And do we really want to point our students towards bad writing? It's quite a risk.

References:
McHenry, Robert. "The Faith-Based Encyclopedia." Technology Commerce Society (2004): n. pag. Web. 25 Jan 2010.