Alix’s Exploration of Learning Technologies

Although I have yet to incorporate the use of social media in my classroom, I would like to compile a list of social media that use personally:

1. facebook- to keep in touch with friends and family

2. google book marks and del.ico.us – to keep track of potential resources for school, teaching and life

3. RSS feeds – for teaching and personal interest

3. wiki and google docs – so far, justv for MET assignments

4. weblog – so far, just for MET purposes

5. Discussion forums – not much of a contributor, but a few that I follow

I am not much of a texter and have yet to “twitter”.

I have worked collaboratively before on a wiki for a course assignment. In the previous case however, I was working with only two other people and we each prepared our own separate pages. As such, no one did any major changes on the others’ pages. This experience working on a wiki was different. The contributing group was much larger and we were all editing a single page. The advantage of this is each student contributed a small section, but we ended up with a large artifact documenting social media “sightings” and key challenges and strategies for implementing social media into education. Another advantage is that we were able to edit mistakes that the original contributor may have missed. Collaborating to produce a single artifact with many contributors and editors is not without it’s challenges though. A wiki is often edited by contributors separated by space and time leading to a number of issues. For example, there is an issue of consistency and voice in an artifact. When collaborating in this manner, the contributors need a way to communicate and make democratic decisions. In the wiki activity where we contribute 5 challenges and strategies, one student came up with the idea of puuting an “x” next to the submissions we would like to contribute to the “top 5” . The submissions with the most “x”s would become the final 5.  Another issue is that whole contributions can be deleting or greatly modified by other users leading to feelings of frustration by the original author.