Hello ETEC 540 Community,
Thank you all for a wonderful 13 weeks of learning together. The MET program is so rich in terms of not only the caliber of the courses, but the collective knowledge of the participants. It is a privilege to learn along side all of you!
For my final thoughts, I decided to do an informal experiment with Wordle. Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. I created one Wordle with the RSS feed from the Community Weblog, and another Wordle with the RSS feed from my entries on the Community Weblog alone. Here are the results:
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- Community Weblog Contributions
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- Personal Weblog Contributions
The results were very interesting! The top word for the Weblog overall was hypertext and the top word from my entries was books. How appropriate as we really have moved from studying different forms of print right through to digital forms of text as Ashley Ross demonstrates in her Major Project “The Evolution of Advertising: From Papyrus to YouTube“. When I look back on the progression of my entries, I see that right from my first entry about a child’s alphabet through to my Major Project on Typography that my progression in this course was fuelled by an interest in print.
This journey has been fascinating and at times, it pushed me out of my comfort zone. I’m not much of a history buff, so I really appreciated Laura Bonnor’s thorough research project, “How the Fall of Rome Leads to the Development of the Gutenberg Press“. Laura’s detailed account helped me to make connections to other research projects, including my own, and to the readings.
ETEC 540 kept us all on our toes with the different platforms we used; Vista, the Community Weblog and the Wiki. Using the three different areas to showcase our knowledge was a valuable experience. As we develop our skills in educational technology, we learn to do the work by doing the work. As graduates of the MET program, we must be well versed in the tools available to us and one could argue that we only used one platform, a browser.
Thank you all again for your knowledge, skills and participation. Good luck in the New Year and Happy Holidays!
Camille
