Category: Reflection

These items are personal reflections focused by readings, discussions and personal thoughts.

Categories
Assignments Readings Reflection

Digital Storytelling

Digital story Lesson # 2 – read assignments carefully and clarify understandings. Sometimes you take a wrong turn and have to begin again.

My experience with the digital story telling started with multiple ideas, several media options and various familiar tools with which to create my story. As I worked on both of my digital stories, the ideas dictated the directions and the story dictated the final selections used. Daniel Pink, in his book A Whole New Mind, stated, “We are our stories“. This became my story.

My personal digital storytelling experience started with one story, that was in me to tell. It ended with another story, that evolved the way most stories do. It begins with images, ideas, and thoughts that slowly untangle into a thread that creates the fabric of the story. My digital story is a ‘narrative’ in the truest sense, with a main character, evolving plot line, rising to a climax of discovery, and has an ending that brings the story to a conclusion. Understanding the nature of a narrative is one that many students struggle with, as did I when this project first started. After a ‘eureka’ moment (that also made me glad I asked the question), I knew what to do. As Young Turtle discovers, the answer was within me all along.

You’ll find my digital story here: https://blogs.ubc.ca/hjdew/digital-storytelling/

 

References

Pink, Daniel H. (2006) A whole new mind.  New York: Berkeley Publishing Group, Penguin Books. Retrieved on July 10, 2011 from http://www.danpink.com/wnm.html

Image from http://4freephotos.com/index.php – Free photo # 820808c8369c053eceaf71070e248ff0

 

Categories
Exploration Open Reflection

Tag! You Found it!

Tagging is the key to the web. The concept of tagging is not new, but it is something that has eluded me in my understanding of the web. It has come back into my explorations during this week’s discussions about privacy, protection and public presence in online environments. The difference between being fully private and fully public has caused heated discussions with educators around the globe. In our efforts to keep students safe, we are missing an opportunity to apply critical literacy skills to their investigations with digital media. In the meantime, the concept of the web is changing and this will become a redundant topic of discussion.

 

semantic web graphic
Link to http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/

The concept of Web 3.0 and how tagging our web contributions makes the web work has caught my attention. I have now begun to tag where I never tagged before. I even went back into other blog posts and created tags to the information posted there. In this way, I am helping to create the next evolution of the WEB – 3.0. The web that will become my personal google and a tool fit to my needs. It will know what my interests are, my common search topics, my music download interests and even my fitness habits. My personal tags will define who I am, my biases, my interests and my explorations. My digital tatoo will define me but not limit me. It will serve my needs while it learns who I am.

 

Web 2.0 is here with full force. The next wave is the semantic web that is Web 3.0. Here is a simplified explanation.

Since we have also been working on digital storybooks this week, here is one created to explain the differences between Web 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0. It is an Xtranormal clip with two characters – Broccoli 3-d and Semantic Web.

Web 2.0 you say?! I say, let’s move it up the web and aim for 3.0.

 

Categories
e-toolkit learning Exploration Readings Reflection

One Voice in the Crowd

This week’s topic in ETEC 565 is blogging and the wisdom of the crowd. I reflected, read and came across a wealth of voices in the crowd, each one sharing something important about the topic of blogging in educational settings.

This particular blog post, although done in 2004, is very relevant to the foundations of educational blogging – purpose and audience. (http://weblogg-ed.com/2004/04/13/)

The focus of the conversation on this blog was on the ultimate purpose and passion that true bloggers and blogging require. Unless there is that burning need to express a thought, opinion, idea or concept, the blog and blogger are doomed to failure. Will Richardson quotes Stephen Downes with the question – “Where is the locus of blogging? is it with the students or is it with the teacher?”

For my own work thus far, I would say the locus of blogging is with the teacher creating a contrived circumstance to provide a means for students to write in a public forum for the sake of sharing their writing publicly or with an authentic audience. For many educational blogs (listed in the ‘Links to School Bloggers‘) again, it is contrived for the sake of the exercise. Once the exercise is over, the blog is dropped.

To be true to the purpose of blogging, it needs to become a passionate endeavour of sustained energy with depth and breadth to the topic of discourse. Would my personal blog fit into that category? Probably not. Maybe not yet.

Will my words echo in the blogospher with the likes of
Will Richardson, (http://weblogg-ed.com/);
Stephen Downes (http://www.downes.ca/news/OLDaily.htm);
Seth Godin (http://www.sethgodin.com/sg/)
Steve Hargadon (http://www.stevehargadon.com/) or even
Chris Kennedy (http://cultureofyes.ca/)?
Probably not. But that doesn’t mean my words shouldn’t be publicly published with passion and penache! (try that one 3 times quickly :))

That can also be said for our students, particularly those who feel strongly about a topic or interest. That’s where they pick up the pen (or keyboard) and begin to write. As found in this article written by Stephen Downes “Writers will write because they can’t not write.” (Bloggers will blog because they can’t not blog.) Their voice will shout out through their words and, like the ones from the ‘Fisch Bowl‘ be celebrated for their contribution. The marks and grades, at that point, would be a secondary consideration.

Another great posting about educational blogging also comes from Will Richardson (http://www.infotoday.com/MMSchools/jan04/richardson.shtml)

What we’re doing when we blog – written by Meg Hourihan is another interesting link to review. It was published through the O’Reily Web Development Center (http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/javascript/2002/06/13/megnut.html).

And one final connection to a blog about the best in educational blogging sites – http://oedb.org/library/features/top-100-education-blogs

So the voice of ONE can make a difference in the crowd.

It’s linking those voices together that leads you to the ones you want to listen to and that will lead to my next post – It’s All About the Tags!

Categories
Exploration Open Reflection

Collaboration in Wiki-spaces

My reflections on the recent work on the collaborative wiki for this week’s module has left me pondering and wondering about the pedagogical and educational applications and implications for collaborative work spaces.

This activity was challenging since the only way to see if any changes had been made was to use the history and then compare versions for changes. This significantly changed the way I interacted with the information and with my classmates. Not necessarily easier or harder, just different. When you are used to seeing where and when additions or new information is posted, working with a wiki brings the word ‘collaborative’ to the forefront of my thinking.

Each page has the message “if you aren’t prepared to have your work ruthlessly modified, don’t post it here” as well as the warning ‘don’t post copyrighted material’. Both are reminders of the public nature of the writing environment.

The final product should be a piece of quality writing and a compilation of everyone’s thoughts on the topic, if everyone puts their ‘2 cents worth’ into the project. The fine-tuning and organization still takes a certain someone to take ownership of these tasks or the whole thing is left in a messy, disconnected collection of individual thoughts. In this writing environment, the individual contributor is always making some assumptions about the others involved – that they agree, that they are present, that they care about the topic, that they are participating (even if there is no record of their presence in the history), or that they are aiming for the best outcome for the project. These can be challenges but also strengths to this type of collaborative working space. If you have the right group of people working on the right task, these assumptions become irrelevant and a quality outcome is assured.

Categories
e-toolkit learning Reflection

Wiki learning

Wiki Learning

I have had several experiences creating wikis – through UBC MET course ETEC 510 (http://sites.wiki.ubc.ca/etec510/Hypertext), wikis created for work related projects and also personal wiki spaces to collect information. The wiki done for ETEC 510 was an intense experience that challenged me to code in HTML to get the page to work the way I wanted it to. The embedded images, chart, headings, etc gave me great pride when I managed to get them done they way I had hoped. Using code from other wiki pages and then replacing information to adapt it to the necessary content was one way around coding from scratch. Two interesting items that I discovered while doing this wiki project were the 5 pillars (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Five_pillars) and the criteria established for the top ranked ‘featured article’ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Featured_list_criteria that make Wikipedia articles effective sources of information.

Using WYSIWYG software like Wikispaces makes it so much easier to get up and organized quickly. I found the wikispaces format intuitive to use and was able to modify structures and content with little trouble. Giving access to others was also easily done.

One challenge that I still experience with wikis is the changing and editing of other people’s content. Unless I am very familiar with the other collaborators, I am uncertain and uncomfortable in editing without permission, either through formal permissions granted or through familiarity of other’s acceptance of changes.

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