Monday, August 31, 2009

Week-2 Virtual Collaboration EDU 651

Wiki Wiki Wiki was the theme of Week-2. It was an interesting week of learning because I had to rethink everything I thought I knew about the world of wikis. I learned how wikis could add an enormous amount of variety to the learning and collabrative experience for students and collaborative efforts in the work place as well. We had to create 3 possible wiki projects to frame, which was very interesting in itself. The ideas forced me to truly think about ways to solve problems in my current academic environment. We carefully examined the pitfalls of wikis, which we quickly gathered that careful planning, managing and monitoring would help eliminate many of those pitfalls.

This week is primarily about putting the 2.0 to action. We were assigned to create our blog, twitter and PBworks accounts and begin utilizing those tools.

I will admit, as a novice and past skeptic, I am extremely nervous about this wiki project but looking forward to doing something new.

Stay tuned because this is going to get better.

Collaboration & Learning In A Virtual Environment EDU 651 WK-1

Week One of this course was fast paced and introduced me to an enormous amount of new information. We kicked off the week with a Jing PowerPoint introduction to the class which had some challenges for some of us but it was fun once I remembered what to do. We read from one of textbooks providing us with a short history of the internet and how it has evolved into the read/write web it has beome today.

We conducted a SWOT analysis of various technologies presented to us in the 2009 Horizon Report that chronicles technologies that are at there peak and those that will be highly used in 2 years - 5 years. I conducted by SWOT specifically on mobile devices. We conducted a webquest on the top 100 tools for learning 2008 by the Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies, which reveal the top used technologies and introduced me to technologies that I don't know how I've managed to live without. I was surprised that I was at least familiar with several tools. I am must excited about Social bookmarking and Presentation Sharing.

From there we learned about the introduction to Wikis and how they have made it possible for everyone to publish, edit, and create. I have looking forward to what is to come and how my perspective has changed completely about how we can use Wikis in any environment on any subject.