Your blogs in the week of December 6 must include one reflection on the experience of blogging. The intent of this task is for each of the students to thoughtfully ponder the experience of blogging. In doing so, you may choose to discuss the experience of blogging within the constraints of the given assignment. You may also choose to consider the utility of blogging for pre-service and/or current educators. Some questions that you may wish to address in this reflection are: What did I learn from this experience? What can I do to improve my blogging (with or without the constraints of this assignment)?
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Blogging in IDE 611 has been a wonderful experience. At the start of the fall 2010 academic semester, I was very nervous about starting a Blog. It was my first time creating a blog and I worried about whether I would be able to find enough information to write about on my selected opening blog topic, Digital Storytelling. Luckily, all my earlier worries were for nothing because there was a lot of information about digital storytelling, not only on the internet, but also via traditional library resources. Later, in the 2nd half of the semester when my new blog topic became College 2.0, I also had a lot of interesting information to draw upon via the College 2.0 section in the Chronicles of Higher Education.
Blogging for pre-service and/or current educators is a very useful and effective way to stay current with the various innovations and new research findings in one's content or specialty area. Specifically, one can add an RSS feed to get updates on all the latest news and events from a variety of blog and news sources. For example, I added the RSS feed of EDUCAUSE and the Chronicle of Higher Education to my "Blogs I'm Following" reading list; it was a convenient way for me to get article updates which I later used for some of my own blog postings. Blogging can also promote social interactions and engagement among educators and other professionals through the comments and feedback that one can leave on a blog that sparks one's interest. For instance, Thinnakorn's "Social Networking" and Wilairat's "Amazing Wikis" were two blogs that had postings that encourage dialogue about the posted topics through their prompt return response and informative commentary. Towards the 2nd half of the semester, I found myself repeatedly commenting on these blogs even though they were not part of my group assignment. My assigned group members Sue, Leah, and Greg made me aware that blogging can be used to build one's knowledge base. Sue's blog dealt with Web 2.0 technologies, Leah's blog addressed Twitter and Electronic/Interactive White Boards (IWB), and Greg's blog investigated IWBs and iTuneU.
Through blogging, I learned that there are a lot of exciting new innovations and experiments taking place in the world of Web 2.0 technologies. For example, in my November blog postings, I discussed how some academic researchers are using social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook to engage and motivate students. Furthermore, I looked at Wikipedia and addressed whether or not in the future it could ever be accepted fully as a scholarly resource by the college/university professors and library personnel. Last but not least, I looked at the cultural conflict that arose with Asian students and school assignments calling for them to utilize wikis.
Two ways in which I sought to improve my blogging was by incorporating videos and picture images into some of my blog postings. I think these two items made the topic postings more interesting to my readers and captured their attention in a quick and efficient manner. In addition, with some blog postings, I tried to select articles that were relevant to or in alignment with our online discussion sessions via Blackboard. For example, last week's Blackboard discussion topic was games and games based learning; I was able to find an article for my blog posting in which a university researcher was using video games to secretly assess the learning of some of her students. Known as stealth assessment, many of my fellow IDE classmates found this alternate form of learning assessment very interesting.
In the future, to further improve my blog postings, I think I will include more end of the week review/recap and critical reflection postings that incorporates not only my own thoughts, but those of my fellow classmates who either left return commentary or feedback on my blog postings. On Sunday, November 21, 2010, I did one such recap posting and I found it an extremely useful exercise.
