Week Five - Class Critiques, Delicious, Social Networking Papers

Week Five started out with a bang - or was that a crash?  There was a major problem with this assignment. We were supposed to send out a mass email (with the links to our Wiki, Ning, and Facebook groups) to all of our classmates through Blackboard's Communication section. Unfortunately, when setting up in Blackboard upon entering this Master's program, almost all of our classmates used the privacy settings to hide their email addresses! One of my classmates was really on the ball and discovered this problem with the Roster early in the week. She posted it in the Question & Answer forum. As far as I can tell, only a handful followed her directions and changed their settings. In total, I was able to acquire only about twelve of the twenty email addresses needed before the deadline.
      Many students had trouble with sending only the link to Facebook in general instead of the link to the page containing their group. The impact of all of these problems is that those of us attempting to turn our work in on time had only a handful of selections to choose from as we tried to provide feedback on 3 each (nine total) of our classmates' wikis, nings, and Facebook groups.  This means that only a few people will receive the benefit of their classmates' feedback. 
     The Student Reflection was on a rather loosely thrown together article from a USA Today reporter with the titillating title of, "Scientists ask:  Is technology rewiring our brains?"  The article quoted very few actual facts, only a few studies, and, from the "experts," only "suggestions" not actual findings. The premise was that students are different today than they were twenty years ago because of electronic games and the Internet. A further premise was that children are not learning or are forgetting the necessary social skills for dealing with people face-to-face.  My response to the article is found here in a separate document.
     We were instructed to open a Delicious account.  I already did that in Week One so I just needed to refine it a bit according to the directions given.  It seems that it will be a very helpful tool for organizing and retrieving bookmarks.  I am certain it will be of tremendous help in research.  Will Richardson, in our text, mentions how we used to search for information in a library or an Internet search site then makes the case for social bookmarking:
     But today, when we now have the power to organize vast libaries of information on our own, the process is being run by millions of amateurs with no real training in classification.  Not to worry, however, because as with many topics on the new Net, users of social bookmarking systems have created a new concept to deal with the change:  the process is no longer taxonomy but "folksonomy."  The idea is that in working with your community of researchers, new tagging systems will emerge and become accepted that will allow us all to participate in the process.  Although this might seem as chaotic and not effective as
traditional methods, by being able to apply many tags to one particular link, we get the added potential of  seeing how others might interpret or use resources that we share.  Thus we get connected to information  in ways that traditional libraries cannot duplicate.  And the more people contribute in the creation of
folsonomies, the more valuable they become to all who participate (2009, p. 90).
On a personal note, this will now make it possible for me to actually be able to organize and easily retrieve the over three hundred ungrouped bookmarks that I have accumulated in just a couple of years - hooray! 

Letter of Request
This assignment was interesting.  It made me put my knowledge into words.  We were instructed to write a fictitious letter to our principal/boss asking permission to use a social networking tool in our class/training. 

Critical Thinking Exercise
This assignment was basically designed to make us read two chapters from Richardson.  The questions required answers that pretty much had to be paraphrases or direct quotes.  That makes for a lot of in-text citations.  The instructions said a "1-2 page paper" but it would have taken that much (double-spaced) just to write down all of the questions or lead-ins from them!  I ended up with 7 pages in the body.  There were about twelve questions.  We'll see what happens. 
  
Reference
Richardson, Will (2009). Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms. Thousand Oaks, California: Corwin Press.

Scientists ask: Is technology rewiring our brains? USA Today. (11/10/2009). Retrieved from http://usatoday.printthis.clickability.com/pt/cpt?action=cpt&title=Scie4ntists+ask%3A+Is+...