The first of the blogs for this week is one of multiple resources. It is the 2008 Horizon Report: The k12 Edition Blog site. In this blog the author explains and represents multiple online learning communication tools. It gives a breakdown of numerous communication tools that will be completely adopted in the next year. Tools such as skype, ustreamtv, and youpack are overviewed and linked for support. I believe this blog is a wonderful reference for all educators.
This blog illustrates how these communication tools can be adapted for all ages and experience levels. The thing I liked best about this blog was how it showed the relevance for using these communication tools in teaching, it also provided examples of how these communication tools are already being used by teachers from across the United States.
Another thing that I particularly found useful was the links on the right hand side of the page. These resources were the happenings before this blog and the accounts of what occurred after this particular blog. The one that I really enjoyed looking through was the one titled Technologies to Watch. This blog gave descriptions of up and coming technologies for the world of education. I also found that every time I clicked on another link I was mesmerized by the information I found.
This blog can be found at the following address: http://wp.nmc.org/horizon-k12-2009/chapters/online-communication-tools/
The second blog that I looked at for this week was found at Into the Blogosphere called Blogs as Virtual Communities: Identifying a Sense of Community in the Julie/Julia Project. This blog was written by Anita Blanchard and focused on the question of why are virtual communities important? It was interesting to read her ideas as I considered the discussion question for this week. Her point was that the term virtual community has been so overused that the term has actually lost its meaning, and while online education cannot be conducted without a virtual community she wanted to know exactly what that meant. To discover what the term actually meant Blanchard presented many different resources as well as a case study that she followed.
The case study was a blog that Blanchard followed to see if blogs could be indeed called a virtual community. Her findings were that with this particular blog and the followers the virtual community was only moderate at best, however all participants did feel the blog was a positive experience. So my question after looking at this blog was how can we take blogs from being just a positive experience and turn them in to a real virtual community. I sometimes feel that when blogging online I am missing the interpersonal connections of tone, and feel the writing to be monotone. No matter how good the writing may be, I find it hard to get into because I am just scrolling down another page.
I found this blog to be a very interesting, and honest review of virtual communities, and blogs in education. I believe that we could all benefit from reading this blog. Blanchard’s blog can be found at: http://blog.lib.umn.edu/blogosphere/blogs_as_virtual.html
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Kassidy,
ReplyDeleteI understand your point about blogs being "monotone" and lacking "interpersonal connections." Since we do communicate through Skype...you and I...I would like to suggest that maybe we connect more because there are emoticons that allow us to express our mood and our feelings with a click. That is something that blogging lacks, although my site blog has a mood emoticon category for me to choose each time I start to add a new entry.
I love using wiki's and blogs, and Skype, and I am still working on building my website; however, there needs to be more....I love sound and color and things like that. I like that you have different color writing in your blog. I am very visual and there are many gaps in parts of distance learning where that is missing. I believe blogs can be interpersonal if we know how to approach it. I can write much better than speak at times. There is something about writing that allows me to express myself in a way that I cannot always do in speaking. I just need all the "bling" to go along with it.
Maybe that is why I love creating PowerPoint and multimedia presentations so much. I sense that quality in you, also, from your projects.
The question is...how can we get there from here? What can we do to improve blogging? What innovation is needed to make it more interpersonal? This is something to think about!
Cynthia