podcasting

better late than never, here is some sharing of work I've done about podcasting. This is a fully developed research proposal that I will likely be implementing down the road since there is very little formal research (especially quantitative) on the educational value of podcasting. Unbelievable though. Apparently Blogger doesn't allow me to attach a file to a post. So I'll have to see about getting it up on the web so I can link to it.

The Tentative Plan for my Project

One of the classes I teach regularly here at CNM is called "College Success" it is a course that I wish I could've taken before I started my college career. It centers on self-discipline, self-appreciation, study habits, life as a student in the real world, and lots of self reflection and idea sharing. So what I am considering is a two-phase approach to the study habit area as well as the sharing. I think having the students set up a bookmarking account and sharing it will help them with both online and library research (since I will also have them use the bookmarking tool to create their own personal article or book reference using proper citation ( citation will be a new lesson module as well) The idea, is to give them a personal bookmark foundation which they can use throughout their college career.

The second aspect would be to have then set up a social networking site (I know there is an academic variant of facebook out there, I will just have to find it) We will them move our discussions out of blackboard and into this tool. The logic here is that within Blackboard, the students lose access to the discussions when the class ends. By using a networking site, we can not only retain the discussions, but that site can exist beyond the class as a peer netwrking site through college, and perhaps beyond.

This week: A look at ZooLoo

for this week's assignment, I decided to random;y "google" the term "free photo and and Media Sharing" and selected a service called ZooLoo. Signing up was the easy part, but one soon finds the site to be a little convoluted. They seem to want to have connectivity to everything else. This could be a good thing since it allows one to share posted between sites, and can even send a Twitter message when a new image or posting is made. Definitely a plus for the diehard web 2.0 aficionados. For educational use though, I think the myriad of options and related instructions required would make it more troublesome than useful (unless it was a class about web2.0 perhaps)
Uploading and annotating image posts is rather straightforward, and I had no problem at all getting a picture in there. Once you have more than one, it allows you to categorize them into "albums" any way you choose.
The service also provides a dashboard with Google searching, RSS feeds, weather, news and other widgets you can customize ( like I said, they want to be the all-in-one)
don't get me wrong though, I do sort of like this approach since in a previous post I referenced an article that presented the notion there being too much out there to keep track of. ZooLoo has taken some broad steps to not just be a image presentation site, but to become a user's homepage with interaction many of the popular web 2.0 utilities. I plan to spend more time there (because I want to), so may have an addendum to this posting.
you can see my "site here

some additional thoughts...
mulling it over, I do think that, with a good integration in lesson-planning, this site could be useful for education since it does provide a sort of "portal" to several tools. From this central location, a class can share media, link to a facebook site, twitter one another, and custom links to a bookmarking site can also be added. The portal can also support RSS content, so students could personalize their own "class portal" page.

Can MySpace make better writers?

I'm inclined to agree with the author that tools such as MySpace, Blogs etc. can foster better writing skills, especially if the student knows that peers will be viewing, or that it will be graded. Next time I see one of our English faculty, I will have to ask for an opinion. I do grade grammar in the courses I teach to some extent. These are are college success courses where a journal is kept by each student. This could fit very well in an online journal or personal blog too.
One thing I do disagree with the author about is the significance of creative abbreviation. it's not bad thing. But I believe there is time and place for it - that is when one is sending a text message. I feel it is important to distinguish for students, that this is not something to be randomly used, and especially not to be used in professional communication. Case in point; the text below is from a sale representative who contacted me as part of my job. This was the first communication I ever received from him:

Dear Brian,

(company) provides subtitling services for live streams and on-demand video content.
We would like to discuss partnering with Central New Mexico Community College in order to bring these capabilities to your target audience.

Please LMK who would be the best person to contact.

Am I just being nit-picky, or does he really "kill" his introduction with that "LMK"?

His company does provide a valuable and needed service for online learning. But I feel someone from his organization should talk to him about professional correspondence.

What's the Difference?

I'm a bit off-topic once again here. But I just retrieved some notes I took at a conference last year where we sort of defined the differences between web 2.0 and the previous -which we were calling web 1.0 :

Web 1.0:
-had static pages which were mostly code-based (HTML)
-for communication they just had feedback forms and guestbook signing
-information was basically one-way (publisher to you)

Web 2.0:
-the pages are dynamic, consisting of HTML, XHTML, Java, Flash etc.
-communication is not just back and forth, but multi-way. Publisher to you, you to publisher, you to world
-information is at minimum 2-way but usually mirrows the communication aspect goinf in multiple direction through the use of blogs, wikis and other tools.

we also came across Commoncraft, which you may find to be a great source for simple explanations of just about everything, including web 2.0 tools are. But be careful! it's easy to get "caught up" there and before you know it, you've been there for an hour..or even longer!