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♠ Eric’s video

Very passionate in his presentation. I now just have to do everything he says: Twitter, Facebook, etc,…..So much is readily available nowadays. We just have to pick and choose.

♠ Ko & Rossen, Taking Advantage of New Opportunities

→ When I read that chapter, I was thinking of a particular sentence, which is the following:

 Lifelong learning is for everyone

That made me think that the age factor in French universities is not comparable with the one in the US. In France if you want to go back to school after your midlife “crisis”  we have special universities just for seniors and which are part of the “Union Française des Universités Tous Âges.” You are not really mixed in with young people who study towards a degree. At UCLA, I remember a lady, who was my classmate who started the Phd program at 50 years old. I was so surprised to see an “older” lady at the time and I did not know that it was possible to start your Phd. studies so late in life knowing that it requires a good amount of work to write the thesis. But now I understand and I can see that lifelong leaning is really for everyone.

♠ Video with Dean Shareski, Sharing : The Moral Imperative 

→ I like the passage where D.Shareski says that the information he uses does not always comes from him exclusively but from sources that he finds on the internet. What you insert into a specific content provides the unique tool called sharing via blogs, websites or other online tools. And we already know this is the main function of a teacher: to share his/her knowledge to the world and find the information not just from books but from the Internet as well. I think that it always has been a moral imperative to share what we know, at least in the academic world. Otherwise, no one would be able to learn anything if concepts, facts, etc, were not exposed to the world and namely our students.

♠ Gardner Campbell, A personal Cyberstructure

→ I took note of this particular comment in that paragraph: Many students simply want to know what their professors want and how to give that to them. But if what the professor truly wants is for students to discover and craft their own desires and dreams, a personal cyberinfrastructure provides the opportunity. To get there, students must be effective architects, narrators, curators, and inhabitants of their own digital lives.

→In my point of view and commenting on the readings from week 20, it is basically the same for the teacher, who has to be not only the leader but having also the same virtues as the students: narrator, architect and curator. The teacher leads and informs of the tasks and the students go further by making their own digital lives, their own research.

♠ Martin Weller, The virtues of Blogging as a Scholarly Activity 

→ This article was my favorite. I thought that he was very strait forward by stating that blogging did not have  the best impact on his academic life but the counterpart did: he persevered because he believed in this new Internet tool, which opened up so many doors to his world and beyond: ……. I have written books, produced online courses, led research efforts, and directed a number of university projects. While these have all been fulfilling, blogging tops the list because of its room for experimentation and potential to connect to timely intelligent debate. That keeps blogging at the top of the heap.

→ It is not a question of given up on other forms of educating people via the reading of books, for instance but blogging adds to what you do to make it 100% better: A key aspect of the digital revolution is not the direct replacement of one form of scholarly activity with another, but rather the addition of alternatives to existing forms. You blog so you automatically share to expand knowledge and it is free. A wise career choice.

 ♠ Video with Alec Couros, Teaching and Learning in a Networked World 

→ Alec Couros’video was neat. Great speaker. There are several passages which were funny. I like the presentation he did about himself at the beginning making some collages on his face. And viewing videos on YouTube ,which for some don’t make too much sense, was interesting also but as he says not everything is bad on YouTube and that is quite true, of course. There are some “intelligent” videos also. And I like the fact that he went into his past to show how quickly he was connected to the outside world. Showing his daughter with a computer at 4 years old was quite indicative of how much he believes in the Internet at a young age.

Working on for my presentation → Week 15: Creating Class Elements Part 3: Screencasting and multimedia (Feb 16-22)