30 Minutes without Any Technology

The technology I use most is the Internet on a daily basis. Other than surfing online, I rarely watch TV, I don’t own a GPS, iPod, and I have been resistant to own a smart phone thanks to my husband’s not-so-right user habits. I read on Kindle from time to time for pleasure and listen to the radio on my ride to and from school. However, I do spend a lot of time on the Internet daily. I would say if I am at home, I stay in front of my laptop. Thus, to accomplish the task of 30-minute-without-any-technology for me is simply shut off my computer and get out of my house.  

I enjoy going to a bookstore for my time off from technology or something else. A good cup of coffee is a must-be for my break, I would check the new books, magazines or gadgets in store or just simply watch people. After all, the real human touch of things is still in need for me rather than everything occurs in virtual world. 

In the era of new technology, it’s difficult to stay away from new gadgets. However, I am meant not to rely on technology too much. For example, I don’t buy a GPS because I don’t want to lose my direction sense and my ability of map navigation. I still memorize some of my family members’ and friends’ phone numbers and might need to contact them for emergency in case if my cell phone gets lost or broken and correspondingly the phone book is not accessible. This task, 30 minutes or even day(s) without any technology, is indeed a great practice for me.

Kindle Experiments and Reflections

I had heard E-book for years and hadn’t own one until my husband buy me a Kindle as a birthday gift last year.  Even spending most my life reading through printed books, it was a breezy transition for me to Kindle. After all, I have had a number of years digital medium user experience. As a portable reading device, Kindle has benefited e-readers from various aspects.

1.      The books are cheaper. Amazon claimed Kindle Store owns over 550,000 books that cost US$ 9.99 or less and thousands of free books.

2.      A “pre-read” chapter. Buyers can pre-read first chapter to see if the book is something they are really interested in before place the order.

3.      Buying books is easy. Buyers can place an order and download the book in less than one minute with free built-in 3G wireless connection. Only the 3G feature comes with an extra price tag.

4.      An easy-to-carry portable library.  You can carry up to 3,500 books in a slim handheld device.

5.      Digital notes and highlights: You can take notes, highlights, clippings, and bookmarks on your own Kindle. Amazon also allows readers to store all the notes, highlight and bookmarks on their server and share with others, although some readers are concerning this feature might abuse their privacy and account security.

6.      You can do research while reading. Kinle enables me to research the unfamiliar words through built-in dictionary or connect to Google or Wikipedia for further information. This is one of my favorite features.

7.       Battery. After suffering from the battery with my other digital gadgets, Kindle’s long battery life is a breeze to me. Its battery allows you to read for up to one month on a single charge. Frequent travelers, especially traveling out of countries that have different electric voltage or power outlets, will greatly appreciate this advantage.

8.      Monitor display. Unlike most of digital monitors, Kindle’s electronic ink screen works just like real books and newspapers, eliminates the glare, and can be read easily even in bright sunlight.

Benefits in one context, may be drawbacks in another. Some things I don’t like about Kindle are:

1.      The price. The Kindle we have is 9.7 DX version came with a price tag US$ 379. You can get a full-functioned Netbook or replace an entry level iPad with another $120 which is a multiuse gadget rather than an E-reader. The cheapest model costs $139, it is still relative expensive while it only does one thing.

2.      No sharing allowed. Although Amazon allows buyers lending e-books to others, it comes with rather strict limits. First of all, not every e-book is lendable, it is publishers’ call.  You can only lend for a two week period and only lend a book once. Also the book is unavailable to you during the two week lending period. Not to mention that no reselling is allowed.

3.      Lack of real page numbers. It is challenging to provide footnotes for quotes because Kindle uses “location numbers” instead of page numbers.

4.      Frequent page turns are tiring. My husband is a math professor, and he particularly dislikes the downside of Kindle because he has the needs to locate certain pages of literatures or papers. Without “go to page” function

Kindle in Education

Without any question, Amazon would leave educational market behind and try to expand their market share. Here is what they state the reasons why the Kindle is an excellent choice for student, teachers, and school for K-12 and higher education. Their biggest sale points are no more overloaded backpacks, get digital textbooks instantly, and carry all documents on the go. In fact, Kindle and Princeton University and many other universities elaborated pilot programs in 2009 that Amazon provided free Kindle DX for the student participants for their classwork. The main common accomplishments revealed by the universities are cut the cost reduction in the use of paper and have immediate to all the course material in a lightweight device.  According to the pilot experiments and my personal observation, Kindle doesn’t have any killer feature exceed their competitors. This current E-reader, with black-and-write screen plus limited web surf capacity, seems doesn’t have a bright future as an academic tool. Additionally, its applications for educational purposes are not strong or unique which can be easily achieved by various devices like iPad, Tablet computers, Netbooks, laptops…and so on. Besides its high cost for an individual machine, Kindle’s single purpose – reading is not appealing to media multitaskers. Lee Graham indicated that the current student population is part of the “entertain me” generation. They wanna be engaged, as well as, entertained as they learn. http://www.elearning30.com/2010/05/27/kindle-failed-higher-education/  To become a key player in educational market, Kindle still has a long way to go.

Social Media Experiments and Reflections

It’s hard to notice sometimes how our life has changed until we stop a moment and look back to see how different it has been from not long time ago. As this assignment asked for how social media has affected our life, I scrutinize my day-to-day activities and would say social media has significantly impacted more than ever on my daily life. From how we get keep up with the world, how we do our daily business, to how we reveal and gain information, social network, play a big or small part in different phases of life.

Along the rapid growth of social networking sites in last decade, most of people have been familiar with Facebook or MySpace. According to the statistics released by Technology Review in January 2011, Facebook’s market has been growing at more than 200% rate last year in different countries like South Korea, Romania, Hungary, Thailand, Brazil, Russia, India, Portugal, Costa Rica…ect. Despite of some of significant drawbacks of using Facebook like privacy and security, it will most likely remain one of widest acceptable platform. Microblog –Twitter, the 2^nd biggest social media with 95,8000,000 members (ebizmba.com February 2011), enables users send and read messages on the go. Thanks to the most popular video-sharing media, people can upload, share and discover videos for different purposes, entertaining, educational or business… and so on. Many people subscribe publications with RSS reader or News Aggregator software to stay up-to-date based on personal interests. With RSS feeds, the news or information will come to us, it can be time saving and trustworthy since we know who or what organization is recommending the fed content.

I haven’t heard any of social bookmarking sites. Bookmarks is one of features my use a lot on my laptop. It truly saves my time for repeated information navigation. The downside is the booked sites are not able to be shared within different devices or even different browsers. Now people can store bookmarks, add tags of their choices, and designate the saved the bookmarks as public or private through a registered social bookmarking site. The article, 7 things you should know about social bookmarking (EDUCASE Learning Initiative, May 2005), addressed social bookmarking give users the opportunity to express differing perspectives on information and resources through informal organizational structures and allow like-mined individuals to find one another and create new communities of users that continue to influence the ongoing evolution of folksonomies and common tags for resources. Social bookmarking is also a useful tool to promote website traffic by tagging or sharing the sites among the cyber community. The downside of social bookmarking is there is no oversight as to how resources are organized and tagged and the resource might never be found by others with different logics of bookmarking and tagging.

While working with preschoolers, I haven’t had too many chances integrating social media into teaching. I use YouTube most in classroom to show some videos related the topics of thematic units. For example, we collect a series of video on the topic – bears we are learning this week and present them in a flash, entertaining way, so videos can help draw their attention and enhance learning experience. The video embedding feature of YouTube is a greatly helpful element for educators. Teachers are able to embed the videos on any site to share with colleagues, parents and community members to promote the communication and collaboration.

In age of Web 2.0., the possibilities of social media can be endless. Implement different media for different groups of learners, the learning results could vary significantly. As an educator, knowing yourself, understanding your students and getting familiar with your tools, at least, you are heading the right way along the technology revolution. 

Advantages and Disadvantages of Using Blogs and Wikis in Education

I had my first blog when my husband and I moved to the United States. I was planning to stay in touch with my family and friend living in Taiwan by posting my diaries on my blog. It didn’t last too long because my husband didn’t like our live revealed on the Internet. However, following up different blogs has been part of my life to keep up with the world. I don’t have too much personal experience of using Wikis. Most of my Wiki knowledge was acquired from the Internet or other users’ experiences. 

Accompanying with the popularity of blogs and wikis, more and more educators start to integrate them into academic activities for educational purposes. One of common characteristics of blogs and wikis is that they allow teachers to reach out to the community or even the whole world and bring the community with the same interests into the classroom.  Blogs are more intended for web-based journals written usually by a single author and typically within a specific theme or area of interest. On the other hand, wikis are a type of writing cyberspace and allows users to express and edit the postings and are designed for collaborative authoring by everyone in the group. After I did visit a wide range of blogs and wikis and combined research, I found out that despite of the fundamental differences, both of blogs and wikis share some common advantages and disadvantages, my reflections on them are shown as the following points.

Advantages

1.      Free or inexpensive. Many providers offer free blog or wiki services. Even with advanced features, they charge a quite affordable price.

2.      Offer an easy publishing tool for posting information as well as getting feedback to and from public. Both of them are easy to learn and use with pre-designed templates and step by step user guidelines.

3.      Enable educators and learners to expand the learning circle with parents, communities, or even the people around the world who has access to the Internet. They allow users by sharing their articles, views and comments to build a network with similar interests.

4.      Digital achieve. It eases the frustration of navigation for the posted articles and discussion in relation to particular topics. With recent change feature, wikis have the capability to track every edit and to revert back a previous version of postings.  

5.      Provide collaborative learning environment and promote communication skills in some aspects. Wikis and blogs create a common goal of participation and help learners develop social skills about group consensus and compromise. Students are encouraged to being authors and develop communication skills, especially in writing and reading, while class activities take place in virtual setting rather than traditional classroom.

Disadvantages

1.       Confidentiality and quality concern. All the postings go to public unless the site owner limits the access. It’s time consuming and involves a lot of efforts to maintain the quality of the site quality and keep it on task. Public publication can also result in becoming an easy target for spam or vandalism if not manage properly.

2.       Plagiarism and copyright issues. The publishers need extra caution not only to make sure all the postings are original or the quotations from others are clearly remarked, but also for prevention from outsiders stealing their intellectual properties.

3.       Hard to grade and assess. It can be overwhelming for educators to grade either too many or too few entries are posted by students.

4.       Users can be distracted easily. Once the students get connected with blogs or wikis, they also have access to the entire virtual world and can get diverted away from their tasks easily.

5.       Lack of listening and speaking skill training. The activities are mainly conducted in text writing. Not all language skills can be comprehended in blogging or wiki related coursework, especially in listening and speaking. Writing may be more casual than traditional assignment and can lead to sloppy writing similar to email or text messaging.

About This Blog

This blog is about my reflections on technology experiments and various assignments for CECS 5200, New Technologies of Instruction.  

My experience of using new technologies of instruction is that new technology is not necessarily good for instruction; only right technology makes a positive contribution in learning.