Blog Post 7: Professional Learning Network

Every morning I'm greeted by two new sources of information in my inbox: An edutopia Community News Alert and Digg's Digg Deeper Daily Wrap (say that ten times fast). I subscribe to the following feeds on edutopia: Technology Integration, Game-Based Learning, and Media Literacy. This site proved useful last month when I used it to learn more about James Paul Gee, a researcher in the area of linguistics and literacy. and an author whose book we are reading in this quarter's GED 580 - Game Design for Educators. Although I have not contributed to any discussions or posted to any forums, I do appreciate the resources that are afforded here. I know it's only a mater of time until I join in on the conversation and get acclimated to this still-new environment.

My areas of interest are a bit broader on Digg. I have been using it to help with research on the topic of social media and education for yet another class - GED 690. My subscriptions to Digg not only cover education and educational technology, but current events and consumer technology.  It proves a convenient way to catch up on today's news (you mean it's not all about Cal Poly Pomona?). With time and practice, I see myself fine-tuning my subscriptions as my areas of interest broaden and evolve. That's the beauty of Web 2.0: It is tailor-made, immediate, relevant, and quite responsive.

Question 1
Some theorists have posited that learning does not happen within - from the inside out, but rather through social connections - from the outside in. What implications are there for social media and education?

Answer 1 
Social media serves as an ideal delivery method for today's students; students who consume vast quantities of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. Their literacy with these modalities brings like-minded students together. Blogs, tweets, messages: ideas are distributed and shared, reflected on, and acted upon. This sharing, connecting, and further expansion of ideas is at the heart of social learning and education. What's the point in knowing something if you can't share it with someone else?

Question 2
The short video below depicts the evolution of a typical workspace over several decades. Notice the authors' correlation between the physical items and their idea of its Web 2.0 counterparts.  Is today's tech merely a repackaging of proven processes or is it more? 

Answer 2 
I believe we are at a crossroads of technology and intellectual development (for the time being, at least!). We have reached a point where the processing power of our technology can give our personal processing power a run for its money. Additionally, information which took months or even years to reach us, can be measured in mere seconds. There's a point in the video where the rolodex (the item on the right, in front of the globe) morphs into a LinkedIn icon. Of course people connected, shared, negotiated, and brokered deals before the days of LinkedIn. LinkedIn, and the assortment of icons depitcted have the capacity to shorten the time for those connections, negotiations, and deals to occur. I like to think of these tools as not necessarily improvements, but as an amplification or augmentation -  for both the good and the not-so-good. We're able to do what we've done in the past, except quicker, custom-tailored, and perhaps too, a bit more impersonally.