Monday, October 18, 2010

Blogs, Wikis, and Other Online Writing Processes

Note: I will use this blog post to support a presentation I'm doing for my EDUC638 class on October 19, 2010. It might or might nor be of interest to my regular audience. Short URL to this post: http://bit.ly/EDUC638-blogswikis

For those who don't know yet, I've finally decided to start using my fee waivers and enrolled in EDUC638 Learning Technology Across The Curriculum. As a part of my coursework, I have to present on the topic of blogs and wikis, and how to use them in education.

I have always felt weird that blogs and wikis are bunched together all the time. In my opinion, they are completely different technologies. My presentation will address that, and go beyond the traditional notion of blogs and wikis to explore other online writing technologies and context.

Blogs wikis
View more presentations from Mathieu Plourde.

Activities:
My Wiki Report:
Videos: 


Resources Cited in Slides:

    Monday, October 4, 2010

    Branded to Learn: Leveraging Social Media Conversations

    On October 5, 2010, I have presented at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at the University of Delaware about the use of social media for learning. I don't think I'm an expert in this (anyone who claims to be a social media guru is a poser, in my opinion), but some might see some of the things I have experienced in the past as "social media micro-successes", for lack of finding a better term...

    Before I dig into a laundry list of slides, videos, and resources, I'd like to use a quote from Clay Shirky's most recent book, Cognitive Surplus. Describing the ever-widening gap between him and his NYU students...

    They can understand the shift from scarcity to abundance, since the process is still going on today. A much harder thing to explain to them is this: if you were a citizen of that world [before the Internet], and you had something you needed to say in public, you couldn't. Period. Media content wasn't produced by consumers; if you had the wherewithal to say something in public, you weren't a consumer anymore, by definition. Movie reviews came from movie reviewers. Public opinions came from opinion columnists. Reporting came from reporters. (page 61)

    Now that any cellphone becomes a means of self-expression and a public conversation device, it's hard to imagine what it was like, even 10 years ago.

    This presentation is a mix of my personal experience with social media, how I got introduced to it, used it, and tailored it to make me aware of the world and make the world aware of me. Social media is a weird new space, where you need to brag a little to get noticed, and where it's not always frowned upon to do so (see Self-Service: The Delicate Dance of Online Bragging for more on this subject).

    Below is a list of links pointing to tools I referred to in my presentation. Have fun exploring! 

    Personal Productivity Tools

    Social Networking Tools

    Enhanced Reality Tools

    Content Hosting and Creation





    Short URL to this page: http://bit.ly/branded2learn

    Disclaimer and Copyright

    The ideas and opinions expressed on this blog are mine, and do not necessarely reflect my employer's point of view.


    Creative Commons License
    This work by Mathieu Plourde is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.