Wednesday, May 21, 2008
Future Plans
Cool Stuff from Web 2.0
There is a lot of stuff on this website. There is just about anything you want to find whether it deals with music, news in the world (sports), documents to create blogs etc... This site is pretty useful. I saved it as one of my favorites and intend to go back and look at more because there is a bunch of things to look at. Thanks for the link to this site.
Sunday, May 18, 2008
Changing Times
I scarcely remember the day that I had to go to the library and had to dig through the filed cards so I could find a research book for school. Today someone it is possible that someone could never leave the comfort of their home and computer and find just about any information they needed to know off the internet. This age is turning research into a few minutes of browsing through Google to see what came up for the topic you typed in. Teachers are having to put boundaries on what websites are allowed for research and what are not because just about anything from anyone can be published and put on the internet without inspection. According to Derek E. Baird and Mercedes Fisher who wrote “Neomillennial User Experience Design Strategies: Utilizing Social Networking Media to Support “Always On” Learning Styles” state that in the “1990’s, as the digital age began to bloom, teachers were among the first to embrace the Internet and other first generation digital technologies, finding creative and innovative ways to integrate these digital technologies in their classrooms”. It is interesting to me because a lot of teachers now want you to have at least half your sources from hard books from the library and limit your sources on the internet. I think this just shows the vulnerability that the internet has now that didn’t use to be there fifteen years ago when it was just getting started. The internet however, has enhanced the learning of most students as it enables them to search a vast amount of research in a limited amount of time.
Libraries need to update facilities
Blogs are something that I have never really understood and don’t know how people have so much free time on their hands to constantly update these with everything else they are doing. Mary Ann Kajewski who wrote an article on “Emerging Technologies Changing Public Library Service Delivery Models” suggest that blogging can be the new way for libraries to reach the public in a more efficient and informative way. She suggests that “creating a blog for your library is a free, easy and fast way for your staff to communicate information to your public and if you choose, to provide a medium for your public to participate in service development”. The only real contact I have had with blogs before this were two years ago when a former basketball coach I had was hit with a stroke. His brother got on the computer and kept everyone up to date with what was going on in his life. This coach almost died and took months to recuperate after many surgeries later. It was really neat to be able to hop on and see how Coach Johnson was doing because he was I Oklahoma and hard to get a hold of. So in this sense I could see blogs being very useful and beneficial.
Facebook Good or Bad?
After reading Richard Ferdig’s editorial on “Examining Software in Teacher Education” I came to the conclusion that our society has changed tremendously in the last five years. Yea, this sounds like common sense but I don’t think people really look at how fast things are changing. Our society has made more technological breakthroughs in the last fifteen years then in the last one hundred years combined. The biggest thing that has caught on fire these past couple years is the whole Facebook and Myspace thing. Just about everyone has one and if someone doesn’t they are almost made to feel that they are losers and don’t have a life. I know because I have been one of those people who have held out from getting plugged into either of them. I finally had to get signed up for this master’s class I am taking but I have had a numerous amount of people try to get me to sign up for an account in the past and I never have until now. Ferdig suggests that can be both beneficial and non-beneficial but I think just about everything in life can be taken advantage in the wrong way if someone really wants to. I will probably get even more involved in Facebook now that I have one because it does seem to be a good way to stay involved with people once you can no longer see them face to face.
Interesting Technology
I just had a birthday recently and received a GPS for my car. I have never had any contact with one before and am looking forward to using it more. My parents figured that because next year I will be traveling a lot on scouting and recruiting trips that I might need a little help finding where I am going as well as hotels, restaurants etc... It amazes me on how accurate this is and I don’t even have to pay a subscription or anything on it. I’m not going to lie and say that I am the most up to date on technology so this is pretty neat for me. However, I am still old school with a lot of stuff so when I am planning a trip I sit down before hand and look at my route with a regular paper map. I do use Google map to find directions but sometimes I just like looking at the paper map and write anything I want to on the map. This will probably be out dated like next week but it’s what works for me.
