Using Photosharing Sites in Lifelong Learning

I can see the use of photosharing sites in the context of supporting facilitators presenting material. We offer a wide range of art, history, and music classes. All these topics could benefit from the facilitators being able to gather examples and easily display slide shows to their classes.

Using Visual Material

Compare your current or past use of visual instructional material with how web 2.0 technology could be used to present them. Are there unique ways that you and your students could collaborate with photosharing?

Within our OLLI program we frequently use visual instructional material, particularly in art classes, history classes, and opera and other music appreciation classes. Currently the materials may be hard copy pictures presented on overhead projector, power point presentations, and canned video presentations which have already selected the images to be presented. In exploring Flickr, I can see many opportunities for using this to quickly gather examples for use during classes. For example, we just finished presently a class on Arlington National Cemetery. The facilitator spent many hours gleaning through books to gather photographs to use during her presentation. I can now see that she probably could have gather the vast majority right from flickr.
Beyond adding to the classroom for OLLI, our OLLI participants produce amazing works of art. We could photograph and share their work, even present a series of in progress art work, as a way of showing each student their own progress, and share their work with the world.

"I like your font" - Steve Hargadon - Classroom 2.0

Steve Hargadon writes: "topic or content is maybe not as important as the act of engagement. We each have dozens to hundreds of things that we are passionate or care about. In some interesting way, engagement trumps topic--when we find a topic that creates engagement, that engagement changes how we view our lives and sense of learning in all areas we are interested in. It changes how we think about sharing and discussing things with others. So when a network we thought was going to be a big hit isn't, all is not lost. Our job is not as much to define what is talked about, but to help conversation to take place."


What caught my attention in this post is the idea of the role of relationships in education.

Friendster

1. What was the target audience for this social networking site?
The target audience of Friendster was people looking for potential dating partners. The premise was to connect friends of friends as a networking tool. Users ended up coming from three main groups, bloggers, art festival participants, and gay men.

week 4 dicussion assignment

All of these formats for online communication appear, at least to some degree, to overlap in their purpose and function. My current challenge is sorting out which piece of online technology is the most effective and efficient for different types of goals within education. The use of social networking sites could be helpful in building relationships between students in an on line class. They could also be useful for live chats, comparing notes with each other on assignments, and getting clarification from the instructor.

Using Wikis in Classrooms and Online Courses

I am teaching a course for the first time, and so using a wiki to develop class notes sounds like a terrific idea. I could post my outlines, and use some of the techniques described in Richard Buckland's presentation. So far I have developed a very preliminary wiki that includes some introductory material and overviews. It could also be a way to save on paper and handouts, posting material to a wiki instead of handing out material.