A Culmination of Everything I’ve Ever Learned, in Essay Form

shelby — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 23:58:10 +0000

At the beginning of this semester, I didn’t know what to expect from the class, having received a description from my adviser that was vague at best. What I did not expect however, was a computer and internet oriented class that would completely change not only the way I viewed new media and the internet, but the way I viewed the classroom experience. I went in thinking that blogging was a ridiculous pastime for people who were obnoxiously desperate to be heard, (while some of those may exist) but I have learned that blogging is a chance to share experiences through a medium that literally has the ability to change the world. As I looked back over my past blogs, it was easy to see the progress I’ve made over the semester. In the beginning, my blog post were just a regurgitation of whatever I had read. But by the end, I’d learned not only how to read ☺ but also how to blog. My favorite blog was the Alien Education blog. It was the first time that I thought through the reason that the reading was assigned. I had read it, and I was originally frustrated because I couldn’t think of anything to write about. But when I took the time to evaluate, not what the story was about, but rather, why it was important that I read the story, I suddenly realized the significance. Blogging has become a way for me to clarify my thoughts. Even if they aren’t clear on my blog, writing them out certainly helps clarify them in my mind. I’ve done reader response journals and the like before, but they were rarely augmented by meaningful class discussion. Furthermore, I didn’t ever read anyone else’s journal. But blogging helped me not only map out my own ideas, but also listen to the ideas of other students as I read and commented on their blogs. I plan to continue blogging when I study abroad next semester, and hopefully as I continue my education in other venues.
However, I digress. The main point of this post is to talk about delicious. When I originally thought about my project, I had planned to incorporate dictionaries. However, when Dr. Campbell had a moment of insight (what you blog about is what you think about, brilliant!!) it became clear that delicious and tagging was the avenue I should go down. Because I tag everything. In the beginning of the semester, I was hesitant to tags sites because I was unsure if they were related. But Dr. C assured me it didn’t matter. Because there’s no such thing as random. While the thought process may seem random to the outsider, it always makes sense to the person who is thinking it. However we go down the path, we know the paths we took to get there. So nothing is random, and that means that whatever I chose to tag would be relevant. So while some of my tags ended up being related to new media, for example, The Media Lab, but other things were not (i.e. Robert Frost poetry).
As I experimented with delicious, I learned new things. I experimented with some of the options delicious presented, like creating blog posts of my tags. (That one never actually worked). Every time I stumbled across something new, I tagged it. I looked at other people’s blogs, and the blogs that they had linked to. I explored tags, tag clouds, wordels. Everything that I found I explored. It added up to a lot of hours doing essentially nothing, but in truth every page I found was something new I learned. Before this class I had never heard of half the things and people I know about now. That’s part of why this class was such a learning experiment.
Delicious was the place where I got to catalog all of my randomness. It was a library, of sorts, for all of my “books”. But instead of paperbacks, my library was full of websites. And the beauty of delicious was that all of my sites were connected. I could click on the tag “education” and find sites about Siftables and stupid grammar advice. Even though the two sites were seemingly unrelated, they both concerned education. I could look up other tags related to education, or just focus on my ten most popular tags. I could subscribe to other users bookmarks, including people in my class. And I could set up RSS feeds in my blog for specific bookmarks.
Delicious was a place to experiment with everything. But the best part about delicious wasn’t bookmarking sites or making tag clouds. The best part was tagging a website. Not very monumental to the unobservant, but it is really a learning moment. For example, when I first came across the Jon Udell blog, I maybe read the first post before I decided to tag it. My first instinct was to tag it as “blog” but delicious also recommends tags: your most popular tags, and the most common tags by other users. Here is where the learning occurs. After tagging it blog, I looked at the delicious suggested tags. They included, among other things, “programming, web2.0, screencast, and technology” At the time, I didn’t realize that Udell was such a technology guru, but after looking at his suggested tags, I did some more research. I looked up web2.0 and stumbled across, among others, Tim O’Reilly. From there, I expanded even more. I looked up my other web2.0 tags, and they included everything from tinyurl.com to Tim Berners-Lee’s TedTalk and WorldCat (which is actually a real library).
The beauty of delicious isn’t the organization and the bookmarks, thought they are a central feature. The beauty of delicious is its ability to serve as a learning tool. To help the user realize that education is more than textbooks and Baby Einstein CDs. Web2.0 is more than twitter and facebook.
Overall, this class has been a major learning experience. Ironically, it was only as a senior that I started to learn about how to learn. The saddest part is that I won’t really be able to apply this knowledge to very many more classes, but I suppose we’re always learning, so there’s still a chance to apply myself. Being in this class has given me a chance to evaluate not only how I learn, but how others learn as well, and how education should be changed to allow for the best learning possible.

Dreaming about Delicious

shelby — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 13:39:05 +0000

Last night delicous.com was in my dream, which, while decidedly odd, got me thinking about some things. I’ve been focused mainly on the moment of learning that comes when a site is tagged, but while looking at my delicious tags, I noticed that they are also all connected to each other by their shared tags. For example, I tagged two sites as “web2.0″. One was the Institute for the Future of the Book, and the other was LinkedIn.com, a social job networking site. Both are rightly tagged as web2.0, and yet, we tend to focus the definition of web2.0 as that thing which it is related to in the tag, rather than the whole definition. In other words, when I see the Insititute for the Future of the Book, and its tag, web2.0, I think about how web2.0 and If:book are related. I don’t think about social networking and web2.0 until I look at LinkedIn.com, but both are part of the total definition of web2.0. By looking at the tags as a whole, rather than just an individual site and its tags, we learn more about not only the site we tagged, but also the meaning of the tag itself.

Please Keep all Hands Inside the Vehicle

shelby — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 16:29:16 +0000

Take a walk in the woods. You can either have a specific start and end point in mind and wander as you choose on the journey or you can follow the pre-marked trail. Part of the problem with education is the pre-marked trail. If we are all stuck on the same path, is there ever any learning? Part of the beauty of learning is going down the undiscovered paths. Is repetition learning? Granted, perhaps it is with learning cursive, but there is so much more to learn beyond repetition. Is there any way to have progress if we are all doing the same thing? Yet we can’t have an education system without any structure. There must be a starting and ending point for the learner, but we can’t set him on a straight path with no room to explore. “Motivate the user and let him lose in a wonderful place” (Nelson). Being forced onto a path in the woods robs one of the beauty of the experience, the beauty of being in the woods. The beauty of being in the woods is that one can explore.

insert creative blog title here » Education

A Culmination of Everything I’ve Ever Learned, in Essay Form

Dreaming about Delicious

Please Keep all Hands Inside the Vehicle