Week 5 Reading Reflection

Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century by Henry Jenkins, Director of the Comparative Media Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

In this article the author discusses how educators need to prepare children with the technology skills needed to succeed later on in life. One concern is also that students should be aware of how media shapes their perception of the world, but aren’t having that experience because school programs, after school programs and informal programs are not consistent with helping students understand the
“new media landscape” that’s around them. Participatory culture shifts focus from literacy to one that had individual expression, and involves social skills that are developed through collaboration and networking.

Collective Intelligence:
Collective Intelligence is the ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with others toward a common goal. In other words, like-minded individuals gather to discuss one common topic with much different information being processed. “Everyone knows something, nobody knows everything, and what any one person knows can be tapped by the group as a whole.

Week 4 Readings

Rise of the Participation Culture
http://www.alicechristie.com/classes/530/p_culture%20.pdf

Web 2.0 is such a profound connection to the world. In this article, it talks about using Google Gadgets. I had never heard of this until this article. Google Gadgets places your favorite sites on your blog whoever visits your site can see what you are interested in. The one thing that Podcasting, blogging, Google Gadgets, and social networking sites such as MySpace all have in common are they all attract people to them by how they how easy it is to access them.

With blogs:

* Students can create a site that shows who they are and display what they have learned.

* Parents can see what their child is actually learning in school and what really interests them.

* Teachers could use them as an interactive journal or class newsletter.

* Blogging is the new way of socializing with people around the world and from state to state.

* Blogging would be a great way for students to communicate with a pen pal from another state or country.

Media creation and sharing:
This section talks about how Media creation and sharing is a great way to share photos and pod casts. Pod casts is a great way to teach without lecture. A Pod cast could motivate students to share their own works of art such as explaining the process a plant goes through to grow, to giving examples of words that begin with each of the letters of the alphabet to make their own collective ABC movie. It’s a great tool to use to share students work to parents.

Week 3 Readings

http://teachingtoday.glencoe.com/howtoarticles/social-bookmarking
http://www.newsweek.com/id/45976/output/print
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html

WEB 2.0
One of the best quotes I came across when reading these articles was this:
"Less than a decade ago, when we were first getting used to the idea of an Internet, people described the act of going online as venturing into some foreign realm called cyberspace. But that metaphor no longer applies. MySpace, Flickr and all the other newcomers aren't places to go, but things to do, ways to express yourself, means to connect with others and extend your own horizons. Cyberspace was somewhere else. The Web is where we live."

Social Bookmarking:
I actually didn't know anything about this subject until I completed the reading of this article. I have always had a hard time keeping track of sites I find valuable and then somehow transporting them to the computers at school for my students to use.
If a student or teacher searches for information on a topic, a social bookmarking site like del.icio.us provides links to sites that other people have found valuable.

Classroom Management: Students and teachers can move from one computer to another and still have full access to their bookmarks. Students and teachers will be less likely to forget the location of the sites they have used. This makes it easy for older students to come into the younger students' classroom and collaborate together about different topics being taught in the curriculum.