Group items tagged

10 steps to follow to manage and create a positive digital footprint

EdTech 543 Online Reputation Management Assignment: Here is the link to my Google doc with a list of 10 strategies for creating and maintaing a positive professional presence online.

This article by Stephen Downes provides a great insight into what an effective PLN looks like and how it functions. I enjoyed reading about his second stage of PLNs, which is the "personal learning environment." This idea is presented as the evolution of PLNs due to technology and connectivism in the classroom.

This article by Stephen Downes gives a definition of a community of practice and then discusses PLE's moving into networks and the characteristics of a learning network: diversity, autonomy connectedness and openness.

As I was relatively unfamiliar with learning networks before this course, I wanted to find resources that showed me what they looked like and examples of how they can be used. This article introduces the importance of using digital tools effectively and empower ourselves to gain the knowledge the web offers. The author states that "Learning therefore evolves from being a transfer of content and knowledge to the production of content and knowledge". Working in a network, PLE or communities of practice allow learners to be creative about information and knowledge, instead of just consuming information and knowledge. The article highlights the key benefits of a PLN: diversity, autonomy, connectedness, and openness.

This Edutopia article explains what a PLN is, how they develop through thought, that PLNs are collaborative, what PLNs can do for you, and how to build a PLN. The article brings up three deterrents of PLNs for educators: PLN is a mindset, there is an overwhelming amount of techno-babble, and requires more digital literacy than a Google search. A good quote from this article is, "We must remember that lifelong learning requires effort." The article ends with a list of resources on PLNs.

Edutopia's article defines PLN and provides concrete ways for educators to establish one. While it addresses the barriers for mass adoption of PLN, the focus is to highlight the collaborative nature of PLN. It is this collaboration that allows for personal and professional growth.

This is yet another great and practical article. I especially like how the author outlined how we can each develop a PLN in 20 min/ day and gave some great suggestions for what we should do with those 20 minutes. 20 min/day feels very doable, even to someone new to PLNs or social media.

This is a more technical site that better describes CoPs.  It talks about what a CoP is and what the requirements are.  I particularly like that the it states that the learning is not necessarily the primary reason for the existence of a CoP.  It also gives some sources for further study.

This article is an outline of Communities of Practice with description of relevant terminology outlined and defined. Identifies the three components of CoPs - domain, community and practice. This article says that the central component of this learning theory is to draw participants deeper into the community through the attractiveness of developing skills relative to the domain.

This one I didn't summarize, only because I really had a hard time grasping the three elements of the CoP, and I thought this site encapsulated it nicely. Incidentally, my creative assignment for this week was inspired by the reference to Star Trek fans in this post. Here are the three elements make up CoP, and again, this information below is taken straight from the source (long quotes), because the definition is so good: 1. There needs to be a domain. A CoP has an identity defined by a shared domain of interest (e.g. radiologists, Star Trek fans, middle school history teachers, Seahawks football fans, etc.); it's not just a network of people or club of friends. Membership implies a commitment to the domain. 2. There needs to be a community. A necessary component is that members of a specific domain interact and engage in shared activities, help each other, and share information with each other. They build relationships that enable them to learn from each other. In this way, merely sharing the same job does not necessitate a CoP. A static website on hunting in itself is not a community of practice. There needs to be people who interact and learn together in order for a CoP to be formed. Note that members do not necessarily work together daily, however. Wenger points to the example of Impressionist painters who sometimes met in cafes to discuss their painting styles. He indicates that even though these men normally painted alone, these kinds of interactions were essential to making them a CoP. 3. There needs to be a practice: A CoP is not just people who have an interest in something (e.g. sports or agriculture practices). The third requirement for a CoP is that the members are practitioners. They develop a shared repertoire of resources which can include stories, helpful tools, experiences, stories, ways of handling typical problems, etc. This kind of interaction needs to be developed over time. A conversation with a random stranger who happens to be an exp

Here is a list of my resources that I found for this assignment. I put my summaries in the descriptions.

I shared all of these resources individually before I realized a list would create less clutter and be easier to share with others. So, sorry for the redundancy -- here is my list. I tried to make sure all resources were available for free and didn't require library login access, though there were some great articles I didn't include for that reason. I'll be interested to see how all of our resources compare.

Gretel, I posted a list first. But upon reading the assignment parameters, we are supposed to post each link individually anyway!

This blog post describes a conference about Communities of Practice. The author considers the similarities and differences between Communities of Practice and Personal Learning Environments.

A major difference between a Community of Practice and a Professional Learning Committee is that those in the PLC are often assigned or required to be a member. CoPs seem to evolve more naturally from a desire to gain knowledge. The author of this post had just attended training given by the Wenger-Trayners--CoP gurus.

This blog post highlights communities of practice as one of the theories behind the personal learning network concept. It makes a distinction in that even though PLC's can be a community of practice, they aren't always guaranteed to be.

Another free student organization website. Offers a collaboration feature to connect students with one another. Mobile app also available.

This article gives "real life" examples of connectivism using twitter as a medium.

I'm also taking Global and Cultural Perspectives in Educational Technology this term and this article really relates to the discussions on culture that we are having in that class. It made me realize that in some ways connectivism and the use of social media- i.e. back channeling and tweeting- are a whole new culture to learn and this is why I'm struggling a bit with it.

Great article. Like Nona, it home for me as well. I appreciate how the author uses her own personal experience in the classroom to demonstrate her understanding of social networking. Today, I encourage my students to use their phone to take pics of assignments, tweet info, and access information. Back channeling is a great term!

This is a blog of an expert in Personal Learning Networks. He talks about how his own PLN has developed and changed over his professional career due to the availabilty to make connections with others in far more ways than were possible 20 years ago. He briefly describes many of the connection possibilities on the internet such as social networks, blogs, wikis, etc.

I like the discussion in this article about critical behaviors. I have found that it is challenging at first to follow through on those behaviors. Assignments in our edtech courses help us engage in such behaviors, but the question for me is whether or not I'll keep those habits intact after the courses end. Thanks for the link.

University of Southern California class is using Pinterest for assignments. They use the social media app to gather images for a project on public art.

Students create a twitter account for a specific class (in this case journalism). They are encouraged to follow their classmates school accounts. Assignments are given about what specific tweets should be about. For history or geography class, these could be extremely specific and unit driven.

This is an example of how a science department is using wikispaces to organize the curriculum for many of their classes. I was hoping to find teachers using wikispaces the way I was originally taught to use them- as a place for students to collaborate and build a wiki together. You can see what I wrote for an assignment, but I don't have any students with whom to use it: http://learningsciencealacarte.wikispaces.com/Biological_Molecules