Week 2 Reflection

Well, the first two weeks have brought some new experiences, and through some exploration, have provided some useful tools.  With that said, I want to take a step back and elaborate on my early impressions of blogs and RSS Reader.  I have used blogs a few times before and have not really understood why they would be of good use for an individual, and possibly even a class.   I liked some of the comments that were discussed about personal use of the blog space as a slate to express thoughts and opinions on a certain subject, and for a class, I can now see the potential.   Blogs were always something I looked at as opinionated people’s way of expression that anyone could read, but now I see some benefits.   I was a bit hesitant and resistant to the blog set-up because it is viewable by the public, but with proper settings and a little work, it can be privatized.  I think it would have to be highly monitored if used with high school students, because like some similar applications (Like Facebook and Myspace), opinions could easily escalate to confrontation. 

As far as the RSS Reader goes, I wasn’t real sure what it was at first, so I didn’t know its capabilities.  After researching it a little and setting mine up, I was enlightened.  I was very happy to see that the three websites I constantly check during the day could be linked to one Reader.  This will save a lot of time in that I can quickly scroll through the Reader to see if there is anything of interest without going to each individual website and “surfing” through each sites material.  With that said, I have to return to Postman’s “information overload” statement.   The Reader is a perfect example of information overload.  In one hour this afternoon, I had 98 new postings on only 4 links.  I set up some filters to try to resolve this issue, but over the next two hours I still had 54 new posts.   That’s a lot of headings to look through, especially because only two articles were of interest to me.   So, there are some pros and cons to it, but overall I still think it will save time.  I love the “star” feature, so you can easily refer back to an article that you wanted saved.  Overall, I can see how this could be very beneficial to keeping up with the most up to date information in a classroom, but could cause information overload. 

In regards to Dale’s Cone, both the RSS Reader and Blog sites could potentially fit in many different levels of the cone.   I personally feel as though blogs are very close to the top.   I would say that most blogging would be in the top three levels (still pictures, visual symbols, and verbal symbols).  There is a lot of abstract thinking that goes into blogs.   Pictures can be posted, links can be added, symbols can be created, and messages can be posted.  For all of these things there is a large sense of cognitive connection, interpretation, and abstract thinking that puts all the pieces together.   Some assumptions of tone, non-verbal expression, and dialect have to be made, and then language itself guides the meaning of the written word.  It’s even stated in the article that “spoken words belong lower on the Cone than written words” for many of these same reasons.

The RSS Reader is still near the top layers of the Cone, but I think it takes on slightly more of the middle of the cone as well.  In addition to the top three layers, I think the Reader has more capabilities to include things at the motion picture and educational television levels of the Cone than blogs do.  As I stated before, RSS Readers and blogs can be aligned with many different levels of the cone, but they are directed more toward the top.  Very similar reasoning goes for the Reader.  It’s a lot of written word, interpretations need to be made, and there is a lot of connection making (abstract thinking) that accompanies it.  I include the other two levels with the Reader because I actually was linked to two videos on the NASA website, which gave me a different presentation of the material and was very useful.

Considering Seigel’s concept of “computer imagination” I think blogs could be of great use in lower grade level literacy circles.  Though I am not an English teacher, as I was talking with a colleague today, it suddenly hit me that literacy circles would benefit greatly from the blog type set-up.  It’s very similar to what we did last week, but can scaled down to work in elementary and middle school literacy classes.  The basics of it would be that students could be broken up into smaller groups (5-7 would be a great size) and given a book, chapter, or article to read.   Similar to what we did they could post a reflection as it related to personal experience, another piece of literature, or something else in the classroom and then could share ideas over the blog with each other.  Expanding this further, they could be given assignments like “dictionary demons” (as my colleague was talking about), which means the students have to find 5 words that they don’t know the meaning to, or don’t understand all the meanings of.  They then find the meaning and have to put it in their own words so that others can understand what it means also.  These could be posted to the blog and students would be able to access it and expand that assignment by commenting back with a sentence using each word, or giving a real world example of the meaning.  Now, sounds very similar to what we have done, but the advantages are greater.   Since they are internet based, parents could access them as well and read the discussions (bridging that parent- classroom gap).   Paper would be conserved because it’s electronic.  For the teacher, it would allow for more time to read and comment on discussion points without having to bounce between 3 or 4 literacy circles in the classroom and missing out on bits and pieces of each discussion.  Furthermore, most teachers can type quicker than they can write, so quicker (more descriptive) feedback could be given to the students than collecting papers and having to correct them and redistribute them.  (No more paper shuffling)

Lastly, the RSS Reader can be implemented in many ways that would involve “computer imagination”.  The one that comes to mind immediately would be in an economics, marketing, or accounting class.  A reader could be set up with financial links, business links, marketing strategies, and magazine links for quick up-to-date materials in the field.   I can remember having to flip through Business Week and Newsweek magazines (among a stack of others) and find current information on inflation, government spending stuff, and stock market related issues.  With the Reader, students could have up to the minute news (instead of last weeks magazine) from many different websites.  Depending on the specific topic the students needed to research, subscriptions could be easily modified and filtered to provide valid information.  Wish the teacher would have known about this (if it was available then) when I was in school.