Week 4 Reflection

1.) Social Bookmarking

I can see some value in the idea of social bookmarking, but I must admit that it would be tough for me to come up with a convincing argument that people should use it.  This is the first one of the medias we have looked at that I really see as counterproductive.  Let me start by saying that the concept of saving bookmarks for personal use is excellent, and I personally do this on my computer.   It saves time, gives a refresher at times of sites that you may not have visited in a while, and important resources are one click away.  As far as the networking goes, I can see how other people being able to see the URL’s of the websites you have saved could be a good thing.  Administrators, parents, students, and other teachers could check out your favorite sites, and it could be useful for them.   However, if a person has their own sites bookmarked, and is networked with as few as 4 other people, there could be enough bookmarks in their network to check out that time could be easily wasted.  I like the tag feature, so if you are looking for a website with a specific topic, you could do a search, but I feel that you would get more productive search results by simply using a search engine. 

Now, I can see one area that I could defend this issue.  I think social bookmarking could be great in a very small network of people.  For example, if a network of four high school math teachers were to bookmark sites related to various topics that each team member may teach at some point, this idea could be great!   This is the only example that I can think of where social bookmarking would be more effective than other methods.  

2.)Trends & Issues (Chapter 1)

Chapter 1 in our textbook was interesting to read.  Maybe it’s just me, but I felt as though the chapter started off with the history of the definition, but about halfway through, the spectrum of opinion slid to one side.  By the end of the chapter, Reiser and Dempsey made me feel like if I didn’t agree with their definition (and I didn’t) that I was shamefully wrong, and lost in this field.   Taking a step back, I felt like all the definitions were very similar in meaning, and also relatively vague.  Each definition tended to fit with the era it was written in, but they all seemed to have the same general meaning.  The definition that most corresponded to the words I would have used to describe this field was the 2006 definition posed by the AECT.  Nothing in the chapter really surprised me, except for that throughout the last century, the definition seemed to grow with the times, but each definition was vague and provided some area for interpretation, all while hitting the main points.  

I don’t really feel like anything is missing in any other definitions, but I do feel like the definitions that use simpler words, tend to have a more realistic meaning to me.  The reason I say I don’t agree with the Reiser & Dempsey definition is that they are trying to be too technical in my opinion.   Using bigger words out of a thesaurus doesn’t make the meaning a whole lot different, and if I take 8 historical vague definitions and put it into one definition using all the key words previously used, it doesn’t make the definition stronger.   To me, the field of Educational Technology (amongst 8 other ways of saying it) is tough to define and there can be no perfect definition.  The vast changes in the future of technology will allow for more ways to define Educational Technology again.