Kirsten’s E-Learning Blog

Activity 1.2 relates to web-based applications, which is something I am quite familiar with.

I quite regularly use chat (not necessarily chat forums but more so applications such as MSN Messenger), and am currently using a weblog!

I am subscribed to a number of podcasts (which have meant that my family reached their download limit last month in less than two weeks :S oops!).

I think that RSS and aggregators (such as Netvibes) are fantastic as it means I don’t have to go trawling hundreds of websites to find what I’m looking for. It’s especially good for me to find articles on football (aka soccer – I despise that term!) and netball, considering they’re often hidden in the depths of news websites

Social networking is a web-based application I am VERY familiar with, and it is often a source of procrastination and distraction! I’m a member of SO MANY social networking sites – Bebo, LiveJournal, Facebook, MySpace. I do mostly only use Facebook, and sometimes MySpace, but my Bebo and LiveJournal pages have been languishing in cyberspace for quite some time now without me looking at them

E-portfolios are a quite interesting concept, however my e-portfolio has been totally neglected since I completed the subject in first year :S I think I might be able to use it…

I’ve used wikis for this subject, and e-learning experiences, as well as putting it into use for another subject. We had a group assignment and thought that a wiki would come in handy for discussion as the only time we can meet is in class. As we have to do work outside of class in order to complete the assignment, I created a wiki page to share ideas and information rather than having a constant email thread going back and forth with heaps of attachments and “Fwd:”s

And I’m really only motivated to do these blogs because I’m avoiding doing an assignment for another subject worth 65%… ooops

Anyway… the activity…

The Horizon Report was interesting, as I’ve never heard of it before. To be honest I’ve only read the summary (I printed it out, and the summary was long enough, let alone printing the entire report), but I’d probably read more if I had the time…

The 2008 report listed the 6 technologies that they see will emerge and become part of the online learning environment. They included:

• grassroots video (I’m familiar with this technology in the forms of YouTube, MySpace video and Facebook video),
• collaboration webs (Could this include BlackBoard on UTSOnline?),
• mobile broadband (Is this talking about the 3G networks?)
• data mashups (Is Netvibes a form of data mashup? Or seeing who is online or has updated their status on Facebook?)
• collective intelligence (Can this be seen in our wikis or in our tags on del.icio.us?)
• social operating systems (Is Facebook using a social operating system concept to inform the way they develop their applications?)

The significant trends relate to my experiences of technology in learning in the following ways:

1. Mashups, co-creation and self-publication is used in e-Learning Design
2. Collaborative workplaces, social networking and Skype can be related to our experiences with JoKay in Second Life and our Second Life lecture
3. Portability of content can be related the devices which carry content such as podcast, movies and files becoming smaller, cheaper and more easy to access by most.
4. The distance between student’s grasp of new technology and higher education faculty adoption can be seen in regards to social networking, Netvibes and wikis. Although we have experienced these in e-Learning, a lot of other students could benefit from them but have not had the opportunity to become aware of them or to access them.

In regards to the 2007 report, I have had experience with or have knowledge of the following emerging technologies:

• User created content – such as Wikispaces and edublogs
• Social networking – such as MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, LiveJournal (yes I am slightly addicted to social networking, haha)
• Mobile phones – I have a phone, which has WAP capabilities, but I’m not on a 3G network, so I haven’t experienced mobile broadband
• Virtual worlds – I’ve experienced Second Life both first hand and as an observer (I’ve had to not go “in world” for a while because I was using up all our download! oops!)

I have no knowledge of any multiplayer educational games, or new scholarship and emerging forms of publication…

Ok. So we’ve pretty much established that I suck at blogging regularly.

I wish I could just sit down and type, but I’m so easily distracted by so many things its just frustrating.

Things will pick up soon, I’m trying my best to use my break productively…