CT weblog

1.Don’t Tell Your Parents: Schools Embrace MySpace, Wired
http://www.wired.com/culture/education/news/2007/04/myspaceforschool
This article by WIRED magazine talks about schools needing and wanting social network sites. It states that there has been recent efforts to outlaw social networking sites through a US congressional bill that would stop funds to schools that do not restrict access to such sites. And in response to such actions by the US government has prompted Elgg, an open- source social networking software developed at the University of Brighton, has been developed with an academic angle. It also states a comment by professor Ewout ter Haar, the software allows students and teachers to share and debate their work, and as a networking tool where students and teachers can find others with similar interests. “Students seem to be using especially their blog as the expression of their academic identity,” he said. (Robert Andrews, 2007)

2.Warnings about social-networking sites, E school news
http://www.eschoolnews.com/news/showstoryts.cfm?Articleid=6495
Eschoolnews.com states how social networking sites can have a negative affect on students and how. It states that many schools are warning students of the potential treats that come from social networking sites. Some of the dangers that the article talks about are not related to predators but dangers that come from potential employers and from educators such as an employer not hiring an individual because of the content on their MySpace: and educators can reprimand students for the very same reason. Even though some schools state they will not directly search for offenses on the sites, they have to act on complaints from third parties, which can sometimes be a form of black mail. The article states that employers use such sites to find potential candidates. There is also a reference to a survey that states that a third of employers ran job applicants names through search engines, and look at their social networking sites said 12% of those employers. The article also mentions “College administrators say they can’t–and wouldn’t want to–keep students off sites such as Facebook. Many welcome the kind of community-building the sites facilitate, and they recognize they have become an important, and usually harmless, venue for the kind of identity formation and presentation that’s an important part of the college experience.” (eSchool News staff staff2006)

3.Using Social Networking to Its Fullest Potential, University Business. http://www.universitybusiness.com/viewarticle.aspx?articleid=764
In this article the author states “Perhaps the best way to deal with the invitation only barrier to social networking is to develop your own social network for prospective students, current students, parents, and even alumni. As the owner of the network, you are the one doing the inviting”. It mentions that even though as the creator of the site one should not over govern the content users generate. Which will only lead students to not register to the site, stay as member, or use the site. The article also mentions Steven Infanti who is the director of communications and marketing at Harrisburg University of Science and Technology (Pa.). In the article they state his point of view on schools creating their own social networking sites.

4.National School Boards Association Research and Guidelines on Online Social Networking, WDIL
http://www.wdil.org/resources/national-school-boards-association-research-and-guidelines-on-online-social-networking
This article mentions that safety concerns about online social networking are overblown, and recommends schools become more comfortable with social networks and seek educational uses for online social networking. The article also mentions a survey on how students used the Internet, the survey found the following; 96% of students with internet access say they have used social networking technologies; 81% have visited a social networking Website in the past 3 months, and 71% report using social networking tools at least weekly; 59% talk about education-related topics online and over 50% talk about schoolwork.

1.
This article supports my problem of social networking with in student with an educational setting.
It also tells me that for the most part students are willing to communicate under an educational setting.
2.
The information from the article will support that there is a need for sites that can deliver what the big social networking sites due, with out all the extra baggage. It will also give me great examples of pros and cons of social networking sites.
3.
I will reference the fact that it talks about the importance for schools to develop their own social networking site.
4.
I will reference this article to support the fact some students’ are willing to communicate when they are given the right tools to do so. I will also use this article to support the fact that a lot of schools see social networking sites as a good tool for students to improve in many aspects such as their reading or writing, parents are also said to agree with this.

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Similar sites

I have not be able to find a site that matches what I am in mind . Some sites that have the basis to what my project is going to be are as follow.

www.studivz.net

A social networking platform for students, in particular college and university students in Europe, based in Berlin, Germany. The name is an abbreviation of the German expression Studentenverzeichnis, which means students’ directory.
The service is largely comparable to the services offered by its US-counterpart Facebook. StudiVZ claims to be one of the biggest social networks in Europe, with reportedly about four million members as of August 2007,[1] mostly in German-speaking countries Germany, Switzerland and Austria.

www.bebo.com

A social networking website, designed to allow friends to communicate in various ways. It has developed into an online community where users can post pictures, write blogs and send messages to one another, and is similar in format to MySpace, Xanga, and Yahoo! 360. The site was founded in January 2005 by husband and wife team Michael and Xochi Birch. It was given a major relaunch in July of that year.[2] Bebo can be used in most countries around the world including Ireland, Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, New Zealand and Australia. Bebo have recently launched a Polish version of the site which uses a different user database. There are also plans for French and Spanish versions among others.

www.ning.com

Ning is a company co-founded by Marc Andreessen (of Netscape fame) and Gina Bianchini. It launched its service in October 2005. Ning is an online platform for creating social websites and social networks. The websites running on its service are built in standard PHP and the platform itself is built in Java.

Ning hopes to compete with large social sites like MySpace and Facebook by appealing to users who want to create networks around specific interests or have limited technical skills.[1] The unique feature of Ning is that anyone can make a full copy of the types of social websites and social networks that are popular today and customize them for a particular topic or need, catering to specific audiences. At its launch, in October 2004, Ning offered several simple base websites developed internally and by members of a closed beta. In late September of 2006, Ning narrowed its focus to offering a group website, a photos website, and a videos website for people to copy and use for any purpose. These three templates were superseded by a single customizable template aimed at allowing non-developers to more easily customize their copy of the social website. An example of the new base can be seen at the company-maintained network creators website. All the older sites are still accessible, but the company is only actively developing and promoting the new social network template.

Facebook

A social networking website that allows people to communicate with their friends and exchange information. Launched on February 4, 2004, Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg, a former member of the Harvard Class of 2006 and former Ardsley High School student. Initially the membership was restricted to students of Harvard College. It was subsequently expanded to other Boston area schools (Boston College, Boston University, Harvard, Northeastern University, Tufts University), Rochester, Stanford, NYU, Northwestern, and all Ivy League schools within two months. Many individual universities were added in rapid succession over the next year. Eventually, people with a university (e.g .edu, .ac.uk, etc.) email address from institutions across the globe were eligible to join. Networks were then initiated for high schools and some large companies. Since September 11, 2006, it has been made available to any email address[2] user who inputs a certain age range. Users can select to join one or more participating networks, such as a high school, place of employment, or geographic region.

Online Articles

Article 1 Google search (communication importance within students)

Article 2

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Some questions that I am thinking about using in a questionnaire that I will be doing in my research for my capstone project. The plan is to setup a link on the fuser, and also hope use the schools emails to send students the link to my form. Please let me know what you think about the questions, or if you have any questions. I am going to try and get the form going on Friday at noon. Thank you for you time.

Questions

What quarter are you in?

Which program do you belong to?

Would it interest you to critique other students work?

Are you interested in your work being critique by other students?

Are you interested in communicating with students from your program and outside your program?

How do you currently communicate with other classmates in and out of your program?

How do you feel about communicating with people you don’t know?

What would spark an interest to communicate with someone you do not know?

Would you be interested in an application that would facilitate communicating with students from AID?

How do you prefer to communicate with other through the internet?

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Problem

The problem that I am will be tackling is intercommunication within programs in a college setting. This is a problem to the students who might not be utilizing communication tools that the school supplies, or to the students that do utilize the tools but have a very small community of students to communicate with. This can be a problem for many reasons but two problems stand out the most. The first main problem is the lost opportunity to network and communicate with other students. The other problem is that the students don’t have opportunity to network with students from different semesters or quarters. Freshman students may never have the chance to communicate with senior students, and miss the chance to learn from the seniors’ experience.

Solution

The solution to the problem will be an application that will run on the internet as well as on the desktop. This solution will give new students an instant tool to communicate with others students that are in the same program. Some of the possible tools of the applications are as follow. Instant messenger that will be automatically set as the users logs on to a school computer. This will also login the student to the site, the user will have the option to have the site viewable in a window or just have the instant message window display. As the users logins it will let the users friends know that he/she have logged on and were logged in at (as is room number or over the web), members from the same program will also be notified about the recent login. Another tool will be a user gallery where the user will be able to display their work that they have or are working on. Other user will be able to leave comments or critiques on each of the examples the user uploads. Another important tool of the site will be the message board system, where users will be able to communicate back and forth at their own pace. User will also have a about me page where they will be able to display their work, and their program and interest. All information on this page should at a professional matter. The main key to the solution will be that the site must be visually appealing to the main demographic.

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My experience with SL was good; it did have some up and downs. The first down was, me trying to get out of the tutorial stage of SL. After that I had lots of fun flying around, and seeing all the different class and other things to do. After that I had another down, not having any money kind of sucked. Then I remembered that Lynsey had mentioned a money tree. So I began my journey to look for it, which I found after 30 min of searching. Funny thing was that with the money that I obtained I did not making any purchasing at all. After that I really got busy with school and failed to continue my journey in SL. But I should have asked my girl friend Blanca how much she liked it; she played a lot more then me. Overall I found SL to be a good experience.

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For my project HTMLguide.com I am planning in integrating four new technologies. I have picked Flash, php, mySQL, and if time permits AJAX.

Flash

I have picked to use flash in the testing section of the site. I will embed the flash movies into div’s. The reason that I have chosen flash over JavaScript is because I feel that I can save some developing time. Also in flash it’s a lot easier to create more dynamic menus and cooler affects quick and easy.

php, mySQL

I selected php and mySQL to create two forms to collect information about the user. The first form will be in place to collect new member information. The second form is in place to collect complaints and comments about the site from the users. I selected php and mySQL because that is the only way that I know store information to a database.

AJAX

If time permits I would like to use AJAX to make the site more dynamic.

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After reading some of the new design process that interested me the most, I found that Learning by Design is one of the strongest and the design with the best chance to develop a strong project. The article in www.elearningpost.com on Learning by Design got me interested, and it also motivated me to further research the design process Learning by Design. Which led to l-by-d which helped me better understand the design process. I also did some research on ADDIE and found ed.isu.edu this gave an insight on all that ADDIE has to offer. One of the difference that I see between ADDIE and Learning by Design, is that the possibilties of a Learnin by Design is capable of creating not just good project but excellent projects. ADDIE is capable of delivering good projects but it seems that its one of the reasons that the e-learning has not taken off as it should have.

If I were to chose a design process to work it would be Learnin by Design with out a doubt. I feel that by paying attetion to other design process from different fields will only make Learning by Design a more innovative process. Generation step from Learning by Desin process is something that I have used at school. In the class Media Arts Survey, many of the assignments we had to was to brain storm ideas. Were quantity is more important then quality, and then we start to pick out the best ideas of the bunch. Therefor I belive that this process is one that I would feel the most comfortable with.

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After my research I have found many examples of Connectivism that only deal with animals. For example , E. Thorndike explains an experiment with cat. Were the cat has to escape from a puzzle. After a while the cat learns that it needs to press two levers. One of the levers (S) activate the level (R) and then having to pressing lever (R) to open the door to be able to escape the puzzle. I had a hard time in figuring out a way to simulate the same type of problem but for a human. After time thinking about a solution I remembered a site that Mr. Smith showed that would give an an idea. sqlzoo.net, in this site you are given a task for an SQL statement. They provide you with a input box to carry out the SQL statement. Once you have completed the task you submit it and it checks to see if the statement was entered in correctly. Well this site gave me an idea for a game with levels. The user will be able to pass each level by either answering a question correctly or as the the site showed, by executing a task correctly.

so�.. i came up with The HTML Game.

HTML GAME:

Levels:

The game will be a multi layered game. Each level will build on what was learned on the prior level. In order to play the higher harder lever, the user must first pass the lower level. Each of the level will have information that will build up to make a stage. So the user will make connections between a lower level examples to more complicated examples.

Stages:

Once a user has completed a stage, they are given another stage of the game, which is harder then the prior stage. The format for all the stages are the same, so they will all have multiple levels, and each level is harder then the prior level. Each stage will represent a different tutorial. Just like HTMLdog.com

Incentives:

The user will be rewarded with more and more complicated information to learn. The game itself will be also an incentive for the user, they will not have to read boring tutorials, instead they can play a game. After the user has completed all of the stages they will receive cheat sheets.

How users will learn:

Following the Connectivism Principals, I believe that the user will make multiple connections. Which is how Connectivism measures Intelligence.

The site will not be just a game, but a site that will give a game for each segment the user will like to learn. Some what like www.htmldog.com were they have examples and then you can practice on your own. But in this site the user will be able to play a game.

If you have any suggestion or idea let me know.

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Question 1

Scores:

Learning styles VARK Questionnaire

• Visual:8
• Aural: 7
• Read/Write: 7
• Kinesthetic: 6

The results for my learning style stated that I have a multimodal learning preference, which explains my inability to find a single way of learning. I have alway used different methods to learn different subjects. When I played football I had to see the diagram of the plays in order for me to learn them, I was never able to learn by solely practicing the plays. In math I need to repeat the math problems several times to retain the information also true in me learning code. Now I see that I need to practice my strongest learning style to be a better learner or to learn better, what ever you get the point.

Intelligences Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences

1. 16 Group
2. 15 Body
3. 14 Picture
4. 14 Nature
5. 12 Math / Logic
6. 11 Self
7. 10 Word
8. 9 Music

I strongly feel that test results are accurate to my intelligences rankings. The top four scores are the strengths that I thrive on and tend to use most. I feel very comfortable around larger crowds and in larger groups. Being involved with organizations has always interested me since high school. Playing sports has always been a passions and something that I have always been interested in. Art has always attracted me, my favorite school trips were the ones to the Art Museum. Nature has been something that I inherited from my family, we regularly have trips that tend to involve nature from camping trips to a day at the lake, to always having a family pet. Now for my music result, it has always been the one thing that has never really interested me. Even thou I played the trumpet in middle school, which I failed miserably at and led me to be last chair for the better half of my music career. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy hearing music and use it to be more creative, but I let the professionals create the music.

Question 2

If I were hired to develop an interactive media for a college e-learning course involving XHTML/CSS scripting. I would develop a site that was fitted to the students learning style and their strongest intelligence. After doing some research I came across three sites that would help me better understand both intelligence and learning styles. The site that helped me better understand learning style is Vark Learning Styles by Jean Morgan. The article explained in detail how each of the learning styles would be taken advantage by each type corresponding students. I found an article that clarified the different intelligence which was written by Dr. Thomas Armstrong titled simply Multiple Intelligences. Even thou this article is in place just to sell this dudes book it had some useful information. I also found an article that talked about the work of Howard Gardner work with multiple intelligence. The information that I obtained is best described by this quote from the article.

Howard Gardner initially formulated a list of seven intelligences. His listing was provisional. The first two are ones that have been typically valued in schools; the next three are usually associated with the arts; and the final two are what Howard Gardner called ‘personal intelligences’ (Gardner 1999: 41-43).

After the reasearch I would develop the site according the following out line. The outline will first consist of the students different learning styles.

Learning Styles:

Reading / Writing

• Students will be given sites with articles involving XHTML/CSS scripting.
• Students will then write a blog about what they had read along side a examples of what they had learned to do on the site.
• Students next task will be to find other sites that helped them better understand the material.

Visual

• Student will be given multiple videos of the teacher doing examples.
• Students will also have step by step examples with an image showing aiding in each of the steps.
• Student will then practice what they had just learned.
• Students next task will be to find other sites that helped them better understand the material.

Aural

• Students will have to listen to a series of podcasts created by the instructor.
• Students will also be given videos to aid them along side with the audio.
• Student will then practice what they had just learned.
• Students next task will be to find other sites that helped them better understand the material.

Kinesthetic

• Students will be given examples that they would have to replicate as an assignment.
• The student will also need to find sites to aid them in the assignment, along side with teacher notes.

Question 3

In high school I was given a similar test to the VARK test, I do not recall but I might have been the same one. But even then I was labeled as a visual learner. Looking back I can see how I have always learned best when I followed the instructor work a problem on the overhead or when I was able to worked the problem immediately after the instructor finished with the problem or example. I also learned by reading both out loud and to my self, this little trick only worked in history and in science.

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