Conclusion

If I was to say anything about this journey it would be that it made me look at things that I would probably not looked at normally, in all honesty I had not even looked at YouTube until I did this.  It is hard to say if I have a favourite discovery I looked over the list and in one way or another I knew about most the things I just had no inclination to look at them.

Having said that I am now far more aware of a lot more sources of information that could be useful to me and I have since looked at YouTube a couple of times so I guess it has left its mark.  If there is one thing that was hard it was finding the time, I know some of my latter post have not been my best but I had to do them in bits and pieces where I had a few moments.

 Would I do another one, maybe; I did like the format all of the things and they were nicely laid out with good instructions and the best thing was the examples to look at.

LinkedIn

It is hard to describe something that I do not have, you may have picked up through my previous blogs that all of these social media things are not really me.  My PLN would consist of the people I work with and I could not say that I developed it as much as it formed by proximity.  I did look at LinkedIn and was disappointed with it from the perspective that you really cannot explore it without joining but I see its’ potential.  If I was looking to advance myself in my career this is definitely something I would use, however I am happy where I am.

 After looking at the ACU LinkedIn page it basically has the same information as the home page and Facebook just shown a different way.  Not that I am saying that is a bad thing, different people like different things so the more coverage you have the more people you reach.

Mobile, QR, AR

You don’t make this easy on me because I spend very little time on mobile devises, I barely ever use my Ipad. Having said that I do find Flipboard to be a good site, I like the way you move around.

QR codes are a very useful basic tool for providing information, there are a number of the dotted around the library and we used them on the shuttle busses as well.

 Augmented reality I do find interesting, it has great potential as a learning tool especially taking into account advances in holographic technology.  I can imagine the two combining or blending together in some form in the future.  When I first heard about AR last year I did find an article on SixthSense. There are similarities with Google Glass and given that this article was written in 2009 I think it shows the speed at which some of these technologies are advancing.

I would also like to mention Leap Motion and ZeroN, they are both technologies that create real time interaction with hand gestures and computer generated images or in ZeroN’ s case direct human-computer interaction with physical objects.

 The potential is mind boggling

 

 

 

MOOC's

This thing is about online learning, at present I am doing a course online and although having access to everything at any time is handy I personally like to have a class to go to and talk to people face to face.  I think it is clear however that online courses will have an important place in the future of education and I point to this excerpt from one of the articles;

{ Nicholas Negroponte, the founder and chairman of the One Laptop Per Child foundation, asked in a September article for the MIT Technology Review: If kids in Ethiopia learn to read without school, what does that say about kids in New York City who do not learn even with school?” }

 I think this shows that if operating MOOC’s is more cost effective than tradition schools that they are a better option for areas of the world that are very poor.  For me I thought that the point being made in the excerpt does not necessarily reflect on traditional institutions as much as I think it relates to attitude, it is sometimes easy to take things that you have easy access to for granted.  But MOOC’s or any form of online learning could benefit students that do not do well in traditional schools, I think this is where online learning could be at its most effective as an alternative.

 As for where online learning is going that is always difficult to say about anything, but generally speaking where it goes will depend on money and profit.  As for the negative

I think that providing the infrastructure and the maintenance required on it could be a problem and given that I haven’t done one of these the provision of help if you start a course and are struggling.

Twitter

This week is about twitter, now I am unlikely to ever use twitter but I looked at our ACU library account and I clicked on the prayforBoston link in the Worldwide trends and I understand the purpose for hashtags.

For this thing we were asked to reflect on what you have read – has it changed your mind about the possible value of Twitter?.  I have never given Twitter a lot of thought because social media does not interest me, but as an information tool I can see its value.  There were quite a few useful things on the ACU site and the NLA site had a lot of interesting things on it to, I also had a look at the SLQ site and there is a striking resemblance to the ACU site, I wonder who followed who.

I also found the what are the risks section on the microblogging site was a good read especially the voicing personal opinions part.

Reflection Week

The thing with these things is that they primarily to do with social media and that is something that is of little interest to me and being a library assistant there is little if no use for using the tools in my work.  However the information given for each thing was very good, there was always examples to look at which saved me from harassing a lot of people.

My experiences with the tools that I did look at has definitely improved my understanding of how these things work and I feel that I am better able to navigate myself around anything that I may try in the future.  Reflecting on what I have done so far I won’t approach the last few things any differently, I will plough through them the best I can when I can fit them in.  As for recommending something to a colleague, that flow of knowledge definitely flows in my direction and not the other way.

Create content and content curation

For the first part of this thing I wanted to talk about Flipboard, although I have it on my Ipad I don’t look at it a lot but I do like it and the way that it is designed.  From a professional point of view it is not useful but like TED if you were involved in research or you are a librarian it could be a good tool for learning about new technologies.

For the second part I looked at Storybird and Extranormal, I looked at both because you could not explore Storybird to much without signing up but I do think that it is a great idea and would be a great tool for teachers.  As mention in my last post I have seen Extranormal before and even though there speech patterns are not perfect I found them good to watch and the technology behind it will get better over time.