As I did not manage to submit my link to my VLE and the questions I am interested in; I have added the details in my PLE link. Please refer to this link to view my VLE and the questions accompanying it.


Thanks

Thanks to Jenny's recommendation at her blog. I made a trip to Golgster and had a go at creating a poster for myself. Rediscovered my passion for creation and all things nice. Wanna see my creation? Click here!

Going "SOLO"? (Social Objects & Learning Objects). What do I think of them? Click on the link to find out more.

More updates on my assignment Two is found by clicking on this link

Find out why I decided to switch to Weebly.

Please click on the hyperlink and read more about my assignment: "Our Food, Our Heritage" .

The Machine is Us/ing Us (Final Version)
Dr Michael Wesch (Kansas University- Digital Ethnography)

I support the author’s view in that although the structure of information remains largely the same, the mode of presenting information or searching for information has changed dramatically. The exclusivity of information has been freed by the internet and the development of many social software. While the barebones of information remain largely intact, the exponential growth of collaborative knowledge is huge. The internet has revolutionised the way we are looking for and creating new knowledge and information. We need to think out of the usual to meet current challenges. It is a paradox of modern times- we are more connected but yet has trouble getting across to our neighbours to say “hi”. This brings me to the notion of human relationships- social behaviour will change as the explosion of information through instant connectivity has its undesirable side as well.

Alan Kay: A powerful idea about teaching ideas

In teaching and learning, we hope to engage our learners through the many senses as there are different preferred learning styles - visual, audio, kinesthetic, etc. When using video as the main mode of lecturing we actually have created a 1 way interaction without the ability to see the responses of those listening and taking a dipstick on their understanding. It is rather didactic eliminating the possibility of constructing new knowledge or tapping on existing previous knowledge to ensure learning is understood and entrenched. It does not empower the learner to learn to fish but rather is fed the fish. Children of today are digital natives and have the ability to multi-task while learning, the concept of just sitting down listening to 1 speaker (teacher) will invite an immediate “switch off” attitude. We need to be just as entertaining if not more to engage our young.        

As the world is moving from a knowledge based economy to that of a creative economy, teaching and learning has to change to meet the demands of a creative economy - where the solutions to any problem is reliant on many factors like collaboration, sharing, creation, inventiveness, etc. Media is gaining prominence in our lives and it has changed our relationships and experiences such as “You Tube”. The creator’s work can be enhanced or remixed to allow readers to interact with the work. That is taking learning to a different level. Having said that, technology cannot fully replace the teacher because the human touch is still somehow needed in our increasing individualistic and independent world.

In completing this task, I struggled with a couple of issues which can be broadly grouped into (1) Content and (2) Technical.

(1) Content Issues

What should I talk about in my first podcast? There’s so much to say and yet I am caught in this dilemma of what to say. For someone who has an opinion for just about anything, dumbfounded hardly describes me at all. My thoughts immediately went back to the classroom where students will be dumbfounded by this "anything goes" philosophy. Children love independence and freedom and yet they are lost when too much freedom is given to exercise "free will". Huh… that’s where the skillful teacher comes in- give some, hold some and drop some.

As I struggled, my mind floated back to my childhood days and slowly my story began.

(2) Technical Issues 

Writing is the easy part, the technical glitches is part of a whole nightmare.  By an incredible silly mistake, I bought a microsoft headset with microphone- Live Chat 3000. That really sealed my fate- I had to work on my pc. Then, came the question- how do you do a recording on pc? A probe here and there, I discovered the existence of a sound recorder- rather basic in nature. On testing it with my Microsoft headset, lo and behold, no sound came out ! Panic bells rang and my job was abruptly halted. Desperately, I reached out for my logitech headset which I thought was damaged. Maybe, just maybe the mic will work. Yes! it did. What a relief it was.

And so the first recording was made. But wait…. the volume is rather soft. After a couple of attempts, the volume was raised but not significant. Time to try out on my Macbook Air. This little slim machine is neat but has one inline jack- which means you can listen but you cannot talk at the same time and vice versa. But the voice quality was much clearer and that was critical. So it was an exercise of jacking in and out for audio input and output. 

Next came this thought of adding music to the podcast. The word "Audacity" came to mind as I remembered either Tim or Mike who mentioned it on April 2. After searching and double checking, the sourceforce.net webpage did not provide the necessary free download but rather their trial demos. That’s no good at all. It’s back to mac and garage band. 

Garage band is a breeze which is so typical of all mac software. The people at Apple designed their environment and software with the user in mind. Coupled with the fact that it hardly hangs, that’s a great plus for me. Everything was put together in a jiffy.

The next great lap was finding a host to upload the podcast. I tried a couple like podbean and Gcast; but they were very slow to upload and finally hung on me. Back to the search engine I went and found “mypodcast.com”. After signing up, it was a breeze uploading my first podcast. And I am told that there is no limited space for upload as well. How true? I have yet to find out.

All in all it has been a good experience. Do visit my first attempt at http://judithflex.mypodcast.com. 

As a visual-kinesthetic learner, the best way for me to learn is to discover the differences between blogger and wordpress by setting up a blog in both environment. The table on the left summarises what I have found.


On the whole the experience of using wordpress  can be summed up as user friendly and more flexible than blogger is. I’ve tried to embed videos into wordpress and was only able to provide a link as the storage space is limited. I will further work with wordpress and append new findings as I go along.