Looking back on this course I believe I have learned quite a bit. I was already quite familiar with the social networking sites Twitter and Facebook, I was fortunately introduced to other social media sites such as Flickr and ironically the site one I'm using right now, Blogger. Although I was familiar with Twitter and Facebook, I did learn a few kew aspects of them. For example, I knew about the hashtag feature on Twitter and how to use it, but I had never actually used it for educational uses. I was quite surprised the information and opinions you can come across even when a person is only given 140 characters to write about something. When we tweeted about the Farm Tech Conference, and discovered that hundreds of others were tweeting about it too, this is when it hit me that Twitter is an extraordinary place to share information. Since then, I have found myself looking up trending topics daily and because of this, I stay in touch with a variety of topics such as politics, entertainment news, and current events in my own city, country and all around the world! Another example of something I have learned was when we made the professional Facebook page. I had seen businesses make Facebook pages for themselves but I was unaware of the growing population of people making their own pages. This is a great idea as it is essentially an online resume that can be updated with the click of a button! With the economy not being at it's best, it is beneficial for people to put themselves out there by making a page. It makes it easier for an employer to see what a potential employee has to offer, and I believe that it shows the employer that this person has gone over and above to show their skills. This facebook page is something that I would definitley consider using when looking for a job.
One site I was not very impressed with and will not use in the future was Delicious. I found that it was not user friendly and just down right confusing. When attending class I noticed that a majority of students - including myself - use smartphones instead of laptops. I hadn't had any issues relying on a smartphone in this class until we started using delicious. The website was not at all smartphone friendly (most websites now have both a smartphone format and a desktop format, Delicious does not) so it was very hard for me to navigate around when the only format of the site available was a desktop one. It took me twice the amount of time to get signed up and posting than a classmate beside me using a laptop.
On a sidenote, one assignment I really enjoyed was the Wikipedia Stub Assignment. I use wikipedia on a daily basis, so being able to contribute to the cite was quite rewarding. I was extremely surprised at the tremendous amount of unfinished articles they have and am motivated to keep updating them. I have also discovered that before this assignment I had never really noticed when an article I was looking at was unfinished, but now I am noticing quite often that even articles that are on the longer side are also missing information.
Overall, I found this course helpful. Seeing as I believe that online communication and social media will inevitably be the future of education, this is a good class to get students familiarized with different ways to share their information and get information. The internet gives us the oppurtunity of self-teaching and diverse learning, and this class has opened my eyes to all the different ways that this is possible.
Here is another students view on the course!
Also, here are my five comments on other students blogs. It was interesting to see what other students had to say about ALES 204 and the assignments.
5. Patrick L
References
The power of social media [Blog Post]. (2012). Retrieved April 13, 2012, from: http://innovativenurse.com/power-social-media-nurseup/
References
The power of social media [Blog Post]. (2012). Retrieved April 13, 2012, from: http://innovativenurse.com/power-social-media-nurseup/
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