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Celebration of Learning

April 7, 2022 / / 0 Comments

Examine the application of social media to support learning

Through my journey with this course. I learned that social media is not only existing for the purpose of socializing, but also for the information exchanging as well as learning. Tiktok and YouTube are the two social media platforms I use the most and these two social media platforms supported my learning perfectly. For example, I love cooking and I learn most of the cooking online. I followed an account called “LaoFanGu” on both platforms. “LaoFanGu” gathered a group of state banquet chefs that teaches people how to make fancy meals. If I were going for a detailed cooking instruction of a certain dish, I would go to YouTube to learn detailed steps of the cooking process. They also offer a shortened version of each dish on TikTok so that it is more intriguing and meanwhile making sure I don’t miss any important steps. Another example is that as a Psychology major student. I always like to go to YouTube to find explanations of concepts I get confused about and I can always find detailed answers with explanations provided by the professionals. The use of social media absolutely supported my learning in my daily life.

Explain personalized learning and its relation to learning theory

Personalized learning enabled us to customize learning for our individual strengths, needs and interests. Learning theory describes how students receive, process and retain knowledge during learning (Illeris, Knud (2004)). This remind me of the Connectivism theory proposed by George Siemens. Siemens pointed out the limitations of traditional learning theory: Cognitivism (knowledge viewed as external to the leaner and it is viewed as symbolic mental constructs in the learner’s mind), Constructivism (Assumes learners are actively attempting to create meaning when learning and learning is believed to be a socially enacted process) and Behaviorism (Learning is about behavioural change and observable behaviour is more important than internal activities). Siemens mentioned that with the growth of technology and shrinking half-life of knowledge, Connectivism has become crucially important when it comes to learning for the digital age. In my Showcase Post I wrote that Connectivism integrates different entities as a whole, and the entities includes computer networks, social networks, individuals and groups. Connectivism allowed a faster information exchange and supported personalized learning by providing a wide variety of information that satisfy different individual’s need in learning and people can contribute, learn, and build their personalized learning network within it meanwhile allowing for continual information exchanging and learning.

Recognize that the Internet is not a neutral or equal space for everyone

Although I never believed internet is a neutral or equal space for everyone, this course has provided me with great detailed insight of why internet isn’t/can’t be a neutral or equal space for everyone.  As I was browsing my fellow classmate’s major project. A very interesting term captured my attention. The TikTok group mentioned the term “Shadow Banning”, it means that TikTok will hide user’s profile, limiting their video’s views once the TikTok algorism marked the content as “Violates the community guidelines”. The “Community guidelines” however can be broad and vague and I personally see this issue a lot especially in the Chinese version TikTok which is “Douyin”. Users can put themselves at risk of shadow banning by publishing statements that not in Government’s favor, saying criticisms about the protocols that government use in dealing with the pandemic and sometimes they can even get their account permanently banned by posting statements that violates “Community Guideline”.

I also see this issue as I was watching Shelly Moore’s video of “Transforming Inclusive Education” has made me realize that most of traditional educations, infrastructures etc. are exclusive to people with disabilities. Mia also mentioned this point in her Showcase post of how videos without subtitles may make deaf individuals feel excluded. Although governments and tech companies are working towards the goal to inclusiveness, we still have a long way to go to achieve inclusiveness and this is another direct example of why internet is not a neutral or equal space to all individual.

Shelly Moore on Transforming Inclusive Education

Apply social media to develop a personal learning network in support of your personal and/or professional development

The concept of PLN(Personal Learning Network) states that we should consider ourselves as networked individual living and learning through our online and offline identities in the networked society. In addition, having a diverse PLN is also very important as it allows us to expand exclusiveness, learning from different forms of sources (e.g. Books, School, Social medias). It also allows us to hear voices from different people that from different background which is extremely helpful for building concrete ideas. As a psychology major student, I followed lots of Psychologists on YouTube. This help me expand my knowledge in psychology and help me gain ideas and inspirations of some essay questions as I watch their video. For example, I followed Dr. Todd Grande on YouTube. Dr. Grande is a psychologist, and his video answered my question about which type of narcissistic personality does Donald Trump has and enlightened me as I was struggling with my essay. Dr. Grande speculated Trump’s behaviour and stated what could be happening in his case very thoroughly. He also likes to analyze what is happening in the real world from his psychological view and I always feel inspired after watching his video. Learning psychology with real-world  issue is definitely not the same as learning theories from the textbook as it help me building concrete ideas and helped me form academic ideology as well.

Identify privacy issues and practice online behaviours that are legal, safe, consensual, and ethical

 In the fourth week of this course, I learned about digital privacy. It has been the biggest concern when it comes to the use to technology. I learned about the OIPC, FIPPA, and the cloud computing guidelines. I also learned that the U.S. Patriot Act was established as an anti-terrorist measure. I realized that it is our responsibility to protect our own digital privacy and we can do this by ensuring the consent obtained is informed consent. We should also be responsible in building a safe and reliable personalized learning network. I was able to learn how to sort through misinformation as I was reading the “SIFT” model introduced by Mike Caufield. It can be emphasized as “Stop”, “Investigate the source”, “Find better coverage” and “Trace claims, quotes and media to the original context”. The above steps will allow me to follow reliable individual agent and organizations with good expertise and reputations as well as reducing the risk exposing ourselves with misinformation in the process of paraphrase and re-telling. In addition, I also mentioned in our group project that we should keep engaging and seek out building connections with trusted individual and organizations.

Recognize data ownership and licensing (Creative Commons, Copyright, Fair Dealing, and Public Domain) as a core practice when creating, sharing, or using resources online

Data ownership and licensing is another important area that requires awareness. Just as Mia mentioned in her showcase post that it concerns her that after spending so much time making a video, once the video has been flagged infringing on someone’s copyright, the video can be muted, deleted and publisher can face legal action. This has reminded me of the importance of recognizing data ownership and Copyright and we should be very careful in following legal protocols when publishing videos and contents online.

Practice digital, networked, and open literacies in support of learning about social media and personalized learning

My TikTok account

As I mentioned earlier in this post. I followed several psychologists on YouTube to gain inspirations and ideas about psychology and as a Psychology major student, this has supported my academic journey as well. I also practiced digital, networked, and open literacies to support my learning about social media and personalized learning by setting my TikTok account to public—which is the platform I like to post the most. I did this because just as my learning pod mate Lexi mentioned in her post about connectivism stating that connectivism begins with the person creates woven into numerous organizations and institution, in return the knowledge of each organization and institution feeds back into the individual’s network, allowing for a continual learning. This is a great summary of connectivism and PLN as it states that in the networked society, individuals can be both learners and educators in a fast-paced information exchange era. We benefit and we contribute, this is what makes our society connected and deeply believe in this and having my account set as public is a direct example of how I have practiced digital, networked, and open literacies to support my learning.

Wow and Wonder(Week 8)

March 3, 2022 / / 0 Comments

My “Wow” for week7’s activity is that I learned the “SIFT” model of systematically sorting and filtering informations from the internet. The steps of “Stop” and “Investigate the source” are focused on questionning the source of information including the reputation of the publisher, the expertise of the author etc.. These are the steps we nned to take before we get into the content of the information and it decides whether we should continue reading or not. The “Find better coverage” and “Trace claims, quotes, and media back to the original context” steps are focused on the content of the source. It tells us to find related information of certain information to see if there is consensus exist between different publisher. Although we can hold different opinion of the source, knowing the reliability of the information is extremely important for our future searching directions. In addition, we should also trace the most original source of the information to see if it is provided with full context so that the content of the information are not being manipulated or twisted. In my opinion, this is a very important step because we as individual agent in terms of spreading and sharing information we learned and perceived, the content of the information are very easily being changed in the process of paraphrase and re-telling, this is why we need to look at the most original source of the information in order to gain the full idea of certain information.

My “Wonder” for this week is that after learning the concept of “SIFT”. How should we be looking at the tweet that Russian embassey posted? In my opinion, Russian is never in favour of western medias and most of the time the statement made by Russian are simply sorted as “Fake news” by western media as well as majority of the user on twitter.

Wow and Wonder (Week5)

February 10, 2022 / / 0 Comments

Through this week’s learning, my wow is about learning the concept of “inclusive Learning” which has been evolved from “exclusion” to “inclusion”. This has made me realized that many things such as education, infrastructure etc. are becoming more accessible and inclusive to those who are “different” in our societies. I believe this is crucially important because diversity is one of the key element for our development, if we stick with the old way of education and elementary children draws the same looking elephant in their homeworks, then we will have some big problem.

My “wonder” for this week’s learning is the same question that Shelly Moore mentioned: How can we achieve meaningful inclusive education to those who are “different” instead of just having everyone physically learning together? I think this is a tricky question because the individual differences is very hard to manage. I think finding a way to let everyone make the best use of their advantages yet taking education in the same inclusive learning environment will still require a lot of further studies.

Wow and Wonder (Week 4)

February 3, 2022 / / 2 Comments

My “Wow” this week is about learning the concept of “digital natives” and “digital immigrants” and the metaphor of learning a language as a kid comparing with learning language as an adult. Adult can never learn new language as good as a child because without being immersed into the language as they grow up, they cannot get the essential idea of that language, same with technology learning. This really helped explaining the idea why younger generations tend to use technologies easier than older generations. I was also surprised to learn that the reason behind this is the motivation to engage. It is true because older generations tend to have much less needs to engage in technology which resulted their hardship dealing with technology nowadays.

My “Wonder” from this week is about the US Patriot Act. I learned that this act was established in October, 2001 right after the incident of 9/11. It was established as an anti-terrorist measure. It sounds reasonable, however, I still have some concerns about transborder data flow. The website mentioned that it is our responsibility to ensure the consent obtained is informed consent. Since we are dealing with different consent forms pretty regularly in our daily lives, what are the key points we need to be extra care of when reading a consent form to ensure our privacy is protected?

Wow and Wonder

January 21, 2022 / / 0 Comments

What is personal learning networks(PLN)? The author mentioned that we should consider ourselves as networked individuals and we live and learn through our online and offline identities in the networked society. This connection built upon people and technology has a great influence on the way we learn, process and store informations. PLN has made information exchange much easier and everyone get to share and access informations through multimedias(Youtube, Facebook, Tiktok etc.). The most important skill in PLN is the ability to identify other people’s work in relation to one’s own interest when dealing with different sources of information, PLN is proven to be beneficial for building contacts, collaboration and creation.

image showing person walking in pre-painted footprints
Photo by Flickr user jfchenier under CC license: BY-NC 2.0

Welcome and Introduction

May 2, 2020 / / 0 Comments

Before proceeding with this first blog post, we expect you to consider your privacy preferences carefully and that you have considered the following options:

  1. Do you want to be online vs. offline?
  2. Do you want to use your name (or part thereof) vs. a pseudonym (e.g., West Coast Teacher)?
  3. Do you want to have your blog public vs. private? (Note, you can set individual blog posts private or password protected or have an entire blog set to private)
  4. Have you considered whether you are posting within or outside of Canada? This blog on opened.ca is hosted within Canada. That said, any public blog posts can have its content aggregated/curated onto social networks outside of Canada.

First tasks you might explore with your new blog:

  • Go into its admin panel found by adding /wp-admin at the end of your blog’s URL
  • Add new category or tags to organize your blog posts – found under “Posts” (but do not remove the pre-existing “edci338” category).
  • See if your blog posts are appearing on the course website (you must have the the edci338 category assigned to a post first and have provided your instructor with your blog URL)
  • Add pages, if you like.
  • Include hyperlinks in your posts (select text and click on the link icon in the post toolbar)
  • Embed images or set featured images and embed video in blog posts and pages (can be your own media or that found on the internet, but consider free or creative commons licensed works). To embed a YouTube video, simply paste the URL on its own line.
  • Under Dashboard/Appearance,
    • Select your preferred website theme and customize to your preferences (New title, new header image, etc.)
    • Customize menus & navigation
    • Use widgets to customize blog content and features
  • Delete this starter post (or switch it to draft status if you want to keep it for reference)

Do consider creating categories for each course that you take should you wish to document your learning (or from professional learning activities outside of formal courses). Keep note, however, that you may wish to rename the label of the course category in menus (e.g., as we did where it shows “Social Media & PL” as the label for the “edci338” category menu.  This will enable readers not familiar with university course numbers to understand what to expect in the contents.

Lastly, as always, be aware of the FIPPA as it relates to privacy and share only those names/images that you have consent to use or are otherwise public figures. When in doubt, ask us.

Please also review the resources from our course website for getting started with blogging:

University of Victoria
Photo by Flickr user serdarkaya under CC license: BY-NC-ND 2.0

Test Social Media Post

May 2, 2020 / / 0 Comments

This post  will appear in a few places:

  1. in the blog feed on the front of your website
  2. in the Learning Design menu on your website. This is because we have applied the “edci338” category to this post and the menu item “Social Media & Personalized Learning” has been created from the category “edci338.” For every post you make for this course, please assign the “edci338” category to it. You are welcome to use this blog for your personal hobbies or for other courses, in which case, you could create additional menu items and categories for them.
  3. if you give permission, your posts categorized “edci338” will be aggregated onto the Blog Feed on the EDCI 338 Course Website.

Feel free to delete this post once you understand this. If you have any questions, please reach out to your instructor.

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