Week 4 Reflections

1. The primary benefit of social bookmarking for educational purposes would be the sharing of resources. Social bookmarking sites, such as delicious and diigo, allow users to share, manage, organize, and tag sites. I’ve used the “external links” feature of MyMathLab to post links to helpful math Web sites for students. In the Learning Support Services (LSS), the tutoring center I work at, we utilize Blackboard to share links to helpful Web sites. What social bookmarking offers that MyMathLab and Blackboard do not, is tagging and access to other’s bookmarks. For example, all LSS bookmarks could be posted together, but tagged with words like “training”, “tutor”, “math”, “a&p”, etc. for easy searching. In regards to access to other’s bookmarks, the LSS could save other tutoring centers or helpful users to a Network. As for using social bookmarking sites for sharing with parents, this could be a great resource on a broader scale, i.e. the high school or school district. I know that college courses can be run very differently depending on the instructor and I don’t know much about K-12, but I think individual Web sites for each class could be too much. But wait, thanks to social bookmarking, these Web sites can be tagged for parents to easily find what they are looking for!

2. A couple things stood out to me when reading Chapter 1 of Trends and Issues. First, I kind of snickered to myself when I heard the term audiovisual (AV). I immediately thought back to when I was in high school (late 1990s - early 2000s) and how there were AV carts, AV rooms, etc. that seemed obsolete. My high school had already made some technological investments and instead of overheads and slides, we were using projectors and TVs. I still consider the latter technologies to be AV, but the term itself seems outdated.

Second, I was intrigued at the thought of technology as a process. I was excited to see the emphasis on design (someone needs to create it, right?), but had not thought of it as much more than pushing “play” or using a technology as you teach. In addition to an emphasis on design, an emphasis was also place in learning rather than on instruction (p. 4). We initially designed the technology with the intent of enhancing the students’ learning, so our usage should reflect that intention.

Third, I found that the AECT definition most related to my idea of educational technology. The key phrases that resonated to me are “improving performance” and “managing…processes and resources” (p. 6). I was surprised to see “ethical” in the definition, but read on and discovered that it mean “professional conduct” and that made more sense to me. The text’s definition is too wordy for me and the older definitions are just that – older. Therefore, I find that the AECT definition encompasses my personal and professional beliefs of educational technology. While it may seem odd to many people that the definition has changed over time, it is not surprising to me because it is technology-related. With continuously changing and improving technology, we must adapt our usage, ideas, and thus definition, of educational technology accordingly.