WEBCAST IT!

Yes I did changed the topic for my final project. Here it is a brief introduction to it:

Webcast It! is an online tutorial committed to sharing knowledge about broadcasting video over the web. It is a website where people can go to get more information about digitizing video; creating, transferring (from a camcorder to a computer) and posting videos on the Internet. Another main characteristic of Webcast It! is the fact that it uses Web 2.0 applications to encourage instructors and learners to collaborate to the lessons and share their knowledge.

FINAL PROJECT PROPOSAL

Title: Create Your Own e-Learning Site Using Moodle

* Topic
Introduction to designing a website that uses a course management system - Moodle.
* Primary audience
Teachers at universities, colleges and schools.
* Secondary audience
Students and workers of universities, colleges and schools.
* Instructional and/or learning problem(s) you are trying to solve
One example: a lot of times during a semester/quarter, teachers see themselves repeating a lot of information that could be posted somewhere. Lack of communication can also be a problem for students and teachers.
* Instructional and/or learning goals
The learning goal of the guide is to intruct teachers (and other users) to use Moodle as an online tool that will help them to organize course material and improve communication in and out of the classroom.
* The methods to reach the stated goals (mention which technologies you are going to use to create learning environment to achieve the state goals. Explain why the technologies you choice are the best to meet your goals.
The delivery method for this tutorial will be a website that showcases a course management system - Moodle. I will use a wiki and blog. Both parts of the website that uses these 2 web 2.0 tools will offer the possibility for the user to interact to with the designer of tutorial.
* How would you determine that the stated goals are met (brainstorm how you would assess the goals, you will not have time to really do it)
I will ask my classmates and the teacher of this class to give me some feedback; in doing so, I will be able to correct and/or improve the effectiveness of the tutorial.

Everyday Design – CD Cases

I chose to talk about something that is very simple but I have thought about the product development of CD cases for a long time. I have them for many years and I can see that they have gotten thinner. The cases are used in different instances. At first it was used mostly for music CDs. Later we started using them for storage of “burned” CDs.

One design flaw that many of us never liked too much as the packaging of CDs, and used by most Music Industry Companies, was the seal that keeps music CDs secure. I believe that such a seal is still widely used to secure CDs. I don’t buy music in physical stores anymore, but the last time I bought one, they were still using a similar type of seal.

Even if the design of a CD case still has its problems, as mentioned before, there has been a few improvements that made the difference for me. I am talking about how thinner the CD cases got. Sometimes I still carry these cases on some of trips, with music/data CDs or DVDs and thinner cases are a great thing to minimize the size of bags that I have to carry.

SocialText - Eugene Lee

SocialText

The CEO of SocialText (ST), Eugene Lee, made a great presentation about Web 2.0 technology in general, the company and products that he now represents – the collaborative Web 2.0 site SocialText.com. The products are named Socialtext People, (ST) Dashboard and (ST) Workspace.

ST is a very interesting company that poses itself as a central station online for companies that want to use secure Web 2.0 tools like wikis, blogs, social networking, widget dashboards, and others. It was an impressive presentation for it is undeniable the passion that he feels for the company, products and technology that he now showcase. Also impressive was his curriculum vitae. He has been working in the field, if I remember his presentation correctly, for decades now. He was one of the vice-president of Adobe, Inc.

By the way, he is one example of the excellent speakers that we have had in our class this semester. It is great that we have speakers coming in, or connecting with us via web conferencing, to give speeches to our class because we get reports about how technology is being used out there in the real world.

Five Frams Story

Click on the image above to play slide show

I am not going to say much about the meaning of the slide sequence so people can find their own meanings... but I want to say that this was a lot of fun to create. First, I tried to find pictures. Then, I found that it was better to draw frames myself. I know, I don't draw that well, but I ended up by doing exactly what I wanted. I know I am posting this kinda late. If anybody has any comments, please add it below.

Thanks,

Henry

STORYTELLING - A Collaborative Work

For me this was one of the best project that I participated in this class. It was really great to use a wiki tool (Wetpaint) to create collectevily this story. When we were working on this project, I couldn’t wait to see where our story was going. I was always excited to write the parts that I wrote. In the presentation, Melissa gave us a great reading of our story. I hope you guys enjoying getting to know the characters of this story.

Henry

Below you will find the link to wetpaint, and part of the text that is on my group's wiki site.

---------------
ITEC 830 STORY ---> http://itec830story.wetpaint.com/

The members of the story team are:

Melissa Taylor-Salvador

Henrique Cordeiro

Daniel Dworkin

Walter Hanley

We moodled around with several concepts including a brief history of ITEC before deciding to collaboratively write a story and to use a wiki page as the collaborative tool. The idea was triggered by a couple of things: a few words Professor Foreman spoke during the 30th October class meeting during which she emphasized collaboration, and a game with of unknown origin in which writers take turns plotting the elements of a story.

We wrote instructions for ourselves---rules of the game---which you will find on the next page. The subpage following the rules contains the story to date. We have never discussed the genre, characters, plot---never discussed anything about the story. We only agreed to write one.
We believe we have captured more than one of Pink's Six Senses; certainly Story is present, but so, too, are Design, Symphony and Play---perhaps even Meaning, if we don't take ourselves too seriously.

Enjoy!

Melissa, Henry, Dan, Walter

Mobile Learning and Location-based Learning

Leslie Rule gave a great presentation about how technology is constantly changing and how students and instructors can utilize it. Last semester, Leslie gave a workshop on Digital Storytelling in one of the classes that I took - ITEC 800. Now her presentation had a new main focus – Mobile Technology. It seems that she is encouraging us, ITEC students, to go out there, with our mobile devices (i.e. iPhones) to produce media and informational materials. She also emphasized that interactivity should be in our minds. The main point that I am trying to make is that she is now encouraging us to be outdoors and interacting with people, instead of producing content indoors only. From what I understood, she was pointing out that with “old style” Digital Storytelling there was a tendency of people that were producing these types of stories, to be indoors and somewhat isolated.

She mentioned how technology is becoming more mobile oriented. More powerful phones and PDAs are available now and their popularity is rising. People traveling, kids and teachers on field trips can now explore and produce a lot of content from their mobile devices. GPS technology is one of the main features that make all this revolution possible. As one is out and about, Google Maps (available in several phones) can guide to find details about different locations. Many links like wiki documents, blogs, websites, photos and videos (and other content sites) are attached to Google Maps. Many phones are also capable to deliver content directly from a remote location. And ... do you know what else you can do with phones with mapping technology? You can also find a pizza place close to you.

Learning for the 21st Century

The flowchart is a good method to use when we want to give a good overview of the subject being studied. It also is great tool to use to understand the flow of the subject, in this case, Learning for 21st Century Skills

I would like to point out a couple aspects of the reading that I find to be important to be mentioned here:

• To engage teachers and students a variety of technologies should be used to improve 21st Century learning.
• 
  Core subjects should be increased to reflect the 21st Century world and include equal parts for local, national and global issues.

Brief videos - Web 2.0 apps (week - 15 Sept. - 21 Sept.)

Brief videos with overview of different Web 2.0 apps (week -
15 September - 21 September)

When I watched the YouTube videos in question, I thought: “what a great idea! – to have short videos like these, explaining and traning people about Web 2.0 tools”. I thought about the old traning videos, in VHS or DVD, that had lessons that lasted 30 minutes to 1 or 2 hours. I remember watching a one-hour video on MS-Word – I got the video from the library – and that was very boring. That old video was just too long. So the idea of having shorter online videos is perfect for the way people function nowadays. I especially liked the following videos: Google Reader in Plain English and Wetpaint Wiki in Plain English. One thing that I am enjoying in this class is the opportunity to use these (online) applications in a way that I didn’t use them before. I thought I had a good idea of how they worked, but I have to say that I learn a lot more details about them. I feel that I am now taking fuller advantage of the capacity that these tools have to offer.

Google Maps and Earth - Group Presentation

Google Earth and Google Maps

Our classmate Hung and I did a presentation that featured Geo Web technologies and we concentrated our presentation on the mapping technology delivered by Google. Hung did his part on the G. Earth and I will focus here on G. Maps, as I did it on my part of our presentation. The main difference that I would like to mention again is the fact that G. Earth has to be downloaded to one particular computer to work – almost like a regular desktop application. G. Maps, does not need to be downloaded to work. In that sense, G. maps is more of a Web 2.0 application than G. Earth, in my opinion. One can use almost any computer connected to the internet to access G. Maps. If you have a Google account, you can even save your maps and other features, so you can access your saved maps almost anywhere.

I demonstrated in the presentation how to search for different locations, and a couple of new features that G. Maps has, for instance the ability to find Wikipedia documents that are linked to specific places on the map. I showed the map of Boston and how you could see history and detailed descriptions of places in that city by clicking on different documents attached to the map. One thing that I didn’t have to time to show in class was the feature called Street View. It is a great feature to see how the view looks like if you were right at that location. One can even rotate this view around 360 degrees, in many locations displayed on Google Maps; I should point out that not all locations have that feature but several major (and medium size) cities do have this feature available.

Link to my presentation - pdf document - http://userwww.sfsu.edu/~hcorde01/itec830/pres-geo7b.pdf

It is a Virtual Thing! – Curt Bonk

It was a great presentation (by Prof. Bonk) via our classroom web conferencing equipment. In his presentation and conversation with our class, Bonk described that Web 2.0 is defined differently by different people. It is such a new think that its influence and characteristics are still somewhat being defined. There are many views of what Web 2.0 is, and the main reason for that has to do with the fact that there are so many different applications that are now available via the web. There are many sites out there using a plethora of applications for social networking (Facebook), collaboration (Wikipedia), Web Conferencing (WebEx), Blogs (Blogger) and several others.

One interesting point that Bonk mentioned in his presentation is the fact that there is no debate about the Web 2.0 tools for they are practical tools. Debates can happen on a particular tool, for instance a political debate about current elections but the tool we use is not necessarily the point of discussion. These tools are actually facilitating communication of people that are far away from each other.

Bonk also pointed out that some of these tools, like You Tube, can actually make education more exciting. The short videos with tutorials and explanation of Web 2.0 tools (that we’ve seen in this class) are good examples of that.

Enjoying the presentations about Web 2.0

I thought I knew a lot about the apps available on the web, but I am learning a lot about the stuff we have been going over on our class presentations; wikis, blogs, and many collaborative (and networking) sites – it has been interesting to see presentations that go into more detail than the general information that I had before. The best thing of all is the fact that we are getting practical experience by creating our own blogs, wikis, etc…

I admit that I want to develop further the content that I have been putting on my sites; so hopefully, I will be adding content that is a bit more interesting and relevant in my future posts.

In our next class I will be presenting, with Hung, an exposé on GeoWeb - a used to described the tecnology used by sites like Google Maps (others like Yahoo) to display interactive maps over web Browsers (and/or desktop applications). Please give me your feedback here, and pointers of any news about GeoWeb that I may have missed on my presentation.

Thanks

Henrique Cordeiro

my wiki site

http://sites.google.com/site/hcwikisiteitec830/

Learninng in the digital Age (by Brown)

The first thing that I notice in the article was that I have used the terms information and knowledge as being the same thing. The text pointed out the difference between the 2. Also, the text by Brown goes over the influence of technologies available today, and what specific tools can be helpful in the process of learning. Not too long ago some educators (comment from personal experience by the way) sounded against things like, for instance, social networking sites; so, it is refreshing that attitudes are changing towards people using new tech in learning.

About Connectivism

It is interesting to see how other learning theories are emerging... With the wide use of computers by people, and all the electronic networks that are forming on the internet at a very high rate, technology's influences is felt when scholars start talking about a new theory like connectivism; a word that Microsoft Word doesn’t recognize.

From what I read, connectivism uses a lot of principles of constructivism, where the learner is an active contributor to the process of learning. So, connectivism takes constructivism a step further by taking into account the influence that technology has in our lives. Blogs, websites, e-learning sites, network communities, online news forums, and a bunch of other Web 2.0 apps/tools are a few of the growing list of tools we use nowadays.

The following states some bullet points of more "pure" principles of connectivism that I copied and past from the website where the article George Siemens was at.

Principles of connectivism:

* Learning and knowledge rests in diversity of opinions.

* Learning is a process of connecting specialized nodes or information sources.

* Learning may reside in non-human appliances.

* Capacity to know more is more critical than what is currently known

* Nurturing and maintaining connections is needed to facilitate continual learning.

* Ability to see connections between fields, ideas, and concepts is a core skill.

* Currency (accurate, up-to-date knowledge) is the intent of all connectivist learning activities.

* Decision-making is itself a learning process. Choosing what to learn and the meaning of incoming information is seen through the lens of a shifting reality. While there is a right answer now, it may be wrong tomorrow due to alterations in the information climate affecting the decision.

About me

I am originally from Brazil, and last year I finally realized a big dream of mine: I finished my undergrad studies here at SFSU. I was a double major and got degrees in Design & Industry, and Broadcasting. In the process of going to school, I begun to feel more passionate about education and I decided to pursue a master degree in the Education Department (emphasis in Instructional Technology) here at SF State. My interests are interactive/web design and the video technology that is now streamed and downloaded via the internet. I would like to participate in this exciting frontier that seems to have no borders. I am also interested in media literacy because it is extremely important for people to be aware of the biased messages that come from the major media organizations.

And that is why I named my blog Being Aware... it is about educating ourselves and others.


Henrique Cordeiro