Conclusion and Self Assessment

        The final days of Instructional Technology are upon us and I have learned a lot!  I don’t think the essence of my assessment of strengths and weaknesses has changed, but I sure have.  Unfortunately, my weakness remains the time I spend trying to learn the new technologies; however, I am not as weak as I once was due to the new tools I have learned in class. One of my favorites is the personal space we created on netvibes.com.  I do seem to get things done more efficiently with everything neatly organized in once place and a to-do list that pops up immediately, reminding me to stay focused and complete my daily tasks.  Since these were the main ways I mentioned addressing my weakness, I feel like I will be successful in learning new habits with the help of this new software.
        I will also use this newly learned technology to keep up with the ever-changing face of instructional media. I will continue to learn about new innovations through course work; credit courses, continuing education courses, and professional development courses within my district.  I will also apply my new skills and begin to  check blogs, RSS feeds, and list-serve services for tips on how, when, and where to use the new and innovative software that is available.  I can only hope my strength will always be the willingness to learn and share with an open mind and heart.
        I plan to implement the use of several programs to improve technology and student learning in the classroom. I can use Glogster for class or individual projects, databases will make teaching young students to use the Internet for research much more palatable, and there are several presentation platforms I can’t wait to try out for classroom lessons next school year!

The Job of Organizing

Organizing information is a job, and one that not necessarily everyone should do. People organize things every day, but since we all do not think in the same way, it may be difficult to find that one piece of information you need if someone else organized it. An article about teenage girls getting free makeovers from a Mary Kay cosmetics representative could be located in many different files; teenagers, cosmetics, makeovers, or possibly Mary Kay, depending on who did the organizing and what their focus point was about the article. 

The implications of this for today’s librarians are far reaching. More than ever, the knowledge a librarian possesses about how to organize information in a way that is easily retrievable is a great asset to researchers, students as well as professionals.  With the instant access to an overwhelming amount of information available today, many people need a knowledgeable guide in their quest for quality information.  The training a librarian receives, as well as the practice in organizing information that is a daily part of the job, makes the librarian the first person most researchers will reach out to for assistance.

The Diigo tags I recently created as part of my SLIS coursework are an example of this concept.   The websites tagged had quality information, thanks to what I have learned about evaluating websites, and each were given several tags that will lead others to  the information I found to be helpful. While there is a possibility that my thought processes in tagging may not match another researcher’s looking for the same information, I added several tags to each website, which makes the tags helpful to many people, even those who think a little differently than I do!

 

The Machine is Us/ing Us

The machine, the computer, is us. We are the computer because we place our creations, our thoughts, our images on the Web, in a very interactive way. We now use this medium to collaborate in real time, across vast distances. We meet on line to read, watch, hear, discuss, learn, inform, even debate with friends, colleagues, possibly even strangers. Our lives are cataloged on websites that sort and arrange our financial data, educational data, favorite photographs, even our memories written in blogs and tweets.

The machine, again the computer, is using us. The World Wide Web uses people every day to add to its vast store of information, trivia, music, and videos.  When we store “our” thoughts, feelings, knowledge, lives on the Internet there is program code there as well, code that was designed to learn from every bit of input. We sort our lives using folders, brackets, and software applications; all the while the programming of these applications is also sorting our information following guidelines written by programmers unknown to us. The machine can then begin using these bits of input information and digital media to expand the knowledge the web contains, thus making it even more useful to us, and thus, making us useful to the machine to help it grow its knowledge base.

I believe Professor Wesch gave his video this title because the Web 2.0 is interactive; it grows and expands daily as we spend more and more time inputting the information of all aspects of our lives into the computer, onto Web 2.0.