Facebook Overview

“The longer people are on the Internet, the more likely they are to use the Internet to engage in social-capital-building activities.” - Kavanaugh and Patterson

This is an fascinating statement for Kavanaugh and Patterson to make. I think in a sense that it is true; most of the long-time Internet users that I see who have a noticeable presence in some part of the web are people who have joined or formed some sort of community and made themselves an established part of it. I can't speak for Facebook, because I don't actually use the Facebook account that I have, but on Livejournal, I've noticed that the longer users are there, the more likely they are to join some sort of community based on interests and to be an active participant in said community.

A lot of the things that the paper says about Facebook are interesting. While I knew that people sometimes look at a person's Facebook account in order to gauge how to interact with them and potential employers look at a person's Facebook account to see if that person is acceptable hiring material, it hadn't occurred to me that in an educational context, teachers might use Facebook to find out more about individual students.

The NETS-A standard that applies to this article is the fifth standard, the standard of digital citizenship, particularly the last objective, which states that administrators should help cultivate the development of shared cultural understanding and involvement on a larger scale.

Leadership Legacy

One of the things that I always get the vague feeling about when I see/do leadership tests is that they're operating with the notion that leaders have a definite set of characteristics and that a person who is a leader in one situation will be a leader in all situations.

While that can certainly be true, and there are some definite characteristics that people who are prone to taking leadership positions share, I would also put forth the idea that a person could be a leader depending on the time and circumstances and even the people involved in the situation.

Re: Legacy

I think that legacy is important to leadership, because, as the book introduction mentions, it does help give the leader in question an overarching goal to work towards and to use as a guide in all of his/her actions. The leadership test said that my primary leadership styles are experienced guide (the person who acts as an adviser to others) and the creative builder (the person who is helps start a project). Those leadership styles could view legacy as how they want to cause a change in the people around them.

How can awareness of personal characteristics improve performance in a learning environment?

Awareness of personal characteristics can cause a person to be more cognitively aware of his or her behaviors, which in turn would allow him or her to be able to make more conscious actions where he/she sees fit; for instance, if a person is aware of his or her perfectionist tendencies, then that person can take steps to apply that personality trait in ways that are beneficial to him/her and learn to actively work to change this perspective in situations where it might be unhelpful.

The NETS-A standard that would apply here would be the first standard, visionary leadership.

Apps Online

The article mentions that Office 2010 and the move towards the software being free is changing the market. It also mentions that Google Docs played a role in that move. I wonder, did Open Office also have any sort of impact? I could be wrong, but I think that Open Office, which is open source and has always been free, does predate Google Docs by a few years and offers analogs to many of the more commonly used Office programs (Writer for Word, Calc for Excel, Impress for PowerPoint, and so on).

The NETS-A standard involved here would be the fourth standard, as it relates to the first objective, regarding leading purposeful change through appropriate use of technology.

Teaching 21st Century Students (or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Cell Phone)

When I was a high-schooler (which really wasn't that long ago!), very few students had cell phones and those who were in possession of one weren't allowed to use it during school hours (this was also the case for other electronic devices, such as CD players, pagers, handheld game systems, etc.). So, given my memory of that, I find it a very fascinating idea that teachers are starting to incorporate cell phones as a curriculum tool.

The article asks a question at the end: Is using cell phones in class a forward-thinking trend or a recipe for disaster?

I think that using cell phones in an educational context is pretty forward-thinking. Cell phones are becoming an increasing complex and multi-purposed piece of technology that may eventually find its way to becoming as ubiquitously used as computers. It seems like a good idea to teach students ways of using it in an educational setting. Not only that, unlike with using school computers, a student's cell phone would be a familiar object to the student, one that he/she would already be fairly well-versed in using.

It's very likely that many students may abuse it to do texting in class, but all that really is is a more high-tech version of what students have been doing for years when they wanted to carry on a conversation in class without the teacher knowing: passing notes. A bigger problem could be students finding ways to use it to cheat on exams. One possible way to deal with that could be to do what university professors do: tell students to turn off/put away all electronic devices before the test can be passed out.

On a whole, it just seems like the potential benefits of making cell phones a classroom tool outweigh the potential drawbacks.

The NETS-A standard applicable here is the third standard, specifically the part about how administrators must keep up to date on new trends and research involving using new technologies and how they can be used to improve learning.

Technology in Classrooms: Utopians vs. Skeptics

The article speaks of the the continuum that exists between Technology Utopians (those who believe that increased implementation of technology is the way of the future and can only bring forth good things, such as the greater ease by which students can research, thanks to online resources, and the different ways in which communication in the classroom can be conducted) and Technology Skeptics (those who believe that increased technology can create problematic situations, such as making it easier for students to be able to plagiarize and that it is not as rosy or beneficial as it may seem), with the majority of the focus being on those who occupy the middle ground and acknowledge the benefits and opportunities that technology presents while still being aware of the drawbacks that exist.

The NETS-A standard that applies here is the fourth standard, the standard that is focused on improving the organization through technology. I think that it is possible to argue that both angles, both the Utopian and the Skeptic approach, are primarily concerned with both the way that the technology effects the quality of learning in the classroom and the overall effectiveness it has on education.

Outsourcing IT

The idea of outsourcing technology, as it is discussed in the presentation, is an interesting one. One of the more interesting points that they mentioned, I thought, was that by running the e-mail through Gmail, there must be less technical errors and instances of the mail arbitrarily refusing to work at some times. This might, in turn, free the IT department to be able to improve on the technology in other areas and enhance the institution's overall performance.

Another interesting point that they mention is the fact that you can use the various Google services on a number of different platforms (PC, Mac, iPad, cell phone, etc.). With the growing use of devices other than computers to access the internet, it must be important to make sure that the university's services can be accessed in places outside of the traditional computer.

The NETS-A standard applicable here is standard four, the standard that is concerned with systemic improvements, especially the standard 4e, which states that one of the responsibilities of administrators is to "establish and maintain a robust infrastructure for technology including integrated, interoperable technology systems to support management, operations, teaching, and learning."

Can't Get Kids to Read? Make It Social.

I've noticed that some of the things that the beginning of the article mentions have happened in my life. When I was younger, in the days when my family had internet but a slow connection and limited time in the day that it could be used, I used to be able to sit down and just enjoy reading fairly lengthy books for long stretches at a time; upon entering college and having access to high-speed internet, and a faster ability to gain information and communicate (though in my case, it wasn't texting, it was instant messaging), it required more effort on my part to be able to sit down and read longer reams of text.

What it's saying about Diigo being a tool for helping students is interesting to me. It states that the interactive nature of Diigo might appeal to modern students, allowing them to communicate and take a more active approach to reading. From what I've seen of Diigo since it's been installed on my computer, I'd have to agree that this is the case. In several places (Google, Wikipedia, etc.), I've seen what I assume are high-school and undergraduate students leaving sticky notes on the webpage, using the notes to cite things that they find interesting on the page and just generally forming chains of communication with other students (one of the more memorable sticky notes I've seen, which I believe has been taken down by now, involved students who were acquainted with one another carrying on a conversation about class, which eventually evolved into two of the students having a heated debate about why one of them was just going to let the other leave after graduation without stating his/her, I assume, romantic feelings or something to that nature. It was...very interesting. And odd.)

Another thing that occurs to me about why Diigo might be an effective tool for helping kids read is that it might help liven up what might be a very dull text. I know from personal experience, the textbooks/books that I've enjoyed reading for class more have been the ones were the author showed some sense of humor in his/her writing. Finding a fun author in class readings, though, can be kind of hit-and-miss. I guess that with Diigo's annotation tools, though, even really boring and tedious readings can be made more engaging because of the insights and more colloquial tone of Diigo users.

The NETS-A standards that this article employs is the fourth standard, the standard regarding improving the organization through the use of information and technology, with the emphasis of the article being on finding alternate means of getting kids to read, outside of the traditional book format, that also takes advantage of the social networking trend and allows students to take an active role in their reading.

Browser Add-Ons

When it comes to using different web browsers, I tend to stick primarily to Firefox; Explorer only gets used if a page does not respond well with Firefox or if I'm installing software from the web (Explorer's option to run applications without having to save them onto my hard drive works better for me) and I only recently downloaded Google Chrome.

A browser add-on is a function that can be downloaded into the browser and appears as one of the browser's toolbars. Much like the issue of multiple browsers, I don't usually use browser add-ons; aside from the Diigo toolbar, the only other add-ons I have (which, like Chrome, are fairly recent acquisitions) are FoxLingo (a translation toolbar) and Fire.fm (online radio). The FoxLingo toolbar in particular is rather useful, as I've often run into webpages and documents that hold interesting information but are in a language I don't understand. For the most part, the installation and running of the add-ons went without problem, though Diigo had the side effect of causing me to see people's sticky note messages all over the web, which is a little disconcerting, especially when the notes seem to be personal conversations people are holding.

The NETS-A standard that these browser add-ons most closely relate to, I believe, is the second standard, the digital age learning culture standard. Both Diigo and FoxLingo help further the standard's aim to promote the use frequent use of technology for learning. Diigo in particular could be argued to fulfill standard 2E - "...promote and participate in local, national, and global learning communities that stimulate innovation, creativity, and digital-age collaboration." - since the bookmark and sticky note tools can both help foster discussion and learning between even students who may not initially been involved in the creation of the sticky note/bookmark.

Browser Wars

A web browser is an application that can be used to access and maneuver through the internet. Examples of web browsers would be Explorer, Firefox, and Safari. Currently, the most popular web browser, as of May 2010, is Mozilla Firefox, followed by Internet Explorer 8, Google Chrome, and Internet Explorer 7.

A browser war refers to the competition between different browsers for performance superiority and for the number of people using said browser. Being the top browser is important. Part of this may be for financial reasons. Another possible reason for the importance of having the top browser is that having the top browser would mean it would be more difficult for that browser to fall into irrelevance; currently, browsers such as Explorer and Firefox are known and used by many, leading them to have to constantly upgrade and improve themselves, making them less likely to become dated.