My Voki

Creating a Voki avatar, what an interesting experience. I felt like a child playing dress ups. Having created my first avatar with ease I can see that these would be useful tools for most ages, if this took me back to my child hood, I don’t see why students as young as year 2 could not successfully create one. What an interesting and fun way to embed ICT’s into learning experiences.

The year 2 class that I am currently working with have just learnt all about earthworms and have built a worm farm. Part of their learning experience is to explain what they have done. Wouldn’t it be great if they each created an avatar that announced to the world the knowledge they have gained through this authentic learning experience. They could all then be saved and presented to their parents as a culminating activity.

Beginning my eLearning Journey with a blog

I have discovered that you can teach an old dog new tricks. Everyday since beginning my BLM I have learnt something new, this has been most evident over the past two weeks. I believe that sometimes it is necessary to be pushed into learning. If it wasn't for this course it would have been years, if ever, before I would have created a blog. Basically because I didn't even know what one was until recently.

Blog, excuse me what is a blog, what is it for, where do you get one and how do you use it? These were all questions that were flying around my head in the first few weeks of this course. Well I think I have the answer, a blog is kind of like a diary, an online diary, it can be a record of a learning journey, basically it is an online tool used for sharing news of any shape or form. Once an entry is shared followers ae able to read your news and make comments, providing an insight into their understanding of your knowledge. Each entry is placed in chronological order with a date and time of publishing.

As I am now aware, the history of blog has its routes in the 90’s when Peter Merholz (1999) jokingly broke Barger’s 1997 term “weblog” into the phrase “we blog”. Shortly after the term blog was used as a verb, meaning to edit ones blog entry. Is it any wonder then as a 'digital immigrant' that I was totally mystified when we were first told to create one? Creating this blog, and defining its use was not something I could do totally on my own. I found myself utilizing various other tools within this world wide web to build my knowledge and understanding of the application of a blog.

In refection I can see that my learning journey has followed the path of Vygotsky's Social Constructivist,on the other hand Cronje(2000) would describe this learning as Chaos. Chaos is explained as an integration of constructivist and objectivist theories, where learning is not determinied by an outside entity, learning is opportunistic, there is no cognitive scaffolding. By only being supplied with a list of tools to discover I felt I had been "Thrown in the deep end", therefor this learning experience is in the domain of incidental learning.


References
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blog retrieved 13/08/09
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NN2I1pWXjXI viewed 12/08/09
Image, Retrieved 13th August 2009 from http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/images/search
Cronje, J. (2000), Paradigms Lost; Towards Integrating Objectivism and Constructivism Retrieved on 12th August 2009 from, http;//it.coe.uga.edu/itforum/paper48/paper48.htm

Introduction

Hi All, I have finally made it into the 21st century.
What do I do next? I know, read the instructions, follow the steps.