Week 8: Wikis, Wikipedia, Wikibooks, and Collaborative Writing

In their study, ‘How today’s college students use Wikipedia for course-related research, Alison J. Head and Michael B. Eisenberg revealed that 30 % of the participants said that they always use Wikipedia and 22 % of them said that they frequently use Wikipedia during the course-related research process. I found that this finding was very interesting but expected results. For me, if I have a topic to write about, I usually start with searching for it in Wikipedia to have a general understanding of the topic and get an idea about a direction. As Alison and Michael stated, Wikipedia can be a very useful tool to preview a topic in the beginning stage of a research process. While I was reading articles and tidbits this week, I was wondering if Wikipedia could be an academic or a primary resource for a course-related research or paper. I think Wikipedia could be a good starting point but students should not solely rely on information from Wikipeida. Because Wikipedia is a free-open-online encyclopedia that anyone can edit, there can be a misleading or subjective information especially in a controversial issue such as history. Thus, it is very important for students to verify information from Wikipedia by reading other articles, books, or journals. This is the teachers’job to educate students how to effectively use Wikipedia as a supplement tool to their classroom activities and course-related research projects.

In addition, I have been fascinated by the fundamental concept of Wikipedia that anyone can contribute and anyone can share their knowledge so they eventually help others. I think this could be connected with the stream of OER or OCW in education. Increasing number of people are participating in the movement of knowledge sharing and at the same time increasing number of people are benefiting from it beyond the the borders.  

Week 7: Connectivism, Social Knowledge, and Participatory Learning

‘Future Learning Landscapes: Transforming Pedagogy through Social Software’ was one of the articles that I have read this week. This article pointed out that current society and education has been affected by the attributes of Web 2.0 such as its connectivity, the function of knowledge sharing, or interactivity: As McLoughlin, C. and Lee, M. stated, many colleges and universities are developing new teaching and learning models to keep pace with this trend. Many higher education institutions are providing students more opportunities than before to employ their autonomy or be engaged in social networks in learning processes within the context of Web 2.0.

I cannot agree more with the argument in this article that teachers should embrace Web 2.0 into their classrooms to meet students’ needs in these days. Teachers should study how they can integrate Web 2.0 into their teaching process in a way that they can satisfy students’ desire to create content themselves, share the content, utilize their creativity, learn from others’ views, socialize with their peers, interact with them, work collaboratively, learn from an authentic task, etc. Students’ needs’ have become changed. They no longer want to be just consumers of knowledge but they want to be producer of new content as well. Also, they want to be connected with others to share their unique views and learn from others’ different perspectives. Teachers should be aware of new needs of students and try to meet them by integrating Web 2.0 in their teaching. 

Week 6:Open Educational Resources (OER) and OpenCourseWare (OCW)

One of the articles that I have read this week was “Giving knowledge for free: The emergence of open educational resources”. I found an interesting part in this report:

The article pointed out that there is a significant imbalance between the “provision of OER and its utilization”. It said that most of OER is composed of English and based on Western culture. Accordingly, developing countries have limitation of using OER as consumers of it. However, the article also noted that some developing countries are constructing an increasing number of projects to build OER based on their own languages and cultures.

After reading this part, I was suddenly curious that if there were some kinds of OER available to anyone who needs it in Korea. So, I searched for open educational resources in Korea and I found three official sites regarding OER.

The first one is known as Korea Open Courseware (KOCW): www.kocw.net. Korea Education and Research Information Service (KERIS) is running the KOCW site. This site is offering a number of free educational resources from colleges and universities in Korea and even other countries. The second one is that SookMyung Women’s University has a web site called ‘Open Knowledge Share Dreams (SNOW)’: www.snow.or.kr, which offering free lectures and free educational resources from universities in Korea and around the world. The last one is University of Ulsan: http://open.ulsan.ac.kr. They are providing their own institution’s lectures for free via World Wide Web; it is about 5-6 courses in a semester.

I could see that Korea has realized the importance of OER and developing it. I was very excited about that. I hope more colleges and universities will participate in OER in the near future and give opportunities to students who cannot afford expensive higher education but want to benefit from it.  

Week5: The Movement Toward Free and Open Source Software

I read the article ‘How Is Open Source Special?’ in this week. The article says that open source projects are decentralized and transparent. The author means by ‘transparent’ is that all of the information of the software is available to anyone who wants to know about it.

In addition, the author quotes a passage from Bill Joy, one of the founders of Sun Microsystems, “no matter what your company is, most of the smart people in the world work somewhere else.” By mentioning this statement, the author is trying to say that open source is a way of employing those smart people. The author states that even though open source project takes a huge amount of time, and someone who works in the project is not getting paid, he/she will still participate in the project because the project helps him or her establish his or her reputations for better jobs.

I somewhat agree with the author’s point. However, I don’t believe that is the only reason for someone who works in open source projects. As the author mentioned, participating in the open source project will take a lot of time and efforts. I believe somebody who joins a project not only expect to be personally benefited from the project such as building reputations or getting a good job, but also purely appreciate his or her endeavor to make change for a software, create improvement, and distribute enhanced version to help others and make the world better. 

Week 4:The Continued Expansion of Blended and Fully Online Learning

I would like to talk about pros and cons of online education.

First, there are several positives in online education: its collaborative learning processes, flexibility, expanded learning opportunities, convenience, and asynchronous/synchronous learning activities. More students can learn in online learning environment through collaborative interaction with the instructor and peers at their pace using discussion forums, emails, and whiteboards. Therefore, developing effective collaborative strategies is the key to successfully utilize online learning tools. The instructors should assist student to clearly communicate and interact with each other. Students construct knowledge by reflecting on their exiting knowledge and building new knowledge and perspectives through active interaction with their peers and the instructors in online learning environments.

Second, there are also negatives of online education. They are a sense of isolation, delay in feedback/responses from the instructors, communication problems with time zone differences or communicating via writing rather than face to face, and unclear communication between students and the instructor. In addition, a major problem with online learning is the lack of professional support for the instructors who teach online classes. Most of the instructors who are currently teaching online classes are not trained to teach online courses. The successes of many online programs and courses are impeded by instructors’ lack of knowledge of how to best employ online learning tools to facilitate students’ acquisition of as much knowledge as possible in effective and efficient ways. Training for the instructors could be either formal or informal. This training should be focused on professional development within the capacity of the instructors or support staffs, but varying based on learning context. Formal instruction includes courses, workshops, and other official development opportunities. Informal instruction is indicated by unplanned or undocumented professional development experiences, often structured through the mentorship of other faculty, or through generalized support provided by an entire department/university. Also, informal instruction can be carried out in an informal apprentice role, mirroring the strategies of current successful online instructors. 

Week 3:The Sudden Explosion of E-Books and E-Book Readers

Until a few months ago, I was not much interested eBooks or eReaders. I definitely preferred paper books to electronic ones. For example, whenever professors upload articles for the classes in Oncourse, I always print that out and read it in paper version. However, about two months ago, I had an opportunity to change my personal preference for eBooks.

In the middle of the semester, I had to visit Korea because of a family issue. Because I did not finish my courses, I had to continue doing coursework via email and Oncourse while I was in Korea. I had two final papers to write and I needed resources such as books or articles for my references. However, it was not that easy for me to buy books in English in Korea because of its availability and expensive costs. All of a sudden, it came to remembrance that I could buy eBook in Amazon site with much lower prices. So, I directly went to the Amazon site, and I purchased several books that I needed to read to write final papers, which was the Kindle version. Even though, I had no Kindle device, I could open the files with my MacBook, and it was pretty convenient and its costs was much cheaper compared to buying the original paper books in English in Korea. Afterwards, I realized that eBooks are very useful because I can read texts whenever and wherever I want to with only my laptop, smartphones, tablets or eReaders. I do not know for sure if eBooks will completely replace paper books, but I have to admit that eBooks are very good substitute for paper books. 

Week 2:Digital Literacy Skills

Even though, I am one of the ‘natives of cyberspace’, when I face new kinds of digital technology, I oftentimes struggle to be familiar with. For example, I used one of the social web sites called ‘Cyworld’ in Korea, but I came to America, and I get to know other kinds of social web pages such as ‘Facebook’ or ‘Twitter’; these were totally new to me. I didn’t know how to post things, and how to be friend with other users, or how to communicate with them. However, as times goes by, I gradually get used to those things, and now it is very comfortable for me to interact with others through ‘Facebook’, ‘Skype’, and so on. Of course, I have to admit that young people are more easily adjust to new digital technology than older people, but it is not true that they are born digitally savvy people. This is why education about digital literacy for both young students and older people should be provided to assist them to be quickly adapt to rapidly changing digital technology.

During I was reading articles for week2; there was an interesting comparison between digital/visual literacies and language acquisition in the article ‘Connecting the Digital Dots: Literacy of the 21st Century’. The author of the article mentions, “Children learn these skills as part of their lives, like language, which they learn without realizing they are learning it. Adults who did not grow up with technology continue to adapt from iteration to iteration. The senior population approaches the new literacy like a foreign language that is complex and perhaps of questionable use.(Jones-Kavalier R. B. & Flannigan L. S., 2006)”.

Barbara R. Jones-Kavalier and Suzanne L. Flannigan (2006). Connecting the Digital Dots: Literacy of the 21st Century. Educause Quarterly, 29(2), Retrieved on January 24, 2011 from http://www.educause.edu/apps/eq/eqm06/eqm0621.asp