… It may only work half the time, but it is 100% successful the rest of the time.
In Postman’s chapter 4, he writes about the 4 kinds of students, the sponge, the funnel, the strainer, and the seive. It is very suprising to me, but very understandable after given thought, that the seive is the most desired. I find that my mind is better described as a a half broken bear trap.Though it doesn’t close as fast as it used to, don’t test its sharpness, the notches on the belt can attest to that.
Once in the not too distant past it was a very common practice for teachers to leaver their classrooms and walk down the hall to converse with another teacher about questions they may have regarding a lesson. Yes, this is still a practice but teachers have now found more convieniant methods to converse while remaining in the classroom.
Social Networks are communities on the internet that allow us to be connected to a wide range of people.
These communication tools make it possible to stay in touch with people far away or send a quick IM(instant message) to someone just a few feet away. While this is very convinient, it also carries a level negativity.
To best show the negative side of teachers using Social Networks, i will use a true to life experience(names are changed of course).
Mrs. A is everyone’s favorite teacher at the local high school. She is so popular because she is young and relates well to the students. She is very professional and doesn’t fall victim to intermingling into the students social lives that she is very close to. All of this changes though when her best friend who teaches decides to retire. Without her confidant across the hall, she relies on the gossiping and story telling from her students to make it through the day. It becomes very clear whom this teachers favorite students are because she has added them to her Social Networking site. Those who don’t fit into that circle of students are not granted the same privilege and are never “accepted” or “declined”. Because everyone knows that she keeps up a frequent correspondence with these students, it becomes very hard for anyone to trust her.
Situations like that of Mrs. A are problematic. She failed at her attempt of using a Social Network without alienating a large portion of her students. This can become the biggest problems with us, as future teachers, using Social Networks.
When surfing the internet with the intent of gathering information, one needs to keep in mind the various sources of information. For example, the web based research engine Wikipedia allows anyone to edit its information. During the mid 2000’s, the Wikipedia page for Georg W. Bush had to frequently be shut down due to common negative edits. Sites like Wikipedia that allows anyone to type anything and present it as truth makes it extremely difficult to decipher fact from fiction. A tool that can assist us in our research is snopes. This web site allows us to research common, everyday myths that many people take for granted as fact. Some online sources though specifically manipulate its audience while trying to inform them on particular subjects. For example, the creator of www.martinlutherking.org would want his audience to believe MLK was nothing more than a drunk phony who frequently participated in promiscuous sex with many different partners. Obviously this isn’t true but this information could be used to pray on susceptible young minds.
Web 2.0
In the video “understanding Web 2.0” several different topics were discussed. I was surprised to see the differences in what is now known as Web 1.0 and Web 2.0. Unbeknownst to me I had made the integration from Web 1.0 to 2.0 without a hitch. I find it very interesting to hear how different information relaying has changed with the maturation of the internet. The idea that stood out most to me from the videos was a quote. The quote was “Context is less likely to flow through email and more likely to be learned through posts.” From that quote, I picked up on a trend that I seemingly had been a part of. That trend can easily be seen in a normal conversation between my mother and I circa 2004.
Mother: I just don’t see why you kids don’t email each other anymore??? Me: Well its not 1999 anymore. Mother: What does that even mean? Me: …… Mother: What? Me: you just don’t get it do you?
Things just became easier for us as the web evolved. Those who were slow to keep up with trends were left emailing information while the rest of us relied on online social networks and other mediums to communicate and pass along information. In other words, we had discovered “tag based delivered media.”
Posted by volswaff 
