Week Two Reflection

I think we often assume that because students have often grown up exposed to the Internet and using online technologies they are automatically comfortable with them and know how to use them. This is, obviously, not the case and instructing students in how to use online resources safely and effectively needs to be part of their education. This is not something they will necessarily be able to pick up on their own, nor is that the best way for them to do it. Just as we all needed to adapt to the online world, students will need instruction in how to make sense of everything they find online. We may call them “digital natives” but the landscape is often just as foreign to them as it is to us.

Given that the technological landscape is expanding at an exponential rate, I think it’s important to not just teach specific skills for specific resources, but also to teach general online etiquette and ethics. That’s one of the things that I liked most about the resources we were given this week—there was a lot of information about general behavior and theory, not just about how to use a specific technology. If students are equipped with a general idea of how to behave in an online environment they will be able to adapt those ethics to new technologies—and to their off-line lives!

One of the things I do worry about is using too many scare tactics to warn children and teens about predators online. Yes, it is a real danger—just as it is a real danger in the offline world. I worry that by being overprotective we may prevent students from learning how to protect themselves. I think there’s a crucial balance to be struck between letting children roam the Internet without limits, and keeping them so protected that they don’t learn how to prevent, recognize and avert dangers on their own.

The technology landscape is changing so quickly that it’s often difficult for the legal system to keep up. Given that that’s the case, I think it’s crucial for us to be thoughtful, reflective users of technology—just because something may, for the time being, technically be legal, that doesn’t make it right. Until the laws catch up with technology—if they ever do—I think it’s a good idea to keep the Golden Rule in mind when communicating and using resources online.

Even though it’s somewhat embarrassing to admit it, one of the things I learned in exploring this week’s resources was everything I’m doing wrong with creating passwords. While I wasn’t making some of the more obvious mistakes (i.e. using “password” as my password), my passwords could definitely be a little harder to crack. I’ve started changing my passwords using the tips I found through several of the websites from this week.

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Week One Reflection

I have used wikis, blogs and podcasts frequently in my academic and personal life (were it not for NPR’s five minute news summary podcast, I would have no idea what’s going on in the world), so it’s exciting and interesting to actually be creating them myself. Even though I know that these things are relatively easy—I have created a wiki in my Young Adult literature class using pbwiki.com—there was still a mental stumbling block in using them. While I am young enough to have used online technologies during my post-secondary academic career, I am old enough that I still distinctly remember being exposed to the Internet for the first time. It’s a little dizzying to think about how much our communication capabilities have expanded in just the past ten years. It’s also amazing to realize how much easier it has become for anybody to make use of these technologies.

There was not much new information in this week’s readings for me, as I have used wikis, blogs and podcasts before, and also read about them extensively in other classes. I am always interested in reading more ideas about how these applications can be used in education and was very interested in the article that mentioned wikiHow, a site with which I was only vaguely familiar. I think wikis are a great way for people to share their knowledge. Blogs present a great way for students to communicate and exchange ideas, and podcasts have great educational potential, especially for students with learning difficulties. I know that there is still some resistance to using these applications in schools, and there are some legitimate concerns, but I think the trend is moving inevitably towards using new and emerging communication technologies in classrooms.

One interesting thing I did learn from this week’s reading was a bit more about the system behind subscribing to podcasts. I’d never really distinguished between podcasts and just regular audio files available online, though the distinction is fairly obvious now. I’ve also used RSS feeds to subscribe to different blogs, so it was good to make the connection between these two different applications that I use; now I think of the podcasts I subscribe to as “audio blogs.”