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.”