Final Reflection

As I reflect about this semester I've learned about multiple topics. One of the topics that affected me a lot was the multi tasking. I realized that I am more of a switch task person more than a multi task person depending on the tasks. This class also really opened some doors for me with social media. It forced me out of my comfort zones and made me try different social media tools that I probably would have never used before. It was definitely important for me to be patient and have an open mind for all the new tools that I came across. Every time I would procrastinate to try a new tool I found that the out come was always the same. I would always say to myself, "wow, that was so easy to use, I should have started earlier!" If I can just always remember that then I think I will have more success with trying new tech tools.

In the future I plan to continue using Twitter as a tool for my PLN. I enjoy following new people and articles and reading about them. I also finally understand what the "hashtag" means! I never fully understood it before. As for social media in education I think eventually they will run hand and hand together.

Thank you Dr Bert, Chester, Dal, and Rian for a great semester!

Week 12 - FACETS

In week 12 we learned about curation and the process of FACETS. The Facets process stands for F - finding content, A - assess the content, C - choose it, E - explain the content, T - tailor it, and S - share it. Personally, I thought this process made a lot of sense. It was a useful way to help you remember the process of curation. It's always good to stick with the same process for all tools you review to make sure you look at everything before choosing it. It's also helpful to make acronyms for things to help you remember. The FACETS process gives enough information to complete the process without over doing it. I don't feel like there's anything missing from this process.

Another reason why having an acronym to remember is good is because when we are in a hurry it's easy to just pick things quickly without doing all the research that is needed. If we consistently follow the FACETS process then it will help you stay consistent with whatever you are reviewing at the time and complete all of the steps before choosing a tool.

After googling the author I found that there is a lot out there about him. He is from Amsterdam and it seems that he has presented at universities. Seeing that he is a presenter I would consider the author credible. If there wasn't as much information on him then I would question it more.

Week 13 - Collaboration Video

This was my second time doing the collaboration video project. Both times it was quite an experience. There were challenges in both but always ended with success. The first time around my Japanese group members didn't speak english very well so it was difficult to communicate with them. However, using all of the technology we had we were able to get enough through to learn and make a successful video.

This time around our group members spoke english well. One of them spoke english better than the others so he mainly spoke for everyone. The only bad part about this was that it caused the other group members to  be more quiet and rely on him a lot and so we didn't get to the know the others as well. I also felt like the one english speaking group member had a lot of pressure put on him to get all of the information across to everyone.

In both projects we used LINE, Google Hangouts, and Google Docs to communicate and collaborate on our project. LINE was a great way to get immediate responses from all group members and Google Docs was just where we kept all of our documents and wrote all of our ideas. We also used email and Drop Box. The second time around we had some technology problems  with Google hangouts and our video was not getting through. The Japanese students weren't able to see our video and the person who took the video didn't have the original version because their phone broke. So at the last minute we took some more video footage and then sent it through via drop box and were able to finally complete the video. Though both projects brought on some stress with the last minute technology problems and battling the different time zones I did learn a lot about Japan and how it compared to Hawaii with relation to fashion and the life of a college student in Japan.

With this project I would suggest making the groups a little bit smaller. Having six people in a group made it hard to get all the information across and find a time that we could all meet. It also made it hard to collaborate and get to know all the group members with such a big group. In my first group we only had 5 group members and even though that was just one person less it seemed like it was  a lot easier to get to know each other.  I think a group of 4 is a good number and having one person as a facilitator helps too. Getting to know your group members is really important in order to have a good video at the end. When I watched the videos I could tell which groups got to know each other and which ones didn't seem to communicate as well. Working with people from another country is a great learning experience for the work field and dealing with language barriers and time zones makes you really have to plan and be patient. These are all great skills to have. With both projects the best part was despite any technical difficulties we came together and did what we needed to do to get our project done. It's all about team work and working together!

Whats working or not working...

Well, we are finally half way through. Since I'm getting to this post late we are now actually more than half way through. I think this class is going well so far. Sometimes it's hard to keep up with all the assignments but I think I have developed a good system for myself to be successful. The one hard thing that I have not been successful with is just keeping up with the deadlines. Blogging is the hardest for me. I don't know why but I am not a big fan of it. It's extremely helpful to get topics every week to blog about. That makes it a lot easier for me. I just tend to put it off and I've just come to realize it's probably because I don't like to do it. However, I do think it is a good skill and blogging is a good way to reflect on what we are doing. So, whenever I think about that then I am able to get the motivation to complete my blogs. 

I am enjoying learning about different tools and being forced to use them. One tool that I used in work recently that I learned about from Dr. Bert was Powtoons. I used it to make a presentation with my faculty and even though I thought it wasn't good because I wasn't able to edit the video they thought it was the coolest thing they've ever seen. It made me feel really good to share something I've learned about in class. It also made me realize how much harder I critique myself compared to others. 

Learning

This week we watched TCCFX online. We had to tweet about topics during the conference. This was something I had never done before. As I was tweeting about topics during the conference I realized that Twitter is much more of an information source for people to share about compared to Facebook which is more of a personal place for people to share about what is going on in their lives. Since you have a limit of characters on Twitter it doesn't allow for people to go on and on about things. I feel like it even forms it's own language by people having to abbreviate words to fit everything in their tweet.

I also learned about social media network awareness. This was really interesting because I never thought about how much of an affect it has on people. Social media has really created a new avenue for events to be released to the public. Since my husband doesn't really use social media I am often times more informed than he is if he hasn't gone online for a while. Since I get alerts and am online frequently I am immediately informed about what is going on in the world. We are always learning!

Social Capital

The article I read was 

Steinfield, C., Ellison, N., Lampe, C. & Vitak, J. (2012). Online social network sites and the concept of social capital. Frontiers in New Media Research, New York: Routledge, pp.115-131. Retrieved fromhttps://www.msu.edu/~steinfie/Steinfield_Internetat40.pdf

As far as making connections with others online I think it has increased for me in the past couple of years. Others have exposed me to educational topics or articles relating to my job or current events going on in the world. I feel like I am more of a gainer than a sharer. I tend to not share much because I don't really think about it. I enjoy reading articles that people post but I don't ever have the desire to go out research articles to share. I guess I just feel like if people want to know something then they will research it themselves. Sometimes I share what others have shared because I thought it was a good read or pertaining to something I am working on at work or in school. In the article one of the points it made was that those who posted often engaged in direct communication with friends had a higher bonding social capital. Since I don't post much I think my social capital is not as large as it could be. For what ever reason I try not to get too involved online because I don't want it to take over my life. I like to separate myself from it during the day so that I'm not looking at social media all day long. This is always my battle because it's my source of current events and information but I also don't want to be rude to people when I am socializing. 

Another point made in the article was that the key to bridging and bonding social capital is actually personal information disclosures on social networks. By sharing about yourself as much as possible it helps facilitate the start of relationships, development, and maintenance that keeps the social capital going strong. This made a lot of sense to me because when people know more about who you are, it brings their guard down. I'm torn with this idea because as much as I want to be open to people I feel like it makes me so vulnerable on the internet and I always have "identity theft" in the back of my head. I guess eventually I will have to get passed that if I want to continue using social media to it's highest potential. 

TCCfx 2014

This was my first time tweeting during a conference. At first, I didn't really understand that people do this all the time to expand on the topic during a conference. I have to say, initially when watching TCC I didn't know what to tweet about. Then, as I listened to the topics being discussed I decided to start searching for relevant articles to post. It was actually fun and made me think about the topic a little bit more in depth. However, it did cause me to multi task which now I know is extremely bad for you. 

When they were talking about IRB during the conference I had a hard time paying attention as this topic is not very interesting. If I wasn't graduating this semester I probably wouldn't have known what IRB was all about. I was able to relate to the inter cultural project with the Japanese students because we are currently completing this project. I agreed with pretty much everything they said. Having video to communicate with our group members is very helpful as well as meeting at least once a week. Meeting this much really helps keep us on track and stay in contact with our group members. 

While watching the conference I had a hard time with my sound. For some reason when I would click on some of the tracks it would start playing and then I would lose sound and have to start the track over again. This was a bit frustrating but I was eventually able to get through the TCC sessions. I wonder if anyone else had problems with sound?

Moving forward...

This week I'm on my Fall break from work. My husband an I are taking advantage of the time to travel to California and the East coast to see family and friends. It always sounds like a great idea until realizing the time change and when I need to be online for class and meet my deadlines.

In addition to traveling farther East we got to find out or groups for the Hawaii Kansai Collaboration project. We have 6 members total. Three from Hawaii and Three from Japan. Initially I was having problems with my sound on google hangouts. I could hear everything but for some reason they couldn't hear me. After restarting I finally switched over to using my phone to talk with them and that seemed to work just fine. Thank goodness for having a smart phone! After meeting our group members I'm really excited to get started on our project. Our Japan group members already had an idea about comparing fashion so we are going with it. I think it will be fun to compare fashion in Hawaii and Japan. We are also going to some how incorporate social media in our topic as well. I enjoyed meeting our members and was really impressed with how well the Japanese students spoke english. I can't wait to see how our project turns out!

My only worry is making sure I get all my timezones correct while I'm traveling and figuring out my sound problem on google hangouts. Other than that I think our group is going to have a lot of fun with this project! No matter what technology difficulties I come across I will keep moving forward and do the best I can!

So far...

So far this class has given me the opportunity to explore topics I've thought about but never able explore deeply with them. I enjoyed learning about the social media use with my circle of friends and family. It opened up a lot of conversations and made me realize what a big part it is in their lives.

As we begin talking about our next project with the Japanese students from Kansai University I feel really confident. Since I've participated in this project before I know what to expect. I am very curious about who my group will be and what topics we will decide to do for our video. Last time we did our project I learned a lot about the Japanese students. It was one of the most fun projects I have have ever done.

Multitasking

This week we talked about multitasking. As we started discussing it in our groups I realized that all I do is multitask all day long until I get home. During my day at work I could be doing all of these at once. Teaching a lesson while scanning the class, taking a note out of a students hand, writing on the white board, and passing out papers. Well, this might be a slight exaggeration but it's pretty close. I feel like if I couldn't multitask then I couldn't be a teacher. What I thought was multitasking was actually switch tasking. My brain is just switching quickly between each task. I'm constantly watching 24 kids in my class at a time and sometimes half of them are lined up in front of me trying to get my attention to ask me a question. I didn't realize how bad multitasking can be for you. Here I thought I was making my brain stronger but really I'm just causing myself not to retain anything that I've done. Now I can understand why I can't ever remember anything. I thought it was just my memory and I was getting old but I'm pretty sure it's because I'm always trying to do a million things at once. I'm definitely going to start taking more time on single activities and put more energy and focus into one task instead of half the energy and focus into 5 tasks. Here's a video I found that talks about how you can only multitask in one way. 

Social Media

After looking at all the social media demographics reports there were a few things that stood out at me. First was how similar our data was to the PEW research even though we had a smaller scale of participants. That just shows how much people are involved with social media. I also noticed that there are people who are concerned about their privacy but still continue to put themselves out there.  So i guess they are concerned but not concerned enough. Lastly I realized how social media can really take over peoples lives. After interviewing my participants it felt like they were telling me things that they were actually embarrassed about. I found this video about how social media affects your brain.  It compares it to a drug and how it can become addictive. It's kind of interesting and even talks about multi tasking! Enjoy!

Personal Introduction

This is my personal introduction video I made on Powtoon. This is the most engaging presentation software I've ever used. It's fun to watch and create! I highly recommend it for presentations! In my video I talked about our house renovation story. My husband and I just bought our first home this past year and it needs to be completely renovated. We have been using You Tube to help us with all of our renovations. It's been quite a journey with a few surprises along the way. 

Blog Objectives

Welcome to my reflection blog. This will be where I can reflect on class each week. I will share my thoughts and inspirations as they run quickly through my head and hopefully before I forget them. I'm looking forward to learning from everyone in class as well as learning more about E-learning communities. I'm always open to new ideas and suggestions so please feel free to comment and share as much as possible.