EME6414 Blog

 This week brought with it a lot of fun and useful tools and concepts. I have used Flickr (I participated in the Flickr challenge and am considering making some more photo essays out of my trip to Bonaroo this week) and I pretty regularly use Goodreads- when I'm not in a reading slump.  I was also very interested in the content curation resources. I usually help the students at my school with both history and science fair. We generally use Office365 to keep a running document of shared resources, but a site like Pocket would be incredibly helpful to the kiddos as they would be able to keep all of their resources in one place. Middle schoolers are notoriously bad at keeping track of literally anything, so having an easy to access and simple user interface will make all of our lives easier.  This week also made me think a lot about Intellectual Property Law. The educator in me wants information to be accessible to the general masses- information is power and power belongs t...

 Our Goodreads challenge this week got me thinking: Who doesn't like to read? The answer is SO MANY MIDDLE AND HIGH SCHOOLERS.  I will be entering my 9th year working in secondary education at the beginning of the 25-26 school year, something truly crazy to think about. My background has always been focused on ELA education and every year I am tasked with that battle of reading engagement. I have heard IT ALL.  "I haven't read a book since I was like 5 Miss." "I just don't like reading." "There are no interesting books out there." Once, upon assigning the short story The Lottery  by Shirley Jackson, I received this email from a student: "Please miss, don't be like all of the other teachers that assign us boring and pointless stories that don't mean anything blah blah blah who wants to read about the lottery?" I was genuinely baffled. How was this kid not intrigued by a story where the main character is stoned to death for the ...

  Since this week's readings focused on the concepts of intellectual property, privacy, and ethics, I decided to dive into a YouTube search focused on these topics. In this search, I stumbled upon this lecture from David Koepsell. I was intrigued by the points Koepsell makes on the concepts of ownership versus possession. When I first began the lecture, my immediate response was "how on earth can we function with intellectual property law? What is to stop anyone from taking anyone else's intellectual work as their own?" but this does not seem to be the point that Koepsell is trying to make. My understanding is more that he believes intellectual property should be free and available to the masses- we should not be met with paywalls to access information. He has a few key points he makes throughout his lecture: Commons by Necessity v. by Choice: commons by choice are things we intentionally keep public, such as national parks. Necessity refers to things kept public beca...

  Week 4 Reflection: This week touched on the subjects of tags and folksonomies, digital badges and gamification, and crowdsourcing. Although I was relatively familiar with these concepts, it was fun to dig into how they can be utilized in terms of the learning environment.  Folksonomies and tagging had the majority of my interest this week. I think it is a great method that can assist with building online learning communities. Although I do not utilize tags in my personal social media I can absolutely see how they can be effective in ensuring content reaches an intended audience. Obviously, there is a reason "Instafluencers" (the internet is a weird and wild place) end their captions with a bajillion different hashtags: they're working to make sure they reach as wide an audience as they possibly can. For me, the real magic of tagging and folksonomies comes from the information organizational method that comes with it. I love the idea that every bit of the web can be cate...

 For my readings, I chose to read the article Stolen Snow Shovels and Good Ideas: The Search for and Generation of Local Knowledge in the Social Media Community. I found this article intriguing as it got me thinking about the online communities built within my hometown, Tallahassee, and how much I participated in them without realizing what I was doing. I have compiled a list of the ones I found helpful, as well as ones I enjoyed after stumbling upon them going over my Facebook, below: Are we Dating the Same Guy? TLH:  I have participated in this group as a lurker for about a year now. I have not seen any men I know on there personally, but it is a relatively supportive group of women who try to look out for one another amidst the dating scene of Tallahassee, Florida. It is not a group without its flaws, but I have seen a lot of uplifting comments and have even seen some of my friends turn to the group when they needed information on bad relationships they had experienced. Mos...

Folksonomy Classroom Activity   Brainstorm   This week, I decided to do some self-directed research on the concept of Folksonomy and how it could be utilized in a secondary classroom as this is likely a concept our students have experience with, but could not put a name to. I think it would be especially beneficial to my middle school kiddos to become familiar with this practice as it will help them with research projects in a variety of subjects down the road.  While doing this research, I stumbled upon this great lesson that involved students studying and tagging a variety of zines, sharing their tags in a shared Google document, discussing their reasonings together as a class. The link to the lesson is below: https://libguides.williams.edu/c.php?g=1010260&p=8292148  This is a lesson I would love to do with my middle school students because we are generally the first time they experience actual research projects, be it in the form of history fair, science fair,...