Week 8. (Oct 20th) YouTube, TeacherTube, and the Future of Shared Online Video

YouTube is now my favorite tool for information search and even presentation. Different from audio file, YouTube is a kind of audio files, which for visual learners like me is the best way to learn. Instead of Google search, I usually type in keywords and expecting to see some useful videos. According to some statistics showed in the class, most of the people still using YouTube as entertainment tools, but I think maybe like novice in wiki space, the new users of YouTube first find interesting videos in YouTube, and consuming information there; after a period of time, they may try to contribute videos . I haven’t have the chance to see whether YouTube users will eventually produce their own works or not but it may be an interesting case to know about.

Week 7. Open Educational Resources

This week, I read an article “The emergence of Open-Sources software in China” published by Pan Guohua and Bonk Curtis J. which studies the open educational resources in China. It’s an interesting article, because we usually read articles related to western countries and this is one which specifically related to Asian country.

According to the article, the initial driving force for developing open educational resources in China is the financial concern. Because individual schools can only have a limited budget, some schools decided to cooperate together. They collect their budget and adopted open sources software designed by western countries. Though through the use of open sources software, the financial problem solved, they decided to localize the open-source software systems from western countries. In other words, Chinese scholars want to customization the western open-sources software into Chinese (Pan & Bonk 2007). Different from other western countries, the development of open sources software is supported by government organization in china. They develop Red Flag Linux, and plan to adopted this system national wide.
The development of open source software brings a lot of benefits to students. In the traditional setting students can only use their own school resources, but now they are able to get the access to more resources from other schools or institutions. In addition, the huge population of China also means that more talents can participate in open source software development and create more educational resources. This is now the society of “Give & Take” not “Hide & seek”

Week 5. Neo Millennial and Web 2.0 Learners

Reviewing the characteristics of Neo Millennial and web 2.0 learns, I am a little bit freaks out. Suddenly I feel myself seems out of date. The learning experience I have is no longer the same as my students will have. The role of instructors and learners might switch in the future classroom. In the future classroom, we may rely on our students to teach us how to facilitate emerging technologies, because they are learning through a totally different process which allows them to adopt new technology easier, and faster. The new generation learners are changing in an amazing speed. Actually, there is a question which bothers me for a while. Whether it is the emerging technology reshaping the web 2.0 learners or these web 2.0 learners construct a new web 2.0 community?

I think, I will say they are two ways. The emerging technology require users to seeking, sieving, and synthesizing, rather than on assimilating a single “validated” sources of knowledge as from books, television, or a professors’ lectures (Dede, 2005). On the other hands, users who gradually get used to this kind of thinking process will later produce contents which follow by the existing patterns.