Tuesday, August 28, 2007

EXERCISE #23

Hooray! We did it! Thanks Bethany for all of your hard work in putting this together. I've really enjoyed the Summer 2.0 course. Please see my final responses below:
What were your favorite discoveries or exercises on this learning journey?
I have to confess my favorite discovery was the Pandora online radio. I use this site every single day and my children love the fact that they can customize their own radio stations, although the Barbie radio station is starting to get on my nerves :-)

How has this program assisted or affected your lifelong learning goals? Web technology is constantly changing and growing and as IT professionals we need to be aware of emerging trends. This program has helped me to understand the many different ways that people are using the Internet. For example, I was not familiar with social bookmarking sites and now I feel like I can have an intelligent conversation about them.

Were there any take-aways or unexpected outcomes from this program that surprised you? Not really, I know there is a ton of information out there and creative people are adding new and exciting features/capabilities to the web all the time.

What could we do differently to improve upon this program’s format or concept? The format and concept were excellent! Perhaps I would make fewer exercises, this might help the participation rate. Also, I would make the content available all at once so that over-achievers like me can do all the assignments right away. The reminder emails helped me to remember to go back and update my progress.

And last but not least…
If we offered another discovery program like this in the future, would you again chose to participate?
Yes! I loved this program. Two thumbs up!

EXERCISE #22



I like the Project Gutenberg site because it offers free audio books online. I've used this site in the past but I always like to check it out and see what is available for free to the general public. Here is a link to their Top 100. I think it's great that a lot of the classics are available online in either text, computer read or human read format. I'll have to check out the online version of Homer's Iliad in my 'free time' (if I can remember what free time is).


EXERCISE #21


Podcasts are very useful and help to ensure that you don't miss a thing. From conference speakers to news headlines to radio talk shows, podcasts are an easy way to stay up to date. I'm currently looking into the technology that will allow our instructors to create and upload podcasts to their Blackboard accounts. This link will bring you to a Blog containing several podcasts involving podcasting and Blackboard (the podcasts mainly come from the 2007 Blackboard World conference): http://rod4jefferson.blogspot.com/2007/07/rpp-45-blackboard-world-and-podsafe.html

EXERCISE #20

I love YouTube, I go on the site at home all the time to catch up on my favorite music videos and check out the latest unique, creative and often hysterically funny videos that people post to the site. For this activity, I searched YouTube for something more 'educational' and found many, many videos involving Blackboard tutorials. Here's a link to a video clip that explains how to use YouTube with Blackboard: http://youtube.com/watch?v=LuFj4-zkqGI