Weekly Summary (Week 3_Robinson)

EDU651: Collaboration & Learning in a Virtual Environment

Facebook (FB) has become quite the phenomenon. Its popularity has lured people into a false sense of security. FB has become the new stressor for human resource personnel, as employees (whether educators or others) are writing posts that lack common sense and prudent judgment with regard to maintaining a professional decorum relating to the workplace. Wise professionals and especially public officials know that putting anything in writing that is personally revealing or less than complimentary could come back to bite one in the tush. Bottom line, nothing is private on the Internet and Facebook is no exception.

There is a group pseudo privacy option on FB. I set up a group site to see how it works. I set the privacy controls so that you cannot come up with the group name very easily without being signed onto Facebook. When the group name comes up, you have to get permission to join. Facebook, in my opinion, is not really set up to be a teaching tool. Someone could probably find a way to use it as such, but I still prefer a wiki. This is the group name on FB-–-EDU651: Collaboration & Learning in a Virtual Environment

Learning more about the NING social networking site was great! I was already a member of NING, but had not really explored all of the bells and whistles that the site offered. However, in my opinion, a wiki is still the frontrunner as the most plausible teaching technology tool, but NING does have promise in the classroom. I set up a hypothetical classroom on NING, but found the flow was not as smooth as with the wiki. In addition, there appears to be an age requirement with NING, but not for the PBworks site. Also, you need an e-mail address to use NING, but not for the wiki site, as the teacher can assign access to students without an e-mail address. This is my NING hypothetical classroom http://www.mrsrobinsonsclassroom.ning.com (A hyperlink to this site is under "hodgepodge of links" on the left corner of this page.)