I have chosen these web applications to demonstrate my digital activities throughout the course as part of my learning process:
- Facebook
Twitter
YouTube
Flickr
Delicious
My Blog
Although I have setup 6 applications but my digital activities through out the course are mainly using Facebook as shown in my lifestream feeds. There are 226 entries on Facebook compared to 3 on Flickr.
I mainly used Facebook because I am familiar with this application. I feel more comfortable to reflect my reading on Facebook as it is does not have word count restrictions compared to Twitter with 140 characters. Also as it is popular with the online community and I am connected with many of my friends via Facebook. I was hoping that I will get more comments for my status, friends helping me with questions or answers. I did get few comments but not as many as I would have liked. Also by extracting a sentence or quote from my reading helped my understanding of, and provoked thinking about the blocks’ readings.
Twitter is new to me, I registered to this because it was a requirement for the course, where there was a Twitter activity in the first block. I used Twitter in the first block of the course mainly to post my thoughts about the ‘Film Festival’ week we had and links to any useful video which I found on YouTube.
I used YouTube to find clips of the blocks’ topic that could help me to understand the readings and also to understand the course – digital culture. In the first weeks of the course, where we watched clips from films to demonstrate topics such as Matrix and AI, I have used YouTube to find similar clips which demonstrated the theme – dystopia, worlds and being human.
I have heard of Flickr but not actually signed-up to the service until this course. Throughout these 12 weeks I have only managed to have three activities on it – added two photos of my 17-month old sitting in front of the computer which I believe demonstrated that the new generation start the digital culture at a very young age. I have also used Flickr to upload my digital artefact.
I have used Delicious to bookmark any articles and websites which I found useful and related not just to the course but the e-learning community.
Last but not least were my occasional blogging entries which I have used to reflect in detail where I can on the readings. I found blogging a very useful tool to reflect my learning process digitally. Unfortunately I did not manage to do it as often as I would like to due to circumstances.
I am surprised that I am able to use various social web applications to demonstrate my digital learning activities. Many believe that students are unable to separate the social and education activities when it comes to using the applications as found from the JISC research on the relationship between social networking sites and education.
