Blogger: we are more and more close

Last night was really interesting; we took turns to be teachers and students. Every time I am in the group which gathered most people. For example, when it was my turn to be teacher, then we got 7 teachers but only one student-“supply exceeds demand”. But when I am the students, there is only 1 teacher with 5 students-“demand exceeds supply”.

Therefore it reminded me of what I had read for this week,” Blogging is about, first, reading. But more important, it is about reading what is of interest to you: your culture, your community, your ideas.”(Downes, 2004) Most of time, teachers and students are interesting in different things. Just like yesterday, students might be interested in how to use Twitter in conference, but maybe teacher wants to explain to them the importance of Blog using in education. I am glad that yesterday evening we all got chance to teach and learn our best articles. But in reality, it is impossible for all the students to like the way and the content instructor teaches, and some side effects might be brought about, so it is very important for teacher to find out what interest of their target audience, then he/she can make the teaching process more engaging.

That is some thoughts about our yesterday’s teaching and learning.

What’s more I did learn a lot from yesterday’s discussion. I never use Twitter before, but Jason (by the way, he is voted as the best teacher for Monday’s class^_^) explained very clearly. There are 4 reasons why people use Twitter

1.      Daily chatter, 2. Conversations, 3. Sharing information 4. Reporting News

What interested me most is the functions of reporting news, in the article I read “Educational blogging”, it also mentioned the rapid growth of blog is after September 11, 2001, because blogging not only allowed us access to the event; it made us part of the event. Some people found some first-hand information and spirited commentary about some hit event. In this way Blogging is not longer be defined as “personal journal”, it become a platform where people can receive and send message.

Here is a video to show the difference of how to report news between 20^th century and 21th century.



Compared with 20^th century, the news in still remains professional but more personal. Here, news is defined loosely, everything that new to you can be defined News. For example, you may get some news from blog about your old friends’ latest information, what his/her job, where he/she travel; you may also gather some educational and informative knowledge from a blog to teach you how to create a video.

Then it is truly mass media. On the other side, I was thinking about the validity of these “News”, some people may use blog to post some fake news which may lead to chaos, so how could we avoid such thing? In China, as long as this thing happens, government will soon be stepped in. I was wondering how about USA?

Youtube-you can be the director of life!

The share of the online adults who watch videos on video-sharing sites has nearly doubled (from 30% to 60%) since 2006, (Pew internet, 2009 survey), especially the generation between age 18 to 29, nearly 9/10 internet users ages 18-29 now say that they watch content on video sharing sites, also the survey found that there are no significant differences across income or education groups when looking at the use of video sharing sites.

Therefore, the educational use of video on campus is accelerating rapidly across the whole world including nearly all disciplines.

For it 1) Provide a context for learning( Brow, Collin,&Duguid,1989), students are not isolated from the “cold textbook”, all the knowledge presented by the video are like an intrigued story which will highly arouse students’ motivation at the beginning or lead to reflective thinking after the class. In this way, knowledge is less inert (Bonk, 2008).

     2) Foster students dual coding of information (Paivio, 1986) and increase leaner retention of information (Fox, 2003). When educators teach a abstract concept, like Behaviorism, they maybe confused with “Negative reinforcement” and “punishment”, even with a vivid description for those two terms, students might still store these knowledge into their short-term memory. So instead of using words or textbook, a video how children get punishment or negative reinforcement may help them possess these two terms into their long-term memory. So next time, it is much easier for them to recall these 2 items.

     However, there are also some points teacher need to be more careful when using some videos in their class, like the video should be shorter, most of the time, 1-4 minutes are ideal, and it should closely linked to the knowledge which teacher want to presented.

 I once had a class called “teaching method for XXXX”, during the middle of the class; the teacher played almost four 45 minutes video for us to watch!!! Sure at first we all excited, because the video provided us with real teaching method that might help us integrated into our future teaching style. But things begin to get out of control at last, students’ attendance decreased significantly. In the third class, only 7 students show up (24 students in total), they all felt that since it is available online, why should I spend the whole time watching it in classroom? So teacher should be really careful to use the appropriate video.

Speaking of watching educational video at home, Salman Khan, the most popular teacher on the “Youtube Kingdom”, created his own non-profit teaching website “Khan Academy” (http://www.khanacademy.org/)%20with almost 1400 educational videos. All the videos are mini-lecture ( around 10 minutes) and low-tech: Viewers only see the scrawls of equations or bad drawings that Mr. Khan writes on his digital sketchpad software as he narrates. All his class was started with MR. Khan best known area-math and engineering, and then he added biology, chemistry and even history classes into “Khan Academy”. How did he add these areas that his is not familiar?

 "I took two weeks off and I just pondered it, and I called every professor and everyone I could talk to and I said, Let's go have a glass of wine about entropy. After about two weeks it clicked in my brain, and I said, now I'm willing to make a video about entropy."

Well, a really brilliant idea, but as some people say, they all worry that the videos may contain errors or lead students astray. And also as some teacher pointed out, what bother them most is the lack of identifiable, high-quality content libraries and simple, reliable tools for customizing the video to their curricula. So I was thinking, maybe in the future time, more and more people will collaborate together (someone wrote the movie script, someone shoot the video, someone edit the video etc.), using various resources, to create a more professional and easy to use video website which contains most of the disciplines. Thus, it will provide more credible video resources for teachers, and enhance students’ performance.