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?