Rachel's Learning Adventure

 Y'all! It is with much excitement that I have finally created my cooking blog and am using that as my curated content for our upcoming project. It's long been something that I have wanted to do, so I already had the photos and my versions of the recipes written out, but now I actually did it and have shared it with the world. I am also shamelessly self-promoting it, so if you want to stop by, check it out here . I decided to host it on Blogger since 1). I am now familiar with Blogger and 2). Blogger has built-in Analytics that I can use for our project. I also had fun researching rules around recipe writing and intellectual property. Fun fact: ingredient lists cannot be copyrighted, but the expression of the recipe, how you write it, what you have to say about it etc., can be copyrighted and protected. This partially explains why some bloggers have 1,000 word stories before they ever get into their content! It's just another way for someone to try and protect their intelle...

 I feel like this was a big week for me in terms of shifting my thinking toward social media and not only how it can be used in academic spaces, but why it should. I told Dr. Dennen at the beginning of this course that I was hoping that my mindset around social media would be challenged, because I came into the course really believing that social media should strictly be used for social purposes. But now, I've realized that my world view of what constituted social media, and even social learning, was extremely limited. And more than that, I read something this weekend when I was looking for ways that teachers can remain FERPA compliant, and it basically said that teachers can't expect students to use their social media responsibly if educators aren't actually modeling appropriate use for them. How are we supposed to help hone the digital skills of students who really truly ARE digital natives if we're not giving them the opportunity to use the tools in a responsible way...

So this challenge was right up my alley, because I started working for real from home in April of this year, and my home office is kind of sad. It's also the guest bedroom, so it just feels cramped, and I never had the time to get any of it decorated, so I loved being able to make a vision board that is my perfect home office. This was a really cool experience, and while I was creating it, I just thought about so many practical applications that it could have in an ELA classroom for middle and high school students. Like the potential to explore tone, mood, and characterization is kind of unparalleled! How cool would it be, after reading a poem, for example, to have students create a board that captured the mood of the poem. Or, as part of exploring characterization, have students create a vision board showing what they think the character's bedroom looks like, for example. Then they could write about it, and use text evidence to justify why they made the decisions they made. Th...

 Hey hey hey classmates! In light of some of our readings and the theme this week touching on Open Educational Resources, I wanted to share this website that the EME 5250 Spring 2022 class worked on. If you weren't in the class, you should know that this site was started by the first class of EME 5250 students, and then our class built out certain sections of the website. This is a really comprehensive website that offers lots of material for understanding the scope of OER, understanding various copyrights, evaluating OER, giving proper attribution, and more! There are multiple lesson plans that are based on OER materials that can be quickly and easily customizable for students. Check out the website here ! It's really cool to think about the relationship between OER, IP, and Web 2.0 Learning tools, because I spent so much time looking and thinking about OER strictly through the lens of academics, that I didn't know, for example, that when you sign up for a social media sit...

 I feel like I'm having a hard finding my groove here. I did actually download the Twitter app to my phone, complete my profile, and follow a bunch of my classmates, so that was a win for me. I LOVE having so much choice when it comes to how I choose to participate, but I also do recognize that it can be really overwhelming, and I think that has made it challenging for me to get into a routine of how I want to participate. I love reading the blogs and have been a heavy blog commentor, and I would like to engage more on Twitter. It's just that sometimes I don't feel like I have a lot to say, or because I've been swamped at work, I haven't been able to get to a lot of the content until later in the week, and at that point, I don't want to regurgitate something that others have said better and more eloquently. So my goal for the next week is to get to the content earlier so that I actually have time to process and engage before the weekend rolls around. What about ...

Sometimes this class makes me wish I were still in the classroom, because I loved reading the article on Effective Tagging Practices ( Dennen, V. P.,  Bagdy , L. M., & Cates, M. L. (2018). This line, toward the beginning of the article really stood out to me:  Tagging serves both individual and collective pedagogical purposes. Individually, tagging activities promote self-regulation within the learning process (Cao, Kovachev, Klamma, Jarke, & Lau, 2015), whereas collaborative tagging activities are useful in classrooms because they promote peer engagement around content artifacts, and the act of tagging requires reflection (Bateman, Brooks, Mccalla, & Brusilovsky, 2007). I would also say that not only does tagging promote reflection, but it also requires synthesis of information, and in the ELA classroom, could be an awesome way to help students summarize their understanding as well as meaningful interact with the content in ways that make sense to them. I can defi...

 So I'm brand new to actually having an account with Quora, although I've come across it several times when I've Googled a full-on question. It's just so interesting to me. Like, what's the draw here? From what I saw tonight (I spent about an hour on the site) there seem to be two kinds of posts: Those that are information seeking, and those that are information seeking couched in community seeking or the opportunity to connect experience to experience. For example, I saw questions such as, " What's the rudest thing someone has ever said to you?" and "What's the fastest way to peel pistachios?" And some of these questions have hundreds of comments and interactions. If you haven't signed up yet, there are also dedicated spaces, which seem to function like groups do on Facebook. You can follow people, like you can on Twitter. To me, it feels like Facebook, Twitter, and Blogger had a baby and that's Quora. Anyone else weirdly fascina...