Week 6 Reflection

I cannot believe how quickly each week is flying by. Each time I post a blog, I realize that I am one week closer to finishing and graduating. This week I work on setting up my delicious account and my flickr account. I reviewed the article about Twitter and I really enjoyed learning about microblogging. Everywhere you turn, someone is tweeting-which I thought sounded totally stupid when I first heard it, but now it makes a little more sense. It is a neat way to quickly communicate with people that have common interests. There are so many uses for it now.

Okay---after posting pictures in flickr, copying all my favorites in delicious, tweeting a little, it's time to move on to next week's assignments. Have a great week. Well---I've heard there might be some snow coming in this week. I guess we will have to wait and see. I'm about ready for some warm weather myself.

Week 5 Reflection

Okay, so this week I would like to talk about how my workplace uses collaborative software in many of the procedures we do daily. I work with the medical student admissions committee at the Brody School of Medicine. I set up and maintain a SharePoint website where I post things that are necessary for the committee to have. I really feel like it has updated how the committee does things. I send out committee reports, class statistics and pictures, as well as important announcements. SharePoint is a neat program that allows me to communicate with my committee instead of e-mailing everyone each time I need something. They have been very receptive about using our website--I was so excited about using this and since it goes along with our class, I figured I would share how it works with my classmates. It looks like it's going be a wonderful and warm week, at least for a while.

Week 4 Reflection

So this week I continued to read and learn about wikis. I worked on my section of our class wiki which was very interesting. Wikis are very powerful tools that are becoming more and more popular in both education and businesses. For my article review, I chose the one that was related to wikis in education which was titled "Uses and Potentials of Wikis in the classroom." It was a very interesting article which described how the teacher-student relationship is constantly changing, going from a classroom in which the teacher "owned" all the material, to one in which the students become collaborators.

I really enjoy learning about how the whole classroom setting has changed in the last few years, but more importantly how much potential wikis, as well as other virtual software, has enabled the classroom to become a much more interactive society for students. It is exciting to think about the limitless possibilities that exist, as well as others that will come about in the future for classrooms.

Businesses are also getting in on the action. After researching the internet, I found many case studies of how businesses are already taking advantage of wikis. These companies are using wikis for meetings, projects, and just about any type of collaborative work they have to do. Again, I am enjoying learning all about the many possibilities that now exist in this area as well.

Well---until next week....it's all about learning about the possibilities of virtual teamwork!

Week 3 Posting

Well our class is building our very own Wiki--this should be an interesting experience. Wikis are interesting creatures (so to speak). They can be very useful tools with lots of good information. However, one must be careful when relying on some Wikis. From what little I know about them (going into this project), I understand that some of them can be edited by anyone and the information is not always verified, which can lead to often reporting incorrect data. I think our Wiki will be an adventure for all of us. I'm excited about working together on this project. It is amazing how much collaboration goes on now everywhere from places of business to classes, even church programs.