Completely Overwhelmed This Week!

I am feeling completely overwhelmed with this class and program!!! When I decided to take on this degree I was told this program was great for individuals that are working full-time. As a teacher, you do not have the luxury of working from 8:00 am to 5:00 pm and be done. Myself and most other teachers I know arrive an hour or two before students arrive at school and then leave to go home several hours after students leave. In a small district, like the one I work in, you also are working on grants, coaching, attending meetings, and the list goes on and on. Most weekends go by also with the teacher in the classroom preparing for the next week. In my first few classes I seemed to have no problem keeping up with assignments. In this class we are spending a lot of time exploring sites and developing Blogs, Twitter, Facebook, PBWorks and more accounts. The amount of time to complete those requirements would be enough to keep me busy for hours, but then we have our discussion questions and writing assignments on top of that! I do NOT have enough hours in my day! I feel like I am sinking and doing a terrible job in my assignments. I take pride in being a great student. The other bummer is that I do not feel like I am learning everything because there is sooooo much information to get through and not enough time to do a thorough job of learning the information! OK, now on with what I have learned in the last sessions.

We set up Ning, Facebook, and PBWorks and had to give the pros and cons of each. I personally found that PBWorks was a much better environment for a learning event because there were minimal distractions. Ning and Facebook are, to me, primarily social and for a learner too many distractions. PBWorks seems to be geared more toward learning and collaboration.
We also had to decide if we felt Ning, Facebook, or PBWorks could replace Moodle or any other Learning Management System (LMS). I personally do not believe that any of the options could truly replace an LMS. I believe they could play a partial role in learning, but the LMS would still be necessary for posting grades and submitting dropbox assignments due to privacy issues.

We were also assigned to read an article, Minds on Fire: Open Source, and Learning 2.0 by John Seely Brown and Richard P. Adler. The article describes how learners are able to participate in learning events all over the world through virtual environments like Second Life. This site has information on any subject you can imagine from the law, the arts, music, and even new technologies. This is all available without enrolling in an actual university where you physically attend class on a campus. This article predicts a shortage of universities within the next decade that makes virtual learning (synchronous and asynchronous) necessary to educate everyone who desires a college education to meet our society’s quickly growing demand for more well-educated workers entering the workforce.

The article discusses the outside-the-box learning as Learning 2.0. It states that the internet started out as a unidirectional learning tool. The experts published, and the learners read. This is considered the first phase, or 1.0. Now, the internet is a collaborative tool which allows contributors of all levels of expertise to come together. This second phase of the internet is called Learning 2.0.

Reference:

Brown, J. S. & Adler, R. P. (2008, January/February). Minds on Fire: Open Education,

      the Long Tail, and Learning 2.0. EDUCAUSE Review.
      http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ERM0811.pdf

Professional learning communities, Wikipedia retrieved May, 2010 from.

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional_Learning_Community