Friday, November 19, 2010

Website Validation

Website- http://home.inreach.com/kumbach/velcro.html (Velcro Crops)

The authour is Ken Umbach, he is a satirical writer who writes short witty articles for various magazines and websites. The authour clearly created the information himself calling upon fake sources for information and predictions. The author does  not leave their contact information on the page.
Obviously, the page is written in humor and is not meant to be taken seriously. It is in fact, satirical writing. It is most likely aimed at bored college students or middle aged people working a dull desk job. The page is quite old for a web page, 1996, and has not been updated recently.
In conclusion, it is just an old satirical web-post that is meant for humor.

Wednesday, November 17, 2010

WebQuest

I thought that the "World of Shakespeare" and "Anti-Earthquake" Web quests were best. They both listed roles for each member of the group, were straight forward and time efficient, factual and listed several links that were helpful in finding more information or ideas. The two worst WebQuests were "Foreign Country Presentation" and "Waves and Sound." Neither promoted group work or collaboration with other students. "Waves and Sound" was lengthy and didn't seem to allow much room for creative response while the "Foreign Country Presentation" while short, left too much open to interpretation on how to do things. Plus, the "Foriegn Country Presentation" listed Wikipedia as a credible source, which when talking about foreign policeis and economics, it probably isn't.

Friday, November 12, 2010

About Blogging

Thus far, truthfully, I have found nothing that I really like about blogging. I can see it's benefits, like recieving feedback from students on different topics or to divulge information to a broader public than just a classroom, but I personally would rather have face time. That being said, I won't keep a blog after this class. I think that this class actively uses Collective Intelligence by reading and studying information and "pooling" our knowledge to reach a collective goal. I think Diigo is actually a better example of this because we can see each other's ideas and perspectives as we cover the information.d

Learning Style

According to the Leaning Style Test, I am an Aural reader. This means that I learn well by first person interaction and by listening to someone speak. It means that graphs, charts, readings, and other visually oriented learning tools are, for the most part, ineffective forms of learning. I would basically agree with this because I have found that I do better at remembering details and facts if I listen to a lecture without taking notes. If I try to take notes and read them later, nothing really sticks.

http://www.picassohead.com/?id=9d2be7a

Friday, November 5, 2010

Twiiter Stuff: Smothering Creativity.

Personally, I think forcing people to say whatever they want to say in 140 characters or less promotes creativity. It forces  overwhelmingly narcissistic individuals who want to narrate their entire lives for others to skim through and roll their eyes in boredom to simplify "I went to the mall and I bought some food, music, and shoes... more shoes... then left the mall and met some friends and went out and got some dinner and ate some food, but I didn't like my food so I didn't leave a tip... then I brushed my teetht again because I just couldn't help but felt like there was something in my teeth..." and so on, into "I went shopping. Bought stuff." I think that sometimes revision, especially when writing things that are only going to waste other individuals' time is very important. I think twitter and texting do influence the way we write. Those of us who do twitter and text a lot, use a greater amount of simple, or incomplete sentences.