Friday September 30, 2016

--Originally published at Digital Identity

While waiting to have a brief session with Diego Zavala, Ken put us a video of Veritasium about education and technology.

Veritasium says that whether education is provided by animation (videos) or pictures, learning has to be more about what happens inside the brain of the student. In other words, rather than the teaching method, learning depends on the student including its limits. So rather than investigating how technology can improve learning, experts now search for type of experiences that conduct learning.

Today, teacher´s roll is not to deliver information; what he or she does is to guide social process of learning, inspire, challenge and excite to learn; make students fell important. This is because there are plenty of information on the web (for example MOOCs), even Youtube is full of educational videos. So he concludes that technology is not revolution but an evolution.

With David Zavala, I learned the concept of digital strorytelling. He explains that in the past creating and editing own video was very complicated, but now it is possible to do it individually or DIWO easily.

He showed us about Story center, Story Corps, Las Cronicas Elefantiles or ones that are collaborated such as Collabdocs. Most of them are brief and maximum of 7 minutes. But I also recommend to watch them because you can find short movies happened in real life.

For the video safari, he recommended us to use Creative Commons, Pond5 and Flickr; but there are many others.

After finishing the video,  I mocked myself because it was too silly. It supposed to be a horror movie but couldn´t help to laugh at it. I should have listened Ken and use Camtasia or other movie editor, Movie Maker is too simple that can´t put a sound over another.

Eventhough I don´t have talent, I really did enjoy making one!

Later on we had as guests Rebecca Hogue and Helen Dewaard. This was the last day, so I forced myself to ask about one of the questions tha I had:

It was about bloggers who are popular and have strong influence over readers’ opinion; that they abuse of it to get what they want in restaurants or other kind of establishments by threatening them with a negative post against them. What solutions could we have to avoid it.

One solution that Ken gave was websites like Yelp, where many different kinds of opinions about an establisment is given. Also what the guests said is that owners can cultivate a positive space, invite critics to write about them and making sure that they had a good experience. Besides people will stop reading bloggers who are telling lies, they somehow will get to know the truth. So keep on posting positive contents rather than negative ones.

As tips to make and keep a good image or reputation, plus good things that you say about yourself, have comments of other people saying good things about you; but you also have to do it for that people or friends. When you are attacked, you better have allies to help you against.

Briefly in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Rebecca explains the weight of the responsability of having self-publications in the blog, and the consequences of over sharing personal privacy. When you write about other people, what you say has the potential to cause harm, so you need to think about it, she says. For example, my blog is about me and my story, it is not about their stories. Using their names could have an unintended consequence, she cotinues. Besides, we did not include pictures of people who did not give us their permission. When someone blogs about their ideas, however, they are expecting that they are given appropriate credit for their ideas, she concludes.

Semana i ends today, so this is the last session. I am happy for not waking up at 6 a.m. but I had fun having a blog and writing on it for a week. Specially because the posts were full of information regarding digital identity (educational topic), and it was my first time doing this kind of stuff. Also I received some comments back from comments that I wrote in strangers´ blogs, and it felt good!