FSU EME-6414 Course Blog JNSU26

 I'm not sure why, but I'm still not jumping with enthusiasm to create social media learning activities or collections of resources to distribute over social media to get interactions.  I keep doing research, and I get it that it potentially ups engagement and allows for interaction between classmates, but wow, does it take a lot to structure, plan, and manage.  One of the first questions in the lesson notes for this week is "Does using social media add value to a learning activity?"  For me, the why is where I get caught up.  I get that it can add value, but from my experience in this program, it also adds A LOT of cognitive overload.  Switching from one platform to another, then to another to create an assignment, is a lot of context switching and learning new tech.  There are sooooooo many various applications out there, and everyone chooses the one they like best.  It's tough for students.  And at this moment, it is likely specific to me,...

I'm a fan of simplicity and of doing things in a step-wise manner.  I wasn't always that way.  I used to like the shoot-from-the-hip, rip-the-band-aid-off, go-big-or-go-home approach to new things.  Over many years, and with a lot of experience, I am now happy to approach things in a small, measured, step-wise fashion where I can make meaningful efforts that can also be tested in ways that can lead to impactful revisions.  That being said, two things from this week's tools activities stood out to me as something I'd like to implement.  I have experience as a student doing activities on shared documents.  I can envision using that kind of activity in meaningful ways, though I didn't love the way it was implemented in prior classes, so I plan to do more digging into that tool.   I also really liked the two collaborative writing tools.  I'd have to think about how to incentivize using those tools, and whether it would be a required or suggested ...

Doing this week's reading and looking into my main question about using social media for specific learning activities, it appears this is a very fraught place.  It appears that there are some interesting and significant advantages to doing this in class, and if not done in a very controlled and specific manner, there are also a whole lot of net negatives for both students and instructors alike.  I came into my first few weeks of THIS class worried about the blurring of lines in my already segmented and separate online and offline personas.  I have the same worries about this from an instructional standpoint.  And I'm still really struggling to see a positive way to do this.  Initially, I was mostly concerned with the idea that once you send students online to a social media site, Pandora's box is opened, and they are out doing their thing on TikTok and Instagram, and are less focused on academic pursuits.  It also feels like a bit of a drag to co-opt their ...

A bit of a convergence this week between this class and my OER class regarding permissions.  And in some ways, these sentiments around OER creating this "golden age" of course resources that will lead to better learning, improved teaching, and education for all seem, to put it mildly, naive.  And I also find it fascinating that there is so much effort put into the permissions conversations and Creative Commons ratings.  I understand that people want credit for their creations, and we need a way to communicate how materials can be used.  Creating good course materials is not easy.  The cost of commercial course materials is extensive, and not a high-profit-margin business model.  Yes, there have been times when certain commercial presses went overboard on price increases, and also used high prices on certain formats (print) to drive more users into digital materials.  OER had a lot of its beginnings as a response to high prices on course materials....

(This is a funny Gemini graphic--it actually looks like the Grey Goop is going to wipe out the Generative Synesthesia.  Just a few prompts to create this visual, and I did not ask it to put these two concepts in opposition.) Very much down the "rabbit hole" this week, considering how AI impacts human creativity.  Last semester in another class, I had to interview someone working in the field.  He is the learning scientist at the edtech I used to work at.  When we got to the topic of AI, which he and I both acknowledged is currently a ripe area of both anxiety and innovation in Higher Education, he said something that still sticks with me:  "That we have to be careful that we use AI to create, for instance, new modes of transportation vs. building a better horse-drawn carriage."  Reading some of the articles this week about IP issues and copyright laws, and a few about creativity and what is and is not "human-created", I turned to none other than Gemini to ...

This week was one of those weeks where I was behind before the week began.  I've never had to take a dog for emergency surgery before, but now I can check that off my lifetime bingo card.  Dog is fine, after a pretty invasive surgery, and he is recovering nicely.  The whole situation led to flashbacks to other medical circumstances with surgeries and scary possibilities, and just how powerless we all are in those situations, and completely reliant on the medical personnel there to help.  Not to mention how hard it was to leave my sick dog in the care of the UofF vet hospital--he's a little dog, and a rescue, so I just fretted that he felt abandoned and alone yet again.  Suffice it to say, I was as much of a mess this past week as he was. So, this week was a lot of catching up, reading blogs to narrow the list of articles I wanted to dig into (and commenting along the way), and learning a lot of new terms and what they meant.  And even though I feel like I l...