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Luke My name is Luke Burkholder
I am a nth year Computer Science student
graduating this semester
and I currently work at the Faculty of Graduate Studies & Research
at the University of Regina.
Jeff My name is Jeff Cliff otherwise I'm known around here as student number.
I am a Computer Science student here at the University of Regina.
I'm finishing up my degree this semester.
Alec My name is Alec Couros. I'm a professor
or assistant professor of Educational Technology Media at the Faculty of Education, University of Regina.
Marc My name is Marc Spooner. I'm a professor here at the Faculty of Education.
I'm in Educational Psychology although I do most of my research in social justice areas.
Luke In general, sort of a loss of control over what information is out there about you.
Not just privacy, but reputation and branding, and...
You aren't just who you say you are. You are also what Bob says about you and what Jennifer says about you and so on.
Jeff Although they do enable sharing of information, they do enable more collaboration, they're also for the most part owned.
And, a lot of these tools do allow, and perhaps even require you to submit your information by freely distributable licence.
But at the same time, say Flickr or something... if that were to go down, then... and if the university was relying on that service
We could be sort of in the dark.
Marc One is I'm putting myself up to scrutiny. My students too. Like, many professors don't want to be scrutinized.
And I never know who is watching in the end. These are public sites. But they're not well publicized, but they are still public.
If you stumbled across it or a classmate shared the URL, people could find it and so it makes...
And it's permanent. There is a level of permanence.
So it takes a while to get over the gaze of the camera.
But students do and I do. We quickly forget that there's a microphone, you know, every several feet.
So that's one. You're up to scrutiny in a way that normally wouldn't be there.
There is a certain permanence to your words, to your thoughts, what you've said.
That's maybe scary.
Maybe it's unethical in some ways. Like there's always this question of ethics.
What's ethical for the student who's learning, say, difficult material.
Maybe they don't want to have that permanence because they are working through the knowledge.
... of say we are talking about racism and they say something without having really thought about it.
Well now that thing is sort of published. There is an element of publication.
Right? You're making it public. So I think that's a risk
Jeff You see examples of where people have maybe 500 Facebook friends or a 1000 Facebook.... Maybe not a 1000, but
But certainly numbers approaching that in terms of online friends.
You know if you go to Live Journal the same thing, MySpace the same thing.
Just lots and lots of friends but you don't really interact with them in any meaningful fashion.
On the other hand, tools like Facebook, tools like Live Journal, they allow you to take some of the
sort of drugery of maintaining social relationships and to automate them away allowing you to
spend more time doing the things that are I guess that are at a higher level of meaning, higher more meaningful in a sense.
And this allows you to, if you use them correctly, maintain more friendships, better friendships
and sort of allow you to be more trustworthy, a better friend, etc.
Obviously this isn't universally how these tools are used but it's there.
Alec If you look just our context of Saskatchewan: 1 million people
and you know if you look at the number of teachers
it's quite limited in terms of how you would say
Texas is I don't know how many times bigger than us
for instance one state can be how many times the size of Regina or Saskatchewan as a population.
So to have access to many more passionate best-practice type educators is pretty cool
and social networks allow that to happen.
Marc I use a Wordpress site and I find that it really opens up a lot of avenues
for my students and for my own learning.
So some of the tools, well Wordpress would be one of the big ones, I guess.
I use Skype or other ways of bringing people in from remote locations.
How I use it?
So I have a Wordpress site and what I do is I actually film my classes
I record my graduate class
And I produce these what I can learning enhanced re-presentations of the class.
So they are about 10 minute clips of particularly interesting conversations we've had.
So if we've had a good debate or an exchange about an idea
the students get to revisit that and I've found that very useful in so many ways.
One: maybe you didn't feel like talking that day.
You had a headache or you didn't feel well or you didn't eat lunch
or for whatever reason you just didn't feel like talking,
it gives you an opportunity to re-enter that conversation.
The other thing is even you spoke sometimes people don't remember the classroom as it happened,
and so they get an opportunity to review what they've, what they've said.
And maybe you just didn't do the readings and you get an opportunity to read up on the topics that we talked about
to be able to form an opinion and then re-enter that conversation.
Alec How I use it, personally, I'm using things like Twitter and Facebook,
Twitter, more likely. Facebook I tend to use more for personal stuff,
Twitter I use for, I think a good way of putting it is:
Facebook is for people I already know,
Twitter is for people I don't even know I want to know yet.
And that's, that's sort of the whole thrust around it.
So I connect with educators that, that are doing really cool things in their classroom.
And I'm able to connect with them, find out what they're doing,
and then show my students what they're doing.
Those teachers can be inspiring to them, they can be, they can be mentors to my students.
In doing that, in researching those questions, I'm using the same context
using a personal learning network, developing a personal learning network,
through mostly Twitter, educational blogs, through synchronous tools like Illuminate, Skype, those sorts of things
To build social capital, to gain friendships of trust, peer relationships, colleagues that way.
And to ask questions like that.
For me to have colleagues out there whether it's Michigan or whether it's Barcelona,
I can do that now, I can talk to people all the time.
So what I do end up, what I end up doing is basically developing the idea of an invisible college.
Whereas my Skype is my interface to my hallway so I can talk to people down the road if I'm
if I'm wondering what texts I should be researching or what authors I
that I need to be looking at, who's done, you know, some,
you know, publications on this, who's done some research on this area,
I can basically go into my Skype or I can go into Twitter and ask some of those questions
and they get answered like instantly.
And it's just amazing.
Marc I found it's, it's been a wonderful eye-opener for people
and a new avenue for me to disseminate what I'm finding.
So to put theory into practice, through video and other forms,
having the people speak for themselves, presenting data in a new way,
has really pushed the knowledge translation and dissemination avenue forward.
And the uptake has been amazing.
Luke And I think Web 2.0 can be used as a method to get back to
neutral research teaching
and with as little bureaucracy as necessary.
Some is necessary,
but the amount that goes on in most universities is a little bit too much.
Marc In terms of universities,
if they don't understand that people can form their own personal learning networks,
and get the same knowledge outside of the university
they better wake up,
because resting on our laurels of credentialisation will only last for so long, I think,
and people will seek knowledge elsewhere.
You probably already do it yourselves,
you want to know about something, you Google it, and you watch a video,
and universities, can't, they're not the gatekeepers any more.
So we used to have the libraries, the actual physical holdings of knowledge,
and we would decide who could enter, who could look at them, and who could interpret them.
Well, I see the role of universities in the future as teaching people how to look at that knowledge,
how to be a better learner, that's what I'd like {for} my students.
I don't what to be the one who contains the knowledge.
I want teach you, if I can maybe.
These are some processes to help you be a better learner,
to be a more critical reader of whatever you are looking for and I see that as more our future. {END}