RWLD #2 - Due May 18 - Distributed Learning Community

You are entering a distributed learning community. Distributed learning environments emphasize building a community of learners where individuals can be experts and are acknowledged as such.

A learning community is a group of learners who agree on 4 characteristics:

1. diversity of expertise; 
2. shared objective of advancing the collective knowledge;
3. learning how to learn; and 
4. mechanisms for sharing what is learned.

• Dede, C. (2004) Enabling distributed learning communities via emerging technologies - part 1 (.pdf)
• Dede, C. (2004) Enabling distributed learning communities via emerging technologies - part 2 (.pdf)

Read the Web 2.0 book: pgs. 1-44.

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Collaborative Wiki:
This week, we will ask you (the students) to find the information that we will need to review. I have created some wiki pages that correspond with the learning community characteristics. Your job is to find resources (text, image, video, audio, etc) and post them to the appropriate wiki resource page. This is not a graded activity but merely another experience in building a collaborative learning experience.

Videos:

• An Introduction to Using a Wiki
• How to Edit a Wiki (use this to complete the assignment)

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Emerging Instructional Technology Twittering:

Another thing that we will be doing this week is signing up for Twitter.   This will be a way that we can follow each other as well as follow any comments that apply specifically to our Emerging Instructional Technologies (EIT - I will use the EIT to refer to our class.)

Twitter in Plain English video

Before you sign up for Twitter, I would like to give some User Name advice.  You should identify a username that you will use for ALL of your places on the social media network.  This should be a professional name that will easily identify you.  

DON'T use one with long numbers or cute saying: jbrown714 or funnyguy3933

DO use something with your name if possible  zeitz, leighzeitz, leigh.zeitz, vvrotny

1.  Join Twitter.  (http://twitter.com)

2.  Once you are signed in, go to http://twitter.com/zeitz   Click on the Follow button so that you can follow my tweets. I will automatically follow you back, so you will know that you have at least one follower.

3.  Download TweetDeck from http://tweetdeck.com This is a program that you can run from your computer to check your twitter account. I suggest this because it makes it easy to organize the tweets from your friends.

4.  Go to our NamePage where you will post your twitter name.

We will use a few different ways to follow each other:

• Hashtags (#UNI_EIT)
• Lists
• TweetDeck columns

I will provide more information on how to use these soon.

Review (don't have to read) these 6 Sources for Using Twitter in Education 

Twitter Spoofs for a little fun.

Have fun,

Z

photo: flickr.com/cekrypton2