america as a nation reduces expectations of self

Obama Drastically Scales Back Goals For America After Visiting Denny’s

in all the chatter about slam poets

i never did embed the saul williams poems i was talking about early in the year.  so here it is…

he has also teamed up with trent reznor and gone on tour promoting an album they created together, which is interesting cause i never expected trent reznor and saul williams to be two people that would work together.  but who knew?  either way they’ve put this together, which you may recognize from some nike ads not too long ago.  it’s called ‘list of demands‘ and they’ve disabled the embed option so you’ll have to click and chase it a bit.  here’s the nike ad and you can hear a minute of the song in it…

i’ve got a list of demands too, don’t you?

so i guess i forgot..

to write about my reflection on social learning.  first off i was doubtful about how well this class would work; i mean, i’ve never taken a class online before or even considered taking any sort of computer course whatsoever.  But it was the social aspect of the shared challenge – technological newness, blogging, online tools – that allowed for an  exchange of ideas and discoveries to push one another on to learn together.  It was a nice environment. Normally in a class you don’t get to see anyone’s work, never mind progress.  But in this class when someone figured something out, we could all learn from it.  That’s a major difference between the classic university course – everyone for him/herself – vs this one – everyone for him/herself but building off of each other’s successes.

The class wiki was one component that could have been fleshed out as a group a little more, but i think the limitations of the shortened class combined with the reading load and the summer format changed how much time we all had to contribute.  But that’s not to say that even with our limited contributions to it one couldn’tsee how a class wiki would be great.  I’m not adding any links in this post cause i’m lazy but i think we have all seen some great examples of successful class wiki’s during the course of our mentoring and examples provided by dean and other guest lecturers. And of course, one last point about the success of social learning in regards to group wikis: how many times did i use our wetpaint site to find email addresses, due dates, tech tasks, blog addresses, links from our elluminate sessions (thaaaaanks aaaaambeeeerr) etc etc etc….  totally invaluable and for the most part equally generated between professor and students.

one last thing i’d like to mention is how strange it was to see everyone at our real life classes in regina.  We were all so quiet and hesitant to talk – that wasn’t the case during our elluminate sessions.  real life was weird.  Elluminate life was open, and i felt compelled to comment in our class chat in ways i wouldn’t have even considered during our face to face meetings.   imagine larissa and i getting loud during class about 911 in a classroom while the prof is teaching and a guest lecturer is presenting!  not going to happen.  But in the online environment it is a possibility.  And that may not be the most positive example but the point remains true: an online class was to my surprise easier to contribute in than a “normal” class.  interesting, no?

so to finish off i’d just like to thank everyone for making this class a great experience and for posting helpful how-to videos and links.  And for creating really compelling and interesting reading via your blogs.  also i’m not sure how many of you were reading dean’s blog but there are some interesting ideas being discussed by educators from all over the country and beyond.  and some funny stuff too.   so again thanks to everyone for a creating an awesome social learning environment and making this summer (ugh) class as enjoyable as possible.