Our Class Wiki – So Far

After using the class wiki for the first time, I realized that there was quite a bit to learn in order to create an interesting wiki page or to add more content to other areas of the class wiki, but it was sort of fun trying to learn more about the wiki system and how to use it, as well as, creating a new wiki page from scratch. I chose to create a wiki page on education. I thought it would be a great idea discuss on how new media has affected education. Throughout this semester, there were many articles from the course weekly readings that came to mind such as an article written by Bridget McCrea called “Taking Students Where No School Bus Can Go” or the article from www.onlinecolleges.net called “50 Ways to Use Twitter in the College Classroom” that reinforced the co-mingling of new media and education.  I learned quite a bit from these articles, the information within these pieces were quite fascinating because each of these articles depicted where new media technology was taking education or how it was morphing the traditional education system. I intertwined these articles into the wiki page, I also added a structure to this wiki page by starting off with a sort of broad introduction of how new media and education are connected, then I further broke it down into different and smaller sections or portions which included: social media, webcam and video chatting applications, file storage websites, virtual worlds, and lastly, references. Some of the information I include for social media is how Twitter can be used within the class room setting, for video chatting, I include the article written by McCrea, and for virtual worlds, I include the article from the course weekly readings called “Avatar II: The Hospital” written by Stephanie Simon. All these different forms of new media technology provide great benefits to education, I wanted to be able to display this through these articles. The piece on Twitter explained how social networking can be used as a tool for further educational benefits, growth, and contribution whilst McCrea’s article discussed the benefits of skyping folks all over the world for the student audience and Simon’s article discussed the benefits of a virtual hospitals to soon to be nurses. These examples depict the how education is changing and bending to the will of the new era of new media technology. I want to include some more information on new media and education but this will require a bit more of additional research, I would love to expand more on social media and how it caters to the needs of both teachers and students. At the same time, I would like to include some pictures into the wiki page for a fresher and professional look, but as of yet, I have not quite figured out how to do it, I am still learning on how to properly do this. I would probably want to contribute more by creating another wiki page that may interest me such as “Recruitment”, “News”, “Politics”, or “Privacy” page. To include more information on education and new media, I am currently looking at other resources and articles that may be of interest. At the same time, I am looking for insightful images to include in the wiki page.