Well Then…

Participation and collaboration for online learning. The question is how do you encourage/reward participation for online collaboration? Suggestions:

• Make the applications suitable for our everyday work (which has been done).
• Frequent Feedback (which you do).
• Make the learning fun and practical (check).
• Encourage and support (oui).

Looks like it’s up to us. I for one wouldn’t be able to afford to take this course if it were not for the flexibility of the online component. I like to learn technology through exploration (trial and lots of error) and the syllabus for the course allows for learning valuable social networking techniques, software/tech tools do’s and don’ts, and valuable colleague collaboration. I have always been a fan of making my own mid term and I have to agree with others who have said that we shall get out what we put in.

This is cool. It’s probably a matter of time before we no longer need stamps for letters or phones for phone calls. Neat-o! There is an option to send money under tools. I better learn how to use this before my kids get older.

The amount of information and business that is sent/done via the internet is increasing daily. All of this information is in danger of being eavesdropped on. I, for one, am someone who is leary of doing business over the internet. I don’t want to give my credit card info. out. I did it once to purchase golf clubs and when they didn’t arrive within 5 weeks, I thought I was had. Thankfully they arrived that next week, but the scare was there. 

There are a lot of hackers out there who would like nothing more than to steal your identity or money (Winners fiasco) . You can pay money to have someone hack a hotmail password for you. You can buy hardware to track key strokes to steal an online banking account. Virtually, there is NO stopping determined hackers.

As web security improves, hackers adapt. If privacy is a concern for you, there are some safeguards that you can take. There are applications that encrypt all of your traffic (even URLs) in a Virtual Private Network (VPN), giving privacy from people snooping your connection (say) when you’re connected via wireless broadband. This is happening to my cousin who lives in an apartment building and has wireless. His fear is that those who are stealing his broadband will illegally download music or other and it will be traced back to his ISP number.

So far so good! To this point the exploration aspect for this course has been pretty good. This is pretty much the way I like to learn technology . It is very time consuming but very harmless when you make a mistake. The undo/delete button is a fabulous addition to any toolbar.

Here is my blogging page! I hope to use this with my students. It should be one way to cut down on paper and the kids may like this form of reporting over the more traditional pen and paper form!