EDUC 639 Professional Development Plan

EDUC 633 Introduction - How learning occurs

Hi.  I'm Dale and welcome to Jusitn Utherguy's blog about education and technology.  I'm a graduate student in Liberty University Online's School of Education.  I'm also in the Navy and currently deployed to the Middle East.  My wife and 2 children are at home in the DC area eagerly awaiting the completion of my deployment.  I really like the online learning program because it offers a great deal of flexibility for learning.  This class is the perfect example because I'm thousands of miles away from the campus and even further away from you and the course professor and can still communicate and stay engaged in the class.  In fact, I have in the past and will in this course participate in a live classroom session. 

Let's discuss learning for a moment by talking about how learning occurs.  Learning occurs in a variety of ways.  Some people learn by doing, a hands on kind of approach.  Others can learn by observing, like hearing piano music or seeing a dance move.  And still others might learn from reading, a more conceptual approach.  The point is that we can't fit all learners into a convenient little box defined by one size fits all kind of rules.

Finally, let me tell you three things about myself.  Now, 2 will be true and one will not.  You try and figure out which is not the true statement.

1.  I'm 42 years old and I still have a baby tooth.
2.  I never learned to ride a bicycle.
3.  I once took the stairs to the top of the Empire State building.

I look forward to hearing your guesses.  Good luck.

EDUC 639 Wiki Reflection Blog

Working on a project using a wiki is an interesting experience.  Before this literature review I had never used a wiki beyond the occasional trip to Wikipedia.  None of us had designed or worked within a wiki.  I think that this is apparent in the simplicity of design in our team’s wiki page.  My initial contribution was laying out the wiki for each of us to input our reviews.  It was interesting to see how our topic came together.  Each of us had a completely different idea for the review.  After some discussion, and a little guidance from the instructor, we found the common thread in the areas of professional development and collaborative learning so we called our wiki Training-4-Sharing.  The funny thing about our topic is that we were actively demonstrating the need that is supported by our literature review.  None of us had received any prior training on how to use or create a wiki.  I must admit that for a good portion of the time we were working on our individual contributions, I had my doubts about how useful and functional the wiki was for our project.  When we finally got to the point of combining our review and editing the combined review, the usefulness of the wiki began to show.  Each of us could edit and save our contributions at the same time.  We were able to make incredible strides towards completion in a short amount of time by capitalizing on collaboration, networking, and cloud computing.  These were all points discussed in our review.  I think that the biggest impact working on this project had on me was that we didn’t just read about our subject, we experienced it firsthand.

Muddiest Point: Fair Use

Transcript

This week’s lesson presented many concepts related to the legality of using materials produced by other people in our lessons or research.  I have always found legalese a bit difficult to follow.  That being said, determining when the use of material produced by other falls into the category of fair use or not is a little foggy.  There are resources we can use to help us cite literary works from many different sources.  However, the internet has added a different dimension that muddles the citation process.  I found a cartoon on a website the other day that would be very appropriate for use in our wiki literature review.  It relates to cloud technology, but I’m unsure just how to appropriately use it without violating some copyright law.  I think this is the kind of problem today’s generation will face.  As mentioned in this week’s videos, this generation spends a lot of time online and may feel that what they view online is free for all to use.  This is problematic because it may result in the inadvertently illegal use of someone’s material.  Since ignorance is not an excuse for violating a law, serious problems could lie on the horizon for me, and other students, researchers, and educators.