Orientation-Old

Orientation

Goals

• Become familiar with course structures

• Get acquainted with the instructor, and classmates

• Participate various orientation activities.

Instructor's Notes

Welcome to ETC777!!

In this orientation week, we will complete certain course preparation activities. This course is different from other courses. Failure to complete these activities may create difficulties with your progress in this course. This course requires students to be intimately familiar with the course structure and completing the orientation if properly pursued will ensure this familiarity. Students must read the syllabus carefully because the design of this course is very different from other educational technology courses. There are activities that must be accomplished during this week, please see the activity page for details.

Here are some highlights of the structure of this course:

• • Each lesson lasts ONE week. Our class lasts for 8 weeks and the final paper is due later.

  • Students will be involved in various course activities: moderate lesson discussions, peer evaluations, project presentations...,etc.

  • Integrating Web 2.0 and social networking technology, such as Twitter, iGoogle, Delicious, Diigo etc., into course activities. It is a good experience for us to learn more this new educational technology trend.

  • Students will be involved in various team activities: moderation as a team of lesson discussions, team work, peer evaluations, self evaluations, online project presentations...,etc.

  • Students will engage in Peer Support for Assignments activities, or supporting one another on the assignments.

This is not an easy course. It covers wide range of knowledge in distance education. Most students find this course challenging. There are many important activities and assignments that must be accomplished to fulfill the requirements of this course, many are labor intensive. Students must stay current with course activities, assignments. and readings. Do not fall behind! It is important that students complete every single activity and assignment on time. Although each lesson last two weeks, you must not wait until the final days of the lesson to complete the course work. Procrastination will cause you to encounter many difficulties.

Course materials are organized into seven lessons. Each lesson is divided into four different sections: Lecture, Reading, Activities, and Assignment.

• • The Instructor's Notes section is where the instructor provides learning guidance and information for the lesson. Lectures may be updated depending on the students' progress and learning experiences.

  • The reading section provides several different types of reading information: Required reading, Optional reading, Resources, and Resources recommended by the students. It is highly recommended that students should finish the required reading before each lesson begins. After finishing the required readings, students are better prepared to participate in the lesson activities, such as lesson discussions. The optional readings are for those students who would like to obtain additional information on the lesson content and challenge themselves with more learning opportunities. Resources are references for students . It is good to take a look at the resources to review a range of related topics. Resources shared by students on Delicious are shared by current or previous students. This list of readings is dynamic because when students tag their Delicious with ETC777, it will appear on the resources. Be sure to check back for newer shared resources or subscribe RSS

  • The activity section lists all important activities in which students should participate. It also lists the questions that we will contemplate in lesson discussions.

  • The assignment page lists the various assignments.

Additionally, we integrate multiple social media (Web 2.0) to deliver our online instructions. In fact, all of our course materials, instruction, and activities will occur on multiple Web 20 tools. We do not use any Learning Management System (LMS) or Course Management System (CMS), such as Sakai, Blackboard etc.

"Openness proponents contend that distance education often isolates students behind password-protected gates. By unlatching those barriers, professors like Mr. Couros are inventing a way of learning online that feels less like a digital copy of face-to-face classes and more like the open, social, connected Web of blogs, wikis, and Twitter. It can expose students to a far broader network than they would encounter discussing their lessons with a small group of graduate students. " (Parry, 2010).

In order to create a base of knowledge for our learning community, stay up-to-date with the assigned readings, we will use the readings as our basic knowledge to plan, design, and develop network learning environments. We integrate various Web 2.0 tools, such as iGoogle, Facebook, Diigo, Delicious, Wetpaint Wiki etc. to support the emerging ideas of Open Network Learning Environments (ONLE) and “Personal Learning Environments (PLE).” In fact, researchers foresee that Web 2.0 tools will disrupt Course Management Systems (CMS). Another reason to apply Web 2.0 tools to deliver our instructions is that most of our classmates won't have access to CMS since their schools do not have such systems to support teaching and learning. Since most Web 2.0 tools are free and easy to use, schools, or other organizations, are able to adopt them to support organizational teaching and learning for the workforce. We will discuss additional reasons to integrate web 2.0 to create network learning environments.

Frequently, Web 2.0 tools require us to have separate log-in accounts. This is the reason why we need to create an account for each Web 2.0 tool; however, iGoogle, a personalized portals/homepages, allows us manage multiple Web 2.0 tools at the same location. Research has suggested that Web 2.0 tools are more effective than the ones provided in CMS. Students in Educational Technology fields should explore the current effective technologies to support learning. This is why we are integrating various Web 2.0 tools into our course. The Web 2.0 tools integrated into our course designs and instructions are not just for the required activities; it is highly recommended that students should apply Web 2.0 tools to support their own learning and their group activities. It is important for you to maintain good communication with your teammates and the instructor.

Why do we integrate multiple tools to deliver our instructions? As Dede has observed, "the history of tool making shows that the best strategy is to have simultaneously available a variety of specialized tools, rather than a single device that attempts to accomplish everything" (2008, p. 58).

Dede, C. (2008). Theoretical perspectives influencing the use of information technology in teaching and learning. In J. Voogt and G. Knezek, (Eds.), International Handbook of Information Technology in Primary and Secondary Education. New York: Springer.

We will experience many technology tools. You may feel comfortable and/or uncomfortable with some of them. The key is that we need to "experience" these emerging technologies and evaluate how they may impact human learning. Being an educational technology specialist, we need to have broad experiences in different emerging technologies so we can evaluate, and suggest effective technologies to support our organizational learning.

If you intend to print our course materials, please be sure to check back our course instructions because frequently we update our course materials based on students' needs.

It is important for you to maintain good communication with your teammates and the instructor. Frequently, you will have questions or issues that require help to be resolved. Maintain close communication with your teammates and the instructor. I always like to hear from you, even when you are doing well in the class. I prefer that you forward your e-mail correspondence to my NAU e-mail account at Chih.Tu@Nau.edu

Readings (Powered by Del.icio.us. Consider to subscribe RSS to keep updated on reading resources.)

• • Required Readings (Finish the required readings before the lesson starts)

  • Optional Readings (More readings for you to enrich your learning, to prepare for discussions, assignments, projects etc.)

  • Resources (Resources from our classmates, ETC students, and ETC faculty.)

Activities

Orientation Activities

Self introductions on Nabble discussion board: http://etc777-spring-2012-discussion-boards.10260.n6.nabble.com/

I also believe it is important to know a little something about the people in our class. To do that, we need to post our self introductions on the Discussion Board are. Self-introduction is an excellent resource to use in forming a good team; therefore, open yourself up. If you have pictures that you would like to share with us, please do so. Here are some ideas to help you get started.

• • Create a Nabble account. You will use this account to participate our lesson discussions throughout the course.

  • Your name and what you liked to be called.

  • General information about where you live and what you do.

  • What your expectations are for our class.

  • What makes you unique.

  • A picture of you, or an image that represents you.

  • Links to some of your favorite things.

  • Your hobbies, etc.

  • Anything else that you want to provide

Optional tools integrations

• • • Zotero

      • • Zetero is a tool for you to collect, cite, and manage research resources. We will be involved numerous research resources . It is critical to have a useful tool to manage our valuable resources.

• • • • Zotero Tour

Assignment

Assignment 1: PLE Setup

• • We will use GMail to collaborate and submit our assignments. If you have a GMail, feel free to use your exist GMail account. Or you can create a new GMail account.

Nabble

• • Create a Nabble account. Our course discussion will occur on Nabble. Add Nabble discussion to your iGoogle so you can monitor our course discussion from iGoogle.http://etc777-spring-2012-discussion-boards.10260.n6.nabble.com/

  • Be sure to register to our course discussion board: http://etc777-spring-2012-discussion-boards.10260.n6.nabble.com/template/NamlServlet.jtp?macro=start_registration_page&nextUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fetc777-spring-2012-discussion-boards.10260.n6.nabble.com%2F

We will use Delicious.com to manage distributed assignment resources/bookmarks.

• • Social Bookmarking with Del.icio.us

• • Why use Google Calendar?

  • You can view course calendar on iGoogle or your smartphones.

iGoogle Setup

• Source: Google Video: Google Reader Tutorial

  • Subscribe related RSS feeds:

    • Delicious: http://feeds.delicious.com/v2/rss/tag/ETC777?count=15

    • ETC777 Twitter Search: http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=ETC777

    • Optional: Here are RSS feeds that previous students like. If you have any good feeds that you would like to share with the course, please bookmark the feed with the tags ETC777 RSS Feeds on Delicious.

  • http://www.delicious.com/tag/ETC777+RSS+Feeds

  • Feel free to add any RSS feeds that are relevant to your own learning and personal uses.

  • It is highly encouraged students use different features on Google Reader (Tag, Add Star, Like, Share, Share with note etc.) to help you to manage and to organize your multiple subscriptions. They are particularly helpful when you have more subscriptions. You can use Google Reader as a tool to help you and your group to build Open Network Learning Environment (ONLE).

  • It is highly encouraged students should visit their Google Reader regularly because your subscriptions to course relevant feeds would keep you updated on the course activities at multiple sites but without visit multiple sites. In other words, you take on your own learning responsibilities to control and to manage your personal learning environment (PLE).

  • Notes

If you use iGoogle for other courses, you can use the same iGoogle to manage your gadgets, tabs etc.