My feelings about my first blog were mixed. I enjoyed picking the theme for the background and designing the page, but when it came to posting my reflection on the blog, I was a bit hesitant. It’s so public and open. I was putting my personal thoughts and writing out there for anyone to read. I’ve never been a very public person, especially when it comes to my writing, so to put my writing out there for anyone to read was a little intimidating. As for the RSS, it seemed too simple. I just set it up and started adding feeds that interest me. I thought, “there must be more to this…what am I forgetting to do?” I’ve been checking in on it for the last couple of days and thinking about the question, “What does this solve and how is it “imaginative”?” I’ve come to see how useful it can be because it is personalized. I get to see what I want to see and keep up with news and information I’m interested in. When you watch the news channel, you have to listen to all of their stories before you get to the one you really want to learn about. With the RSS, I can check up on the news stories that interest me. It is for that reason that I think it could be useful for my students. They can learn about anything that interests them! They can start to take an interest in things outside of our school and district.
How do the blog and RSS match up to Dale’s Cone? When reading the article by Edgar Dale, I was struck by his quotes about how hands-on experience is the best experience anyone can have to truly learn a new concept. I remember hearing the same things in college classes and workshops. In addition to the hands-on experiences, he discusses “thought” and “symbolic experiences”. Dale states, “Our experiences vary according to the degree in which they involve us physically or in thought. …And in our symbolic experiences, virtually all the manifest physical action has been removed; we deal with the experience through our thoughts, our general ideas.” I like this quote because it reminded me that while physical, hands-on experiences are so important, it is also important to remember to stretch students’ minds and get them to problem solve for themselves. Dale talks about how students learn to think critically and symbolically through their physical experiences. This is where I think blogs and RSS feeds come in. I think they are where students can become “creatively involved” and stimulate their minds to think critically, and symbolically. When referring to video, radio, and other media forms, Dale says, “These materials provide experiences in which the student is an observer rather than a doer. Preferably he is a thoughtful, critical witness to such experiences, but he has little direct responsibility for the way in which the learning event will develop.” I see blogs and RSS feeds falling in with this quote as well with an exception. In a blog, if writing your own blog, you do have responsibility for how it develops. In addition, with RSS feeds, you choose which you subscribe to and which you want to explore. Thus, you do have more control over the experience than you would in the case of a video or radio program. For this reason, I see blogs and RSS feeds closer to the “Direct Purposeful Experiences” on the bottom of Dale’s Cone. I see blogs and RSS feeds near demonstrations because students can manipulate what they want to see and read but they aren’t actually experiencing the learning first hand. In addition, blogs allow for some communication about what is being learned and talking/communication is one way to manipulate and play with an idea. There are so many times that simply talking about something aloud, helps to form deeper understanding of a concept or clear up misconceptions. Furthermore, I think blogs and RSS feeds, like the Scenarios tool discussed in Siegel’s article will help students, “grasp multiple perspectives, and develop judgment as well as strategic skill. Scenarios [and blogs and RSS feeds, I think] provide today’s learners with the power to become effective thinkers and doers.”
As far as “computer imagination” and these two technologies go, I think they are quite imaginative. According to Siegel’s article, in order for a website to be “imaginative” it must allow for, “Multiple people can access the same information and share ideas with no constraints on time or location.” Furthermore, he says, “It can create a community of users: It can be easily updated: We can disseminate only the most up-to-date information.” By these definitions, I find a blog to be incredibly “creative and imaginative”. In addition to these abilities, a blog also allows for communication to a large audience quickly. This too, makes a blog creative. An RSS feed is creative in similar ways to the blog, but it has some added features. “It stores information in an ever-expanding, distributed, hyperlinked matrix: We can go wherever we want, following our interests. It can present information contingent on user input: We can control what we see and avoid having to wade through information we don't need. It can create a community of users: Multiple people can access the same information and share ideas with no constraints on time or location.” In conclusion, these two technologies are creative in my opinion, because they meet the definition of a creative website based on Seigel’s definition and they would be quite useful in the classroom. While they don’t provide the hands-on experience that Dale says is the best form of learning, they do allow a somewhat interactive experience for students, which will allow them to think critically and build symbolic understandings of the topic at hand.
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