Week 5 - teaching and learning in Second Life

I recalled last year when I attended AECT conference, there were a lot of researches exploring the potential applications of Second Life. Second Life seems the most popular virtual world in use today. With its real time/ synchronous characteristics, you can participate in a live event, conference, concerts, etc. Second Life can be use as a means to enhance learning and increase learner motivation. For example use Second Life to create and design situated learning environments, support immersive learning, increase social networking and interaction, and facilitate communication and collaborative learning. In such immersive learning environments, learners can experience real feelings and interaction as they do in a real world and apply knowledge and skills in realistic scenarios. Shy learners are more apt to participate in such attractive learning environments.

The researchers also pointed out some barriers and difficulty. For example, users ( i.e., learners, instructors, instructional designers) may have technological problems or encounter difficulty using the interface of Second Life. Also, it is expensive and time-consuming for instructors or instructional designers to design a virtual world. How to effectively integrate Second Life to support learning and improve performance/ learning is still challenging for instructional designers and instructors.

I also found some wiki websites and blogs about the use of Second Life in education.

• Exploring the educational uses of Second Life.

• Second Life Education Wiki

• Simon Bignell's blog talked about how to assess the impact of Second Life for educational purposes

Week 5 - a predictive technology

Recently, I read an article " The Web Knows What You Want" from Business Week By Stephen Baker.

Corporates want to know the customer's behaviors for online shopping businesses, so that after a shopper look at/ buy a particular item, the system can appear a recommendation that is precisely what the shopper wants. That's just like a sale clerk could give customers recommendations through observing customer's body language and behaviors in a brick-and-mortar store. This is not a new idea, but they want to adopt a new predictive technology in order to improve the accuracy of recommendations and to earn more money. For example, when I look at or add a camera into my shopping cart at Amazon, it would suggest me to buy related accessories and recommend me what other customers who bought this same item also bought. Every time I log in to my account,Amazon will offer personalized product recommendations to me.

The patterns of clicks, purchases, personal information are analyzed, and many other factors may influence an individual's selection. Also, privacy issues may cause some concern to some online shoppers. However, I have more positive attitudes towards this predictive technology. I'm thinking how time saving this will be and what related terms this will show, if I'm searching information on an online library database. At least from a researcher or a student's point of view, this technology could lead me to dig deeper into more research topics relevant to the field of interest.

Week 4 CiteULike and delicious

This week, I have tried to play with CiteULike and delicious. Similar to Diigo, Delicious.com and CiteULike are also social bookmarking tools.

I can see the most popular bookmarks on Delicious's home page. Hence, I can see what other people are most interested currently. It's also very convenient to save the links listed on the first page as my personal bookmark. But unlike Diigo, delicious can't add Sticky Notes or highlight information on a web page.

CiteULike doesn't have that annotation features as Diigo, either. But I think one of the advantage of CiteULike is that it has a citation management feature. I can choose different citation formats and see the abstracts of the articles. This is more useful for researchers, who need to collect academic articles, cite reference, and write papers. I can see other people's bookmarks and tags on the CiteULike's home page. Through other people's bookmarks, I can even connect to ERIC database to find more relative articles that I may be interested in. I feel CiteULike will be beneficial for me because of its citation management features and I still need to explose it more.

An introduction to CiteULike, CiteULike: a researcher's social bookmarking service (Emamy & Cameron, in Ariadne) .

Week 4 -Technorati

Technorati is a blog search engine. It can help me find information appearing on blogs. For being a beginner, I can check what the popular topics and most linked blogs are from their top 100 blogs. Also, I can collect a list of my favorite blogs and keep track on them.

But I think Technorati is more beneficial if you are a blogger and want to make your blog more visible. Especially if someone is making a living on blogging or enterprise blogs, Technorati would be definitely useful for them.

It seems that Technoratic can help blog owners to find out who is linking to their blogs, no matter what blogging platforms they use. It also offers some useful features, such as tagging (I know some blog platforms do not allow multiple tags) and ping, which notice and update Technoratic that there is new content on the blog.

Second, building authority is important for bloggers, because that the higher numbers means the more blogs linking to your blog. Technorati Authority measures the number of blogs, rather than the number of links. So if a blog owner writes some things that are interesting or important that many other blogs link to there, that blog would have a high authority number and it may shows on Technorati Rank.

Right now I’ve just sign up, claimed my blog, and added the Technorati logo on my blog. But I think I just need it to check any update from my favorite blogs, and perhaps someday I will need it to manage my blog if I’ll start to write something that I want more people to read.

There are two resources about Technorati.
This is from Gina Chen, who talked about why journalist bloggers should use it.
This one is about A Beginner’s guide to Technorati.