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CSE697 - Assignments
This page, and others, are still under development. Thank-you for your patience.
Getting Oriented
One primary goal of this course is to help the student manage and organize the many opportunities for information. To organize all information is impossible so the first task is to an inventory of one's personal and professional interests. A skeleton of mine may looks like the one on the left.
A more fleshed out section may look like the one on the right. However this is no format for this inventory. The goal here is to seriously and systematically discern what information you wish to gather.
Also do a self-assessment by making a list of websites that you frequent. What does this tell you about how you use the Internet.
Submit both lists as a post or comment to my post in the Professional Learners Group.
Getting Started
Setup an aggregator. I recommend both Google Reader and iGoogle. Join the Professional Learners group. See right column to subscribe. You will need to set up a Gmail account to do this assignment.
Reaching Broadly
Search the Internet for other aggregators and readers, study their features and write a summary in Professional Learners Group. Also consider other socializing tools such as Twitter and Facebook for interconnecting with others with similar interests.
The Fad
Do some research on how society, students, teachers, business, the general public use aggregators. Do this as a professional and read several journal articles, and as a layperson by observing and gathering information directrly from the Internet. Enter the discussion in Professional Learners. Add comments about what you discovered and comment on waht others have discovered. Sharing this information is key to our learning process in this case.
In Education
Research and discuss how aggregators/readers can benefit educators and students.This assignment is much likethe one above except that we're narrowing our considerations. How can and how are aggregators and readers and social networking affecting education and how we go about the business of teaching and learning.
Getting More Technological
Add Stuff to you iGoogle; stuff that will support your interests, your organizational style, and the management of your incoming information. How can we use tabs and filters to organize the information? (Stuff is not a professional term!)
Tell us about what you are finding useful and why. Keep an eye out on others to see how their efforts might assist you.
Visualize
Now it's coming together. Sketch a diagram of your aggregator/reader: shapes for different sites or groups of sites and gadets, lines with arrows to denote incoming and outgoing information. Try several formats and diagrams and sketches before you allow my sample to influence your thinking. Then review others' and give yourslef room to modify yours as you accumulate new ideas.
Professionalize
Having used the aggregator/reader throughout the course and having discovered its features, write a plan for the next "newly improved" tools for managing your professional and personal information. This is the culminiation of your work. This is when you put the last piece in the jigsaw puzzle.
Reflect
Now we're going to step back and review everything that has happened in the last month. It's like looking at the completed puzzle and assessing your efforts. Write a final reflective paper on your discoveries during this class.
In your reflection, consider what you have learned about PLE's and their role in your future and in education, but also reflect on the successes and agonies of this specific one-credit course taught exclusively online. I'm far too old to allow comments about the weaknesses of the class to overcome me, and they may be helpful in the continuing development of this course.