Weekly Reflection #12

At the conclusion of this semester, I can say that I have indeed "Learned in a Digital Environment". Throughout the duration of this course, I have been able to grow my digital footprint to become a better digital citizen. The rules that govern the online community are critical to maintaining the integrity of the web so it can be a useful tool for everyone. Exploring different web tools is another great way to build your digital citizenship as it allows you to connect and communicate with fellow digital citizens in a variety of methods that create quality online interactions.

As a digital citizen, I believe that the best way to promote certain behaviours in others is to share your experiences and knowledge so others can gain a better understanding of requirements of being a digital citizen. There are many websites that can give a better understanding of appropriate use of various web tools, but there hasn't been a specific one that has stood out through my studies. Usually the most integral part of learning about digital citizenship was doing a Google search of terms of interest in order to gain a better understanding. This is a great starting point to find websites that can be constantly revisited to provide further insight.

The final activity of this course was to quickly Google our name to see what came up. My results are largely unchanged from the beginning of the course as my Twitter, Facebook and Prezi accounts are among the items that come up first. This is due to the fact that I don't use my full name in many of my online accounts. The one thing that has changed is that I now have a Google+ account that is among the first results, which has allowed me to connect with other digital citizens.

Thank you all for reading and responding to my blog throughout the past few months. I hope you have enjoyed my posts and have investigated some of the tools I have written about yourself. This will be my last blog post for a while, but who knows, I could be back before too long!

FluentU, (CC), 2014. Retrieved from: http://www.fluentu.com/french/blog/say-goodbye-french/

Weekly Reflection #11

As I discussed in the most recent page posted on my blog titled "Podcasts" this week's session was one of the most unique and one of my favourite sessions of this semester. We investigated the role that podcasts can play in sharing audio clips with other digital citizens. The web tool that I decided to use to share my short audio clip or podcast using SoundCloud. This was a really easy tool to record and share audio either privately or publically online. Once the clip is created, if the public sharing option is selected, it can be shared on various social media sites and can also be embedded on different websites, which is what I did on my blog! These types of tools allows the creator an easy way to share thoughts and information quickly in a way that I find builds a better connection than text due to the ability to show emotion and emphasis through changing voice tone. It is also fun to just change it up once in a while!

Embed.ly, (CC), 2014. Retrieved from: http://embed.ly/embed/features/provider/soundcloud

Hodgkins, K., (CC), 2012. Retrieved from: http://www.tuaw.com/2012/08/20/third-party-podcast-apps-return-to-desktop-itunes-search/

Tools such as SoundCloud and other similar tools such as Muziboo and RecordMP3 can be a great tool in building knowledge. All of these audio sharing tools as well as podcasts can be a fun and convinient way to find a topic of your choice and learn about it. I listen to different podcasts frequently by downloading them from iTunes and playing them back in my car when I am commuting. Obviously this gives an additional opportunity to build knowledge in a time when reading or other methods of learning are clearly not possible.

These tools are completely different from other collaborative and communication tools that I have used before as most other tools are purely text web tools. This alone allows a completely different communication method and an entirely different experience.

SoundCloud would fit into my PLE diagram under "create", "connect" and "convenience", making it one of the unique tools to fit under all aspects of my PLE. Tools that allow you to create and connect with convenience are tools that I will definitely seriously consider using in the future.

Following the rules and regulations that govern the use of audio recording is no different than text, as they both require proper citation when using someone else's property. This week we also added a creative copyright to our blog which you can see at the very bottom of my blog in the footer. This is an important feature in protecting your materials and ensuring that it is used in ways deemed appropriate by the creator.

In my Feedly this week I found an article that was closely related to the tools we investigated this week. The website I found has a list of the Top 100 Podcasts with many different genres, hopefully one that interests you!

Weekly Reflection #10

In this week's session we once again explored another web tool that we can add to our PLE and also the importance of understanding and following copyright law. In my previous blog post, I included an example of the work we did this week in the form of my Animoto presentation on copyright law. The most notable quality of Animoto as an online tool for presentations is the ease of use for this program. The short video that I posted only required selecting a theme, choosing a piece of music from the large selection available on the site and adding few pictures or videos. This will obviously be a useful tool in future educational activities as it is easy to use and gives a different presentation style than the conventional PowerPoint slideshow.

Lawler, R. (CC), 2014. Retrieved from: http://techcrunch.com/2014/01/24/animoto-enterprise/

The creative tools that we explored this week are all unique in terms of the type of presentation styles, specifically Animoto because I did the majority of work this week on this program. For a professional presentation, the conventional PowerPoint presentation might be the program to use, but for unique and creative designs with better audio and visual appeal, Animoto seems like one of the easiest web tools to use.

Animoto would be included on my PLE diagram primarily under the "create" section as it is a web tool that allows customization of a creative presentation. It could also be included in the "convenience" section due to the fact that it easier to put together a presentation with a lot of different mediums such as images, videos and text together with accompanying audio in a timely manner.

In this week's session, we learned more about becoming an effective digital citizen when we were presented the material on copyright laws. One of the key points expressed in the lecture material was that Google Images has different options for finding images that have a range of possible uses. In my previous post I stated that all of the pictures in my Animoto presentation were copyright free and available for use, sharing and modifying. Understanding the different restrictions for use of images is important to maintaining the integrity of any work a digital citizen produces. Gaining a better understanding of the different restrictions and how to find images and videos suitable for use is a critical step to ensure that you are following all of the digital responsibilities for creating a strong online community.

In my Feedly this week I found an article from the New York Times discussing a company called Aereo that filed for bankruptcy. It was ruled that they violated copyright laws in their business procedures. The full article is here for anyone interested in reading more about this interesting story.

Weekly Reflection #9

In this session we explored a couple of tools that are a great way of sharing and collaborating with fellow digital citizens. The first tool that we took a short look at this week was PollDaddy, which is an online survey application that can be used to ask questions to the viewer who can then respond. PollDaddy also tracks the responses and can show statistics about the responses. I have used another similar application in a recent school project called SurveyMonkey and I found it to be a really easy to use tool that provided quick results on any subject you can think of. The second tool that we investigated this week was VoiceThread, which is a tool that allows people to easily collaborate using voice recordings to comment on different threads. Check out my short summary of this web tool here.

Darlington, S. (CC), 2013. Retreived from: http://synergiseducation.com/blog/voicethread-interactive-presentations-made-easy/

Both of these web tools can contribute to building knowledge either by creating your own poll on PollDaddy to find out the opinion of the viewer or by researching a topic on VoiceThread. Both applications allow the user to interact with others as there is a comment section on PollDaddy, but obviously the voice interaction on VoiceThread is a great tool for communicating with others as it gives a more face-to-face feel than simply sending paragraphs of text back and forth.

As I discussed in my short post in the link above, VoiceThread would go on my PLE under the "connect" and "convenience" sections, so I won't bore you with repeating myself, but once again I would encourage you to check out the link in the first paragraph to learn more about this great tool. PollDaddy would fit into my PLE under the "connect" "create" and "convenience" sections as this application allows anyone to create a poll which they can share easily with people to get their opinion. Web tools that fall into all three categories on my PLE are rare and for that reason, this can be an incredibly useful tool.

These tools are both unique from other tools I have tried in the past in modes of communication between the people. PollDaddy is a much more convenient way of asking questions and gathering results as opposed to posting a question on a blog and recording answers manually. VoiceThread is unique based on the fact that people can communicate using text, but also using voice recordings, which gives an entirely different dimension to online communications.

Once again this week we looked at the digital rights & responsibilities of being a digital citizen by discussing scenarios of technology use. You can check out my response here. If you want more background on digital rights & responsibilities, check out my blog reflection from session 8.

Here are some tips for using VoiceThread:

10 Tips for Using VoiceThread

On my Feedly this week I saw a couple of different scenarios posted by fellow classmates that I think are interesting situations. Take a look and respond to any of our posts, the more the merrier! Here are the posts by my friends Chris and Shannon.

Technology Use Scenario Discussion

Matt enjoys taking pictures with his digital camera. His pictures are quite unusual and can be easily identified as his work. He wants to let other people see his pictures so he posts them on his website. A couple of months later he is surfing the Internet and sees some of pictures on someone else's website. At first he is flattered that someone enjoyed his pictures but on closer inspection he sees that he is not credited anywhere on the site as the person who took the photos. The way the images are posted makes it seem as if the site owner had taken the pictures.

This individual that used Matt's pictures without citing his work is not using technology appropriately. Copying text, images, videos, etc. from another person without properly citing their work is considered plagiarism and is a serious technological offense. "Giving credit to the original author by citing sources is the only way to use other people's work without plagiarizing (Plagarism.org, 2014)." To avoid these consequences, the other user would have been safe from this illegal act if he had used some type of simple citation that can easily be found online to keep the integrity of his website and still share these images with his readers. It is always important to make sure that all ideas are cited if they aren't original or common knowledge and a good rule of thumb is that if you aren't sure, just cite it! There is no harm in having too many citations and it could save you from getting in a lot of trouble!

Plagiarism.org, (2014), Retrieved from: http://www.plagiarism.org/citing-sources/whats-a-citation/

Weekly Reflection #8

In this week's session we explored another useful online tool called a wiki. I like some of you have never fully experienced all of the capabilities of a wiki because I never really knew how to use one. Almost everyone that has ever looked something up on a computer has used some form of wiki, most notably Wikipedia which is a handy tool for looking up quick information on almost any topic you can think of. Although the information found on these types of websites cover almost any topic, they are not considered to be a scholarly source due to the nature of wiki's, making them slightly less useful in formal settings, but still a great way to find quick facts and gain some basic knowledge.

Wiki PD. (CC), 2014 Retrieved from: https://wikipd.wiki.farmington.k12.mi.us/

After learning about wikis this week, I think that I will be more active in adding information that I know on a subject so I can share my knowledge with other people. I don't think I will be using wikis any more than I already do to get information because as I said earlier, it is not always a reliable source and usually shouldn't be used as a key citation in an academic setting. I think wikis are a great way of sharing knowledge in an easy to access way across the digital landscape, and I would say that in my experience it is even more widely used than blogs for sharing information. I think that wikis have the perfect combination of blogging tools (connecting to an audience all over the world) with the ease of use of Google Docs, which makes it a significant web tool.

The majority of papers that I have written since beginning my university education over three years ago have required at least the majority of sources to be from scholarly or academic sources. This make it difficult to directly incorporate information found on Wikipedia or other wikis, but they can still be helpful. I find one of the most effective ways of using wikis other than just to build information, is to look through to find out related topics to research. Finding scholarly articles on a certain topic is much more difficult because there are significantly less available compared to blogs and wikis, so finding related topics may help to find additional academic sources that can be used as primary citations!

In this weeks session, we also took a look at some of the digital rights and responsibilities required to be a digital citizen. Here is a diagram of some of the rights & responsibilities:

Wassink, A. (CC), 2014.

The three points that I decided to expand on as my top three most important rights & responsibilities are the right to privacy, citing sources, and reporting cyber bullying. I think that the combination of the right to privacy and the responsibility of citing sources will allow people to use the internet without fear that their personal information can be made public without their permission and citing sources ensures that ideas are credited to the rightful owner. The final responsibility of my top three is reporting cyber bullying, which is extremely important as this effects many young children all the way up to teenagers and beyond. Reporting cyber bullying could help save a life, so please report it, and if you are a victim, you can learn more about it on stopcyberbullying.org.

Unfortunately I couldn't find anything in my Feedly related to our topic of wikis this week other than a fellow classmates blog; check it out here.