Pursuit 23

1. The image generators and widgets were the easiest - a lot of bang for the buck so to speak. I also will keep in mind the Web 2.0 Awards page as a source for new ideas. Embedding videos will be a big time saver for me. I have spent hours recording YouTubes to VHS at home because the site is blocked at SBISD.
2. The course reminded me that there are always new things to learn. I just have to find ways to seek them out. I enjoyed sharing bits of the course with my friends and family. There were 6 of us from our campus that took the course, so I need to organize a way for the 6 of us to present to the faculty what we learned. (That's my job as Technology SIS.)
3. Unexpected outcome - there are so many people out there that spend so much time on the web! So many different comments and threads.
I asked my three twenty-something children if they blog, and they all responded with a similar answer. They used to but it just got to be too time consuming. Specifically, they don't have time to read their friends blogs and post their own.
4. Some of my teacher friends that are more mid-level users struggled through some of the Things. You could provide more specific instructions - but I know the sites change all the time. I used the Help on Blogger and it told me what I needed in a brief, concise format. Maybe you could point that out to learners.
5. Yes, I would participate in another course. I would like to see some coordination with the Education Technology department regarding students actually logging on and using many of these sites. Most user agreements ask if you are over 13 when you register, so how much trouble will we get in if we let our students use these sites???

Pursuit 22

Nings- At first introduction, I thought the concept of Ning providing a social network outside of Facebook or My Space had some possibilities. I spent about 45 minutes looking through your Ning links and some of the Nings posted by other Library2Players. I just have to say that the format doesn't work for me. All the pages are SO crowded that it gives me a headache to read them. There is no "white space" to rest your eyes. (I have a vertigo problem and I don't know if that contributes to my inability to focus on the content.) The content is so random. Less than half of the postings seemed to relate to the goal of the site. This was particularly true in the photos and videos postings.
I don't see any advantage to using the Ning site versus a Blogger page for classroom projects. Am I missing something?