1) I believe that social bookmarking holds some value for teachers, and maybe a little for students. I can see that a site like Delicious can help a teacher personally and professionally in their organizational endeavors. Efficiency and productivity can be increased. It also serves in the realm of searching the web for relevant subject matter. If a group of History teachers for instance share each other’s sites on a particular topic, I can see where trust can increase. Sometimes if I do a search on the web for something obscure I can be overwhelmed by the millions of hits and frustrated when none of the sites on the first page yield anything valuable. I have just wasted a lot of time for nothing! But if I can search other teacher’s tags I bet it will prove more productive. Now as for students, I am not seeing a lot of relevance with social bookmarking, except that a social bookmark might be the only bookmark some of them would be interested in. A technology class teaching on the actual subject is an obvious application. If a teacher has created an extensive list, they might point the students there to make research a little easier and germane to what the teacher wants. Well, here is a thought: What if I assigned research on the WWII Pacific Theater and gave each student a list of tags and a number of sites they had to find that could actually be tagged with those specific words, and I graded them by looking at each students Delicious site and seeing if those sites represented the given tags. We could then collectively use those tags in various other assignments throughout the lesson unit. Does learning take place? Well, yes, if they are getting the tags right, they have to be analyzing their relevance. I guess it is a tool that can be used, but overall it is a little more cumbersome than a wiki page or blog.
2) The program that we are in, that this class is a part of, is Educational Technology. I find that my notions of this field have been more in alignment with the early part of the twentieth century when it was viewed as media, which is, I might say, rather embarrassing. The obvious connection being that I had never really heard of the degree program before, and we now have a lot of cool modern technology, so it must be all about media, computers, the web, etc. I LOVE that it is so much more! Semantics are important so the authors’ title of Instructional Design and Technology is actually helpful. The chapter was fascinating to me as the history and evolution of defining statements unfolded. The definitions where wonderfully clarifying. I say that obviously with some naivety because this is just the beginning. Because the field is concerned with the foundations and theories of learning and evaluating whether real learning is taking place, no matter what I do, this field is helpful. If I never leave the classroom it is already helping me to be a better teacher. If I do move on to administration, it will help me immensely. It can possibly open the doors to other positions in casting vision for a whole school or district. It was a little surprising to me how foundational and related to all of learning this field really is. I am too naive to notice right now if anything is missing here, but as we move forward and I continue to learn, who knows?
