Twitterchat

I attended the chat called #edtechchat on Wednesday evening. Participants were so many professional educators, teachers, technology directors and also technology learners like me. Excellent bloggers tweeted their own understanding or useful materials like pictures, articles and websites. Coincidently, I found a tweet from the IT director Susan M. Bearden about a question I had mentioned on my blog several days ago. The tweet was about 5 Tips for Classroom Management with Mobile Devices.

Twitterchat is beneficial for the professional development. Firstly, We can ask questions and get answers from the group and answer questions. It’s a really simple and convenient way of obtaining information for users from the network of people with same interest or focus. Secondly, through the interaction with the people we follow and our followers, we can build up our knowledge network and social circle. We may help each other to open up our eyes and see the world.

EFL Classroom 2.0

EFL Classroom 2.0 is a social networking site which provides language teachers a platform to share and exchange information quickly and conveniently. It's easy to join in because you can link it with your Google, Facebook or other accounts. It has various modules on the top, like “tools”, “teach”, “learn” and “play”, through which different users could focus clearly on their demands. When you go through down, you can type in some key words and search for the information you want. Then it comes to the columns which I like most. Users could click on any one of them to obtain the information from teachers, bloggers or video makers in the network. We could see the top 10 contents in this site and join discussion with other users on teaching or learning EFL. We could also see some experienced blog posts and other resources like videos and documents.

Generally, EFL Classroom 2.0 is a great site for EFL teachers to be prepared and skilled in our career through the connection with other teachers.

A learner is like a shopper

I regard an individual learner as a shopper, and the knowledge database is the shopping cart. As shoppers, when we walk into a supermarket, we’ll have a shopping cart with us to load items. But we’ll never put all items there into our carts. Instead, we’ll just choose what we need now. However, our choice will change according to our altering needs in the future. Similarly, in Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age, Siemens (2005) considers that connectivism is driven by the understanding that decisions are based on rapidly altering foundations. New information is continually being acquired. The ability to draw distinctions between important and unimportant information is vital. As learners, we are required to distinguish what kind of information is needed and what is unneeded, thus we could collect important information in our database and directly delete or keep those unimportant information for future use.

In The Changing Nature of Knowledge, Siemens states that the learners themselves, the connection they form with each other, the connection that they form with databases, with other source of knowledge is really the primary point of learning. So in essence, the network becomes the learning. Each learner’s focus is different from others, thus they put different information into their database. But they also need to communicate and share useful information through connection with each other. It’s like each shopper buys different items from other shoppers when they are shopping. But they might have conversation with the cashier and other shoppers. And they might be told about valuable information of the goods they’ve never tried before. So their shopping cart is changing according to their needs.