Notes about using "Chad" rooms

Notes about chatrooms – F2F with Silvia Tolisano

A chat room can be used as a warmup for thinking at the beginning of a class. I immediately see this as an effective way to get students into learning mode in my class. By having the computers already setting out (from the previous class) and logged onto a site, like her Tiny Chat room or the Today’s Meet (which seems really easy to set up and use) site she mentioned, students could engage actively in learning from the time they enter class. A prompt like, write a sentence explaining a way peoples’ actions influence the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, or today’s class list of all foods they can think of that contain seeds (and, therefore, are fruit), can direct students attention to tasks, engage their thinking and expand their understanding about a topic, and have a ‘discussion’ in which everyone is able to ‘hear’ everyone else, each student is able to respond at their own rate, students are working collaboratively, and the class settles in for learning. With it already being online, it could be projected onto the screen for further discussion to begin the class.

Silva suggested Tiny Chat would be good for summarizing information. I would need to see this work. The summarizing we did in class was novice work, but, as a reader, I would have needed much more organization in my mind or maturity in my digital experiences to glean a summary out of all the short snippets that were posted. Besides the making of lists I mentioned above, a chat room could be helpful for students to ask each other questions (@Chad: I appreciate your assistance with how to find the bottom of the page…..) or to generate ideas and bounce them off each other. The question then becomes, Is this a better way of engaging students’ creativity, productivity, and learning than the other collaborative means of engaging students face-to-face? In the near future there will no doubt be many social networking applications discussing the success (or lack thereof) of this avenue.

A side comment about the digital footprint we make:
Chad suggested one can hire a company to do a search on your footprint and hire a company to clean up one’s footprint. Seems to me one would want to hire a company to go after those who slander or bully digitally as well.

My future in geneology (personal post)

This course gets my thoughts going. It's been a while since I have had the freedom to take the time to expose myself to a course like this. I don't have the time now, but when will we?

I've researched my family origins since I was 12. They took me to records written in an old German script in south Russia and to dates preceding the 1800s. I reached a wall, though. I have the names of villages that existed in scattered regions throughout what later became Switzerland, Germany, and Poland. But many of those villages and records do not exist. So how could I go the next step back?

I thought I could get books that have records of people in villages with those same names, and build a census of all the names of people and families in villages with those names over the 18th century. But this course has helped me see the future of geneology. People will see they can have this kind of information come to them.

By putting a simple question out there in what I understand to be a ning, I can get people with interests (and knowledge) in the village of that time into a social network. By getting an RSS feed for everything about those villages sent to me from Google, I can get updates and contacts on such information. And I'll bet technologies in the next five years will be developed that will give us an application by which we can feed in specific search criteria and the smarter search engine will do the work for me.....and probably even organize the information in a way that is easy for me to analyze (kind of like Google.docs does now).