Report and Reflection 5- Microblogging and building your PLN

This week, going back to the Personal Learning Network we are given further understanding.  As defined by Kate Klingensmith, a personal learning network is the entire collection of people with whom you engage and exchange information, usually online. (Klingensmith, 2009) Personal learning networks can be very beneficial to anyone that uses them. “The beauty of people communicating online is the ease of finding and sharing information and – if you ask for it – the group feedback that you get on ideas and projects.” (Klingensmith, 2009) Your PLN can be built through a number of different online tools that can further one’s learning, such as Feedly, blogs, RSS feeds, Twitter and even Facebook.

These personal learning networks can be built up over time and can always be reformed or improved upon based on your learning goals. For example a student’s personal learning network may change based on what they are doing in school, as described by Vicki Davis. A PLN can become a student's virtual locker, and its content changes based on the student's current course work. When a term paper is assigned, the students will search the Web to sign up for information that will feed into their personalized Web page to construct a PLN for that topic. When they get a new project, they will assemble another page. (Davis, 2009) Another way to find information is by networking, and one of the main tools to do this is twitter.

(2015, July 28). Twitter [Online Image]

 Retreived from http://www.thekissagency.

com/make-real-connections-on-

twitter-with-advanced-search/

Twitter is an extremely popular networking site where users can connect with their friends and family, their favourite celebrities, educational or personal accounts and so many more. Twitter allows you to not only follow and look at others ideas or information, but allows you to create and add your own and collaborate with others to richen your learning network. Personally, I did not get twitter until I started university and do not really use it often. I don’t post anything of my own, I just use mostly to receive sports updates and to follow different accounts that I find funny. I find that while the content of twitter may not be that rich (only 140 characters per tweet) is provides the fastest updates for anything, whether it be new related or sports related, etc.

This week while browsing my Feedly, I found an interesting article titled “disparity in life spans of the rich and the poor growing”. The article details how the life expectancy gap between the rich and the poor is growing. A study found that for men born in 1920, there was a six-year difference in life expectancy between the top 10 percent of earners and the bottom 10 percent. For men born in 1950 the difference more than doubled to 14 years. I found this to be an alarming statistic, and one of the possible causes stated in the article was that the amount of smokers among the rich is declining, comparing to those less fortunate. Two other possible causes were obesity and drug addictions among the poor.

This was another week of learning and building my PLN, and again I found an interesting article that I never would have known about if it wasn’t for my Feedly! I am looking forward to what is in store for next week!

-Jordan

Report and Reflection 4- Curating the web

This week had me learning about curation tools. Curation tools are yet another tool that can be used on the web that I am not familiar with. Curation tools are various websites that provide different ways for content curation. In the article Content Curation Primer, content curation primer is defined as “the process of sorting through the vast amounts of content on the web and presenting it in a meaningful and organized way around a specific theme.” (Kanter, 2011) Curation is a tool that can be used to find and present the most relevant information for the topic you are interested in and to find that information in a timely matter. 

(2014, March 28) Curata [Online Image] Retrieved from http://www.curata.com/blog/content-curation-tools-the-ultimate-list/

After reading through some of the articles related to content curation I was definitely interested in learning about it and using it. Not only for personal use, but especially for homework or even potentially work. “Content Curation is certainly more necessary than ever, a critical task in the business environment, not only in Marketing, Communications or Advertising, but it is especially so in areas such as Product, Innovation, Customer Service or Human Resources.” (Fiorelli, 2011) This quote interested me because learning how to use curation tools could potentially help me later on when I am working in a business environment and to help build my knowledge. 

When it came to the learning activities and bookmarking, I realized that I haven’t really utilized the bookmarking feature much before. I looked at my bookmarks, and of the ones I had only one was a site I found interesting. The rest were all articles I was using at the time for whichever assignments I had to write. I would bookmark potential articles I could use for a paper I was writing so I could come back to them later when I was ready to start writing. The curation tool however could be useful for properly organizing any bookmarks I may have.

The site I chose to look at was Scoop.it. On this site I could search various keywords in order to research a specific topic. The site was then display relevant articles or sites for me to view. I choose to look up information on the commercial sign industry, since I am doing a project on it for a different class. Unfortunately after messing around with a number of different keywords I was unable to find any articles that were related to this topic. Maybe it was my own fault for not making a better search but whatever I typed in did not bring up anything related to what I was looking for.

(2013, April 1) Email Etiquette [Online Image]

 Retrieved from  http://quickbase.intuit.com

/blog/10-tips-for-better-email-etiquette

From my Feedly reader, I read up on a useful article about email etiquette from business insider titled 15 email etiquette rules every professional should know. The article provided a number of tips for writing appropriate, professional emails. Tips such as including a clear, direct subject line or having a professional email address were all basic but important reminders that I was interesting in reading about and could help me in the future.

 Thanks to anyone reading, I’m looking forward to learning about more useful tools next week.

-Jordan R.