Education 2.0 and our Digital Tool Sites

When we talk about Education 2.0, our final project falls perfectly into this topic. Education used to be going to class, reading your textbook, doing assignments, and then taking tests, with the final result being a diploma or a degree. How much does that degree really mean in our world today? Yes, it does usually give you a higher salary, but what does it have to do with your abilities? Does it mean that you are proficient in the field you studied?

The fact is, having a degree doesn't mean that you know everything in your given field. What it means, (hopefully), is that you have learned how to learn, and that you can continue your own education outside of the classroom by your own motivation. Does the schooling we receive nowadays help us accomplish that? Hopefully, but I'm afraid that there are still many classes across the country, and around the world, that are still stuck in the traditional form of classrooms.

Web 2.0: Collaboration of Billions of People

The reason why Web 2.0 is becoming such a popular phrase in our day and age is because there has never been this many users of the internet all at once since the internet was born. And that number continues to grow. It allows BILLIONS of people to collaborate on projects, connect with each other, consume information, and create all kinds of new "stuff" for people to look at, play with, and remix. The Web really hasn't changed, it's the fact that the way we are using it has been expanded, because, with BILLIONS of people, come TRILLIONS of ideas.
Hence, the reason why our group is working on creating a couple different websites where people can go to find useful tools to help them Consume, Create, and Connect in our digital world.
As I've been working on our Wiki site (Which, by the way is found here: http://backpack2.wikispaces.com/), I have started to become familiar with a bunch of tools. First of all, wikispaces has become a huge tool in bringing this all together. It is really quite an easy way to design a basic website, and I've never worked with ANY web page designing tools, so it has been a lot of fun. Second, I found a cool website that will quickly create a jpeg logo for your website or company, which I used to create our Backpack2.0 logo on the wiki site. Check out the Logo Maker at http://cooltext.com/. Third, I've never worked collaboratively on a project mostly online, and it has been a new, and interesting experience. A lot of E-mails, and a lot of work on Google Documents is bringing this all together. Hopefully this all turns out looking great for the presentations next week! :)

What a Class!

So far, my experience in this Digital Civilization class has been challenging, but very beneficial. There are many things about history that I have never really studied or thought about until I got to this class. I had never heard of Leonardo da Vinci's "The Painter"; or John Milton's "Areopagitica". I had never heard of Thomas Hobbes or his Book "Leviathan". To be honest, history and me have never really gotten along well. However, I think that the topics we are covering in this class are really interesting, and they are able to keep my attention. I love learning about the ideas of those from history, rather than just the dates and facts themselves. I think it is a wonderful way to focus and delve deeply into a very important aspect of the past.

On top of that, I love tying the computing aspects of today into our learning of the past. I think this is truly what history should be about: looking to the past, comparing it with the present, and looking at how the future might be by comparing them. For example, looking at how the Catholic Church regulated the information that people were able to access, and how Martin Luther and others wanted to liberate information to all people was really easy to compare to the Open Software Movement in our day. This class has really opened my eyes to how Computers in our day can be compared to many of the revolutionary thoughts, ideas, and inventions of the past.

As far as the digital literacy goes, I LOVE this aspect. I was really skeptical about it at first. In fact, I was pretty opposed to it. However, it is opening my mind to better ways of connecting with people in order to learn. Recently I've been thinking about how effective this sort of learning and collaborating will be when I'm a math teacher. To be able to connect with other math teachers from all over the world and share ideas will be a HUGE advantage to me in the future. It is also wonderfully helpful in this class. I'm really enjoying Diigo, because it allows me to keep track of the websites I have highlighted, liked, and even commented on. Writing in a blog is also a convenient way to share the information I'm learning, and a wonderful way in which we are able to connect with the other people in our class, and others from all over the world. Blogsearching has become a wonderful tool that I am really beginning to enjoy. It takes me to new ideas and places that I never would have gone to through a search engine like Google. It even sparks new ideas in me that I then want to share on my own blog. For instance, when we were talking about the Printing Press, Ariel made a comment on my post Printing Press=Internet Press?, which then sparked me to write another blog post about books becoming obsolete. (See Books and Printing Becoming Obsolete?) I love the "research-post-comment-gain new ideas-post again" model that is happening in this class. I think it is a wonderful way of collaborating and discussing the things in class. Other tools like Google Documents are also making it wonderfully easy to share the information we gather with the class and with the world in general.

I think this class is fantastic, and the ideas we learn here will be beneficial to all of us for the rest of our lives.