Nominations for STELLAR Blogs

Ok, so here are my nominations, really quickly:

Historical Content: Danny Patterson http://pucksonice.blogspot.com/

• Does a great job of using his personal knowledge and tying it into the concepts we are learning about history
• Shows that he understands the historical content we are studying in each of his posts.

Computing Content: Rhett Ferrin http://imrhettferrin.blogspot.com/

• Great posts that tie in the Computing Content to the historical topics that we are studying
• Doing a great job of keeping us up to date with the Missionary final project
• Extremely informative posts that really expand my understanding as I read them

Self-Directed Learning: Jeffrey Chen http://mrbasics.blogspot.com/

• Lots of Digital Literacy Labs
• Uses the Digital Labs to relate them to the topics at hand
• Great posts about how he is learning new and exciting things on the internet

Though, in all honesty, I've enjoyed reading all the class blogs that I have over the course of this semester. We have a lot of wonderful writers in this class, and it really is hard to just pick a few. In all honesty, I would nominate all the blogs that have kept up with every blog post this semester for one of these categories.

Video Posting in Blogger

Just as another quick update concerning our group project, I figured something out that I really wanted to know how to do.

Normally, when I just want to embed a video from YouTube, I grab the embed code, and then insert it into the "Edit HTML" section of the blog editor. However, sometimes the video is too big, and actually goes outside the blog post, which always looks really tacky. I had this problem again when trying to add a post to our group's Backpack 2.0 blog website. I wanted to embed a video in one of my posts (namely my post about Dropbox) and the video was always too wide, and looked really bad on the website.
However, I did some experimentation, and found out how to shrink the movie to fit the blog! In the embed code, there is a place at the beginning that determines the height and width of the video box, AND there is a place at the end of the embed code that determines the width and the height of the box. If you go in and change those heights and widths to smaller values, you get a smaller video window.

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.