IT648 Course Reflection

1. What have you learned from this online class? Describe your learning experience briefly.
This course had refreshed and deepened my understanding about telecommunication and its usage in education. I originally took telecommunication as something like telecom, which was similar in their names. Reading the provided handouts and the experience on the term paper had provided me with opportunity to take a tour on what telecommunication is and how it could be used in education and the research fields that are related to this topic. Telecommunication is a revolutionized way to communicate, it is communication based on “tele”, which is a prefix that has to do with distance. So, telecommunication could be any kinds of communication means via distance such as telephone, internet, television, video conference, satellite, and things like that. And as internet becoming one of the most preeminent methods in telecommunication, web-based instruction, online learning has become the main topic to study and investigate in education. Most of the current research topics nowadays, are found in web-based or internet-based instruction or learning.

2. What were your weak and strong points?
My most conspicuous weak point was still, as I had described before in other courses reflections, the inability to read and grasp information quickly and efficiently. This weak point could be viewed in two contexts to understand its severity. Firstly being in the graduate study background it could be a pity to have such weakness, that is to say, this course is a graduate-level course, which contains a lot of reading task and requires one to quickly and efficiently grasp information so one can ponder and reflect and then make sense and then put useful information into sensory and working memory. My failure to do so made me have to spend extra time to read the materials again and again and try my best to CONCENTRATE. The other way to view this weak point is from the content of this course. Reaching into the telecommunication means we are reaching into a web-based era to some extent, which in turn means we are reaching to an era of information-explosion era. In such scenario, it is another pity if one fails to grasp and scan information very quickly from the huge amount of information sources from one’s lap-top screens, mobile phone screens, and television screens, etc. I do confess it is a pity for me, but I have been trying very hard and struggling with distraction and low efficiency. My strongpoint, on the other hand, could be the skills and competence to develop a web-based instructional site, due to my pre-experiences in computer graphic designing and web-development work.

3. How did you like the interaction between you and your peers, you and instructor? Explain in details. Provide examples if necessary.
Although I strongly prefer face-to-face classes (it sounds a little ironic for an IT student to say this), I still enjoyed the interaction with my peers and instructors in terms of the Group project cooperation. I think we worked very well when we tried to use differ telecommunication tools, which is one part of this course. Although we are in distance, we chatted and communicated through text, audio, video, this made this class more like a face-to-face one because we all feel connected. This has become a consensus among our group members. It is much more vivid and interesting in terms of interaction compared with a normal Blackboard-based online course. As to the interaction with the instructor, I’d say I didn’t spend a whole lot of time spend with Dr. Wang academic on this course because my overload of other courses. But I really appreciated her in-time feedback to hour discussion and assignments.

4. Reflect on the communication tools (individually) used in this class: email, discussion board, chat room, Voice Board, Live Classroom, and Blog. Which tool did you use most, why? From your experience, explain the advantages and disadvantages of each communication tool. Provide examples if necessary.
Email was the most common communication tool, too common for us to pay attention. I only used email to have contacted the instructor, and since we do have hour own email, instead of the blackboard email, the chance for using email in this course became even rare. Along with the announcement function, email was the tool for me to receive information from the instructor and ask questions. The advantage of email was people’s familiarity with it, and also its asynchronous feature give students more time to organize their question so they might become confident to interact with the instructor. The disadvantage would be being slow and its interactivity depends on both sides’ precondition of logging in on time. The discussion board was probably the most frequently used tools in this course, if we statistically analyze the using frequency of each tool. I ascribe to the most using of this tool to its mandatory feature, for we have to post our group discussion and comment on others every week. The advantage of discussion board is that it’s convenient for a group of people to discuss diversified topics, because it is threaded. The disadvantage, in my opinion and in this case, is that it has to open a new small window to view contents, which is very awkward and time-consuming. There are other threaded discussions that will add a post directly under the last post when you hit the “post” button, which might be better. I used Live Classroom once, and Voice Board once, only for testing reason because they were the content of the group project in that week. The advantage of Live Classroom is it’s being an synchronous supplement for an asynchronous web-based class. It solved the problem of distance so that people located in different places can join in together and have one “class”. The disadvantage was when there are lots of people in the class, it is very hard to speak without bumping into each other’s voice. The advantage of voice board is it’s being a supplement for the text-based instructional interface, and it is asynchronous so shy students do not have to worry when they speak to record their voices. I never used the chat room, but I think it is pretty much like the Google chat and the chatting function in Live classroom, thus the advantage in my opinion would be it’s synchronous feature and text-based feature which provide some people who prefer secure environment to communicate without speak or chat face-to-face. The disadvantage was that, when it comes to a lot of people, participants will get lost because after they finished typing and hit the enter button, they can no longer locate their last post easily because of the fast rate of new postings.

5. How helpful did you think the group work in this class was? Explain why?
Actually the group work was my favorite part in this course. On the other hand, it helped me feel that this is really a class, with peers and instructors. I enrolled four courses this summer, one hybrid and three online ones. I almost felt separated from everyone and lost the sense of having a class. It was the group work made me feel that I am not alone and I am with people. On the other hand, group work deepened and expanded my understanding about the topics provided by the instructor. When we discuss on a topic and evaluate a tool, we present our own opinions and listen to others, and we took turns to had our speak-time, it was like an online seminar, in which we will fear from others different voices and different perspectives to view things, something that you might not think of, such as educational usage of a certain tool, you may get it from others. And personal ideas could be narrow and shallow; hearing from others may tackle this because other opinions help one jump out of his/her own method to think.

6. Suggestions for the instructor to consider in the future:
This is a good course. You just need to spend time to learn new things. I think it might be good if the first several handouts would be about the general introduction about this field, telling people what is telecommunication, what’s the current application in education, what would you do if you want to become an expert in this area. This would provide an overview to students so we can go deeper and deeper later with these concepts in mind.

Artifact: Course Reflection

Term Paper Reflection

I would really like to assign two superlative-degree adjective labels to the term paper assignments, which are “the most challenging” and “the most rewarding”. As I saw this assignment on the rubric list, I just knew that it would not be an easy task, but I never thought it would be this difficult. I used to write about 20 single-spaced pages research papers, but that was because I did have DATA! – data that I was able to expound upon and hence I did not need to worry about the lengthen of the paper. However, this time, I don’t even have a clue how to write a “research” paper without any research data, no matter quantitative or qualitative. Thereby, the process of planning and replanning and then being compelled to come to my laptop because of the time constrain, that was a very tough process, plus reading the literatures was challenged by my constant distraction. However, after I finished writing the paper, I wanted to exclaim not only because I finished the tedious literature review time and finally finished this task, but also because I find the tedious reading and several days of struggling finally gave me something. I have something in mind as how these guys conduct research study in this field and what are good papers and what are bad papers. It was then rewarding.

My paper was about telecommunication in foreign language teaching and learning. When I took a hard evening staring at the assignment description and some suggested topics, I devised an outline that was almost very different from the final paper although about the same topic. The original title was Telecommunication in Foreign Language Teaching and Learning: A Evaluation of Several Web-based Language Instructional Tools. The emphasis was about evaluation when I planned the outline. I got to confess one reason that I was about to do evaluation was the naïve notion that evaluation paper was easy to write because you don’t need to read a whole lot of literatures, which could be my worst part. So I just typed in a succinct outline with several web-based tools that I could think of and send it to Dr. Wang, those tools included Moodle, SNS, online Learning Management System (such as WebCT).

I did not imagine, however, how hard it could be to write an evaluation paper about something you only know about the name. Moodle was a name that was mentioned by my former teacher in my undergraduate program in a conversation with him. When I opened Moodle’s site, I found it was way more complex than I had imagined, and what was more, it was actually another learning management system, which should be categorized into LMS. This means if I was to continue to write the evaluation paper, it would be even harder because I had only two categories then, the SNS and the LMS, with one major example that I am not familiar with. And it was not like Ning.com or Tokbox that you can spend one night, get familiar with it, and come up with a report. It’ll probably take you a month, if one wants to evaluate it from an instructional technology and professional perspective. I then changed my mind, went to the lab and downloaded a whole bunch of literature about telecommunication in foreign language teaching and learning, and started the long, long, tedious and tough process of re-gaining my inspiration. I had no choice. As I could expect, I was constantly distracted and could not maintain my interest and focus, but I just had to read these papers to gain some ideas.

It was ironic that some had to come back to do something just because he previously planned to make a detour avoiding doing these things. My first plan to write about evaluation was due to my dreading to read, and finally I found I could not do the evaluation so I had to read.

But anyway, I spent some time struggling with distraction and tried my best to retain some useful information, opened the laptop and shut it down, tried to start and gave up, for times and times again. And finally I finished reading all the literatures and decided to take down the good ideas so that I can comeback and visit whenever I need them. I then changed the structure of the paper; it was based on the literature review, and talked about the underlying theories and current using of telecommunication in the foreign language teaching and learning domain. I was then got the chance to stay in front of the desk and compare different papers, and this really deepened my understanding about what is graduate study life. You just need to read, and think, and write, and research, when you have enough knowledge about a certain field, you’re able to think about ideas to conduct research, and then you find new stuff and develop new theories that could be written into newly published textbooks and then you have contributed to this field.
However, that does not necessarily mean every master’s student should proceed into the doctoral study, does it? I have no idea.

Artifact: Term Reserach Paper: http://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0AXF_OPaN9lBEZGN3dnRxY3BfNGQ1bXFjN2N6&hl=en

Website Reflection

I really should not have thought this is an easy assignment.
In the first, knowing that I have some experience in web-design and web-development, I thought this would be a very easy task for me. So I scheduled this web development assignment in a Sunday afternoon, hoping to finish that within five hours. However, when I take out my brain-stormed concept map and started looking at the assignment description, I started to doubt. It was not allowed to use Dreamweaver!...
And when I get to it and started working, I found it was neither funny nor easy. Although NVU was a simple, small program to develop webpages, it is still a new program for me, and I need to get familiar with the program and change the habitual way to do things, such as insert a button or using CSS to style a division. And yes, I encountered Roslyn’s problem, which was the inability to actualize the originally planned website due to technical problems or limitations. There’s a lot of limitations using this program. However, when I finished the website, which took me one afternoon and one evening, I suddenly realize that, although this small program has its limitation (because it is so small and it’s free~!), it also has its advantages. Imagine you are in a place where you will need to develop a quick website and you do not have available Dreamweavers in your hand, what do you gonna do? You definitely will not be willing go ahead and spend more than 200 bucks to buy a Dreamweaver for this one-time usage. And, also, another highlight of this program is its being quick (of course, after you have spend sometime and get familiar with it). Although the code it produces is not as “healthy” (this is a common problem of all web-developing programs, unless you do not use them and just open a Notepad file and starting constructing a web-page with typing the codes), it’s definitely convenient because of its what-you-see-is-what you-get feature.

And, although I am not as satisfied with the web-page I developed, I am still gonna link it here, just to remind me whenever I want to develop a quick website to answer a favor from a friend or something. So, here is my website. :)

http://ocean.otr.usm.edu/~w778322/

Reflection on Group Project3

Judging from Dr.Wang’s feedback and our own experience, we did a pretty good job in Project 3. The purpose of this assignment is to find at least two synchronous and two asynchronous communication tools that teachers can use for free. We tested almost each function of each website/tool, including Tokbox, Tapinya, Wiki Space and Ning. Actually the experiencing of these projects was of lots of funs; at least I myself think so.
We scheduled several online meeting. Based on the experience of using online communication tools, we used the old way to get everyone together, the Google chat. We spend one Sunday evening to have discussed our “vision and mission” and has fixed the four sites to evaluate. The criteria that we used to decide these tools was that we need to cover both synchronous tools and asynchronous tools and compare their features so we can play with them and say, “it is good for a teacher like me!”
We took a lot of time playing with these tools. I spend most of the time in Tokbox and Ning because I find the interface was well-designed and they have very enriched functions. Tokbox is a video communication service that provides video calls and chat, video mail, video conferencing, video blogging tools and instant messaging for free. Adobe Flash is needed in order to use the system. It is supported by most browsers but not all. For instance, it was not working very well in my Google Chrome browser. I tested the IM chatting, video message, the video greeting cards, the video chat, as well as the public post. After setting up the account and my hardware, I was able to start a video chat with my friends from the contact list on the right, and can create video message and greeting cards with the recording function. After the message or card has been recorded, it allows me to either send it to friends, share it online (on Face book, MySpace, etc.), or discard and re-record. However, it could not be saved on the personal page as posts or archives. The public posts, however, allowed me to do that. I recorded a video and posted it on my home page, and enabled all friends to view it. It did not show up in my page automatically according to other group members that I had already added as friends, and I had to send the link to them so they can see the video. I had lots of funs at this site because of its rich features to communicate and also its well-designed interface.
Ning’s interface is a little busier when you first log in. And the different concept inside it was even more confusing. At least I was confused by the personal page, and the social networking site page your created, I assumed them to be the same page according to my experience using SNS. Plus, Tim created our group’s social networking site and named it “Group 3 IT648”. After logging in and joined this site as a member, I tried all the features provided. At first I was confused by the “My Page” here and my personal home page. I even created a social networking site and named it “Rongfei”, and had incorrectly considered it as my personal page, as well. So joining Group 3 IT648 and having a page there, created the “Rongfei” site and meanwhile having my own personal home page in Ning made me lost at the beginning. Later I realized what I did were three different things. In Group 3 IT648, I tested the following functions.
I also spend some time tried Tapinya and Wikispace. Every site has their own hightlights except that Tapinya has not any more exciting synchronous chatting features after you have experienced Tokbox beforehand. Wikispace allow you to edit the page and upload files, and it does not have very busy interfaces such as Ning. I think Wiki is very suitable for the purpose of developing a course site or educational blog.
As to the Educational use, we have been discussion a lot and all took it down in our project paper. Since these sites has lots of diversified features, both synchronous and asynchronous, we have been think a lot of usage such as IM tools to contact the instructor, better topic discussion tools compared with Google chat, replacement of online Learning Management System (LMS) such as blackboard and so forth. The point I value the most is the thought to utilize these tools in foreign language teaching and learning domain, because the diversified feature could ensure the effectiveness of communication, and communication between L2 learner and target –language speaker was highly valued due to the communicative language teaching methodology (CLT). Plus, these are all free, and internationally accessible tools, which could become a bridge to connect language learners from different cultures and regions of the world. This idea has finally led to the topic of my term paper, in which I planned to examine telecommunication tools in foreign language teaching and learning.

I originally planned to upload our project paper to Google doc until I realize that it would not allow me to upload any file that is beyond 500KB in size. So... Let's see whether I could upload my term paper there or not. >.<

Reflection on Group Project2

Just like Group Project One, our group had finished the second project successfully on this Wednesday night. There’s a minor imperfection, which is the pity that our group did not get to meet together. Charity was right, we should have informed our group members earlier so five of us could meet together, and this could be definitely improved in our next Group Project, which was planned on Sunday evening.

This time we get to experienced both audio and video function of telecommunication. We used Voice Board as well as Wimba to communicate with each other around the topic of how these functions could be used in our classroom. Besides a little time waiting for Wimba to set up and a little experience of bumping into each other’s voice when we talk, everything else went along very well. I enjoyed discussing with group members on the topic, which made me felt I was really in a class. This is something I never felt before during last semester when I had online classes. We tested different functions like talk, video, hand-raising and so on. “Live classroom was really alive”. We exchanged out ideas and comment on each other’s ideas. As to the possible use of such technology in our classrooms or would-be classroom, we came up with these ideas individually:

Roslyn: online classes can be lonely without the synchronous part. This would allow more connection to the class. It helps solve the problem of distance – we can still meet as a class without traveling to campus.

Rongfei: Wimba is good practice for hearing and listening to another language. Communicating with students in other countries, learning each others' languages is more effective than just listening to tapes in that language. According to the Communicative Learning Theory (CLT) in language teaching pedagogy, communicative situations make language learners to respond the incoming information and so the received information could be verified and confirmed, it is a good way to test whether the learner had understand the informing information. After responding, language learners will get subsequent information confirming their responding, so it's also good practice for their speaking skills. It is much better using Wimba than using tapes to practice students' listening skills because they could not communicative.

Tim: the voice board could be used to “turn in” recitations in a foreign language class or speeches in a public speaking class. Roslyn noted that Wimba could be used for small-group and one-on-one interviews, for assessment purposes in a business setting (could work for academics as well). Wimba could also be used, as Dr. Wang did, for a classroom chat with an outside expert (either in a face to face class in a computer lab, or in an online class, where everyone's together virtually).

Charity and Elois: there were several difficulties using Live Classroom and voice Board but agreed that it would not be suitable in a K12 classroom environment. Because some student may not have access to the equipment that is needed in order to participate in the online classroom activates (cameras, microphones, and computers). Also everyone has to be at their systems at the same time and some may not be available or able to access at the same time.

Artifact: Project 2 Report

Reflection on IT648 Group Project One

Our group set the time to have met and collaborated on Group Project One this week. The project was to experience Google's some new services such as Google chat based on Gmail, and play with it a little bit to see whether and how it could be used in our educational activities.

Our worked turned out to be pretty good, although there were some problems. The chatting went very smoothly, it was synchronous, and message was sent to each other without any delay. At first Roslyn, Tim and I had been chatting with each other and later other group members joined. We tried different things like one-to-one chat, group chat and we also tried video and audio chat, although that did not get to work eventually. We did some trouble-shooting and our estimate was because the software/driver Google requires to install was incompatible with some of our computer systems. Also, there are no video/audio chatting options in the Group chat Window.

As to the usage in Education, we reached some consensus about Google chats Educational use. To me, I have been interested in language teaching and learning all the time, so the first question I thought about was how Google chat could be used to facilitate international students’ English learning. The immediate thing came to my mind was to use Google chat connect students from different countries in different culture and educational settings, how ever, this feature of Google chat itself does not stands out compared with other international chatting softwares such Skype. However, Google chat is surprisingly bounded to its Email service, such combination of both synchronous and asynchronous feature was its highlights, which made communication more efficient, meanwhile, its recording functions is more convenient than other chatting softwares if users need to review their chatting records to assess their language practice.

Tim generalized our discussed points to a concise list on its problem, vantage and usage, and I added some on it before Roslyn asked us to assemble our scholarly paragraphs into the final documents. I post the concise list we first devised here as the reflection points on this project:

Good points:

• Convenient/always available from any web browser via Gmail, no downloading required (for text chat);
• An Email-communication revolution, combined functions of Email, listserv, IM, and SNS into one;
• Chat works pretty well;
• Record keeping, convenient for notes taking;
• It is easy and convenient for instructor to find out who are active and who are silent in a online discussion class.

Problems:

• It's easy to get confused with several windows going at the same time, especially if they have some of the same people talking in them;
• Inviting could be confusing (hard to remember who was invited and who started the chat. Also, having to scroll up to the top is not a very elegant solution, especially if the chat has been going on for a long time)
• Not well suited to having large numbers of people chatting at once (a dedicated chat program like Xchat does that better).
• Had trouble getting Voice and Video to work (the software wouldn't install on Tim's older XP machine).
• Users have to wait for responses sometimes, and some users got off automatically occasionally and have to be invited again.

Uses:

• Small group discussions (especially for groups who are working on a project together)
• Virtual office hours (for one-on-one or small group conferences)
• Discussion class on a certain topic for a small class

Artifacts: Project One Report

Walk On

It was really disorganized scrambling before I really could finish up everything that was supposed to be finished at the beginning of this summer semester, and sit down in such a hot Mississippi Friday summer morning to start updating my blog. It's a very short semester, it is supposed to be like this busy and pushing.

It was not until I read other peers' blogging did I realize I still haven't posting anything talking about myself. I have been here for almost half an year, which includes a whole semester, and have been taken several of the Instructional Technology courses. In two of Dr. Wang's classes, I used created course blogs like this, but failed to keep the blog going very well. It is new semester, and I thought it might be good to just combine these blogs into one and keep it moving forward. With Dr. Wang's approval, I combined the two course blogs into one and named it "My Educational Technology Road". I used to read a lot of professional's blogs in this field, both written in Chinese as well as English, and I was really amazed by their experience and sensitivity to find new things in education. I thoguth maybe one day I might be experienced in this field and become "somewhat" knowledgable about this field, and then be able to blog like that, like a real scholar. And hence I am setting this little blog here, wishing it could advance like that.

I have been living in China for the past 23 years before I flew to the US and started the academic journey. I just read Roslyn's blog about "when I grew up" and was interested because I have always been amazed by my realizing the notion that life is an amazing journey, you never know where the next stop is gonna be, even though you may plan a lot. I used to devote myself into find arts and thought I might become a painter when I grew up. And when I was old enough the world had already been changed a lot by technology, especially in such a skyrocketingly developing country. Lots of professional no longer draw and paint with brushes and canvas, but with their laptop, digital tablet, and Photoshop. There were even more room and posilibities for them to actulize their fancy imagination, even though in such a 15-inch-wide screen. I was fascinated in digital arts, in graphic design, photography and digital painting. I then thought maybe I could possibly become a digital artist, or graphic designer.

Like I said, life is just like an amazing journey and you never know where the next stop is gonna possibly be (I just realized it's a little alike to Forrest Gump's famous movie lines). It is really amazing that I am now being a graduate student in another country and exploiting my journey within the academia, instead of sitting in my studio doing the graphic work. I do have bewilderment sometimes for this is really a new journey, a journey I did not expected when I was a little boy (I used to read slowly, did mathmatics slowly, did not have good memories and could only spend a lot of time to keep up my academic records). However, I am delighted to alwasy keep walking on on this journey, even though there might be obstacles. We

just need a little spirit to face them. U2 has a song named Walk On, I like it a lot. It reminds me what to do when I may sometimes become frustrated.

I set this blog as the official course blog for IT 648, and meanwhile a documentary for my such academic journey.

And P.S., I enjoying stay here in the United States, this is part of my new journey, too. I especially enjoy the flowers, nice people and the sunsets here, they're just so beautiful.