U-Blog 6

Our group has the teaching assignment at the lowman house coming up next week. I'm hoping that we're prepared and that everything goes alright. We have a basic outline and know what we want to cover, but from what the other groups have said, it's best just to play the fine details by ear. I think that it's a good strategy, because we're limited by time. If we had unlimited time then we could cover everything that we wanted, but since we don't we'll be affected by everyone's learning rate. We'll only be able to progress at the rate of the slowest learner and we won't know what questions or problems we'll run into. So I hope that we're prepared and believe that we are, but we'll see next week.

U-Blog 4

I figured that this week I would talk about the team project. It's been working pretty well for so far for a group project. Ususally, groups are a pretty hard thing to do, because you usually have a lot of slackers that make excuses as to why they couldn't get this or that done on time. We had a little trouble at first, but now it seems like everyone is doing everything on time. This has pretty much been the first positive group experince that I've had. Robbie was kind of thrown into the group leadership position, but he's been good about letting us know what he wants early and reminding us when a deadline's coming up. I've been trying to get everything he wants done as soon as I can. I'm also picking things that I think I would enjoy whenever I get a choice. This way I'm more inclined to do it.

U-Blog 3

I think that the writer of the article in the virtual library for assignment 5.1 has a good idea. Informal learning is one of the most effective ways. I believe that the only way that it's lacking compared to regular class learning is the amount of time it takes. You can go to school for 7 hrs a day and you may only do 6 hours of informal learning a week, but you'd get more from those 6 hours than you would in all of the weeks regular learning. For instance, I like to read, but if I'm forced to read for a class I tend to find things boring even if I'd normally find them at least marginally interesting if I just ran across them. I covered something a little like this in my postings to my team about the project we have to do. I though it would be a good idea to have the students make a buddy or get the whole class on each other's e-mail list or something. The reason I suggested this is because throughout my school career I've learned the most from talking with my friends and classmates about the material and it's always helped to have someone that I could lean over to and ask a quick question that would put me back on track.

U-Blog 2

I'm sort of looking forward to teaching this adult computer class. I like the challenge of planning an hour of learning. I want to fit the most into the alotted amount of time. I believe that this requires a flexable schedule based on what the students already know. If they've never turned on a computer before I believe that we shouldn't start off teaching them about myspace. However, if they know the basics then that might not be a bad place to start. I think that we should make sure that they know how to find help on their own. This is the most important thing. We're not always going to be there to help. So using help on the computer and searching the web are key. Setting up an e-mail account will be the next big thing, because this will probably be the main way they interact on the web with family and friends. We'll need to cover how to use it as well as what to do about spam and unfamiliar e-mails. I think a good idea would be to have them set up e-mail accounts and show them how to make it other contacts. This will give them a circle of people of their general skill that they can e-mail with question after the class. Another aspect to take into account is that these will be adults. While you shouldn't talk down to someone younger than you any more than you should talk down to someone older than you, with adults you have the added problem of whether they preffer to be called by a last name, first name, or mister or miss or mrs. I think that name tags where we ask them to write what they prefer to be called will easily solve this along with letting them know our names if they have a question for us. These are all problems and solutions that just come to mind at first I've posted about this in my groups discussion board and hope that we can get everything worked out to a satisfying conclusion so that we can provide the best learning experience possible and will not only teach them a few things in that hour, but give them skill that will help them throughout their computing experiences.

U-Blog 1

This blog is supposed to reflect on what I've done or learned in the class so far. The most important thing I've learned so far is that I've got to stay on top of an online class. Just like when I first came to the columbia campus and had trouble, because my local campus never used blackboard and down here they rely on it exclusively. I'm having to keep checking blackboard frequently and keep in touch with classmates attending class to keep up with what's going on. Like tonight, I just acciently saw that we had a quiz due before midnight. I've also learned from the articles that I've had to read, though I think some stretch out the length of the article longer than neccessary and that my learning suffers because of this since my attention starts to wander.

Workplace Learning

It was really hard to find any concise article about workplace learning trends or the need for training in America. First, alot of the articles I did find were about the UK or India. Then, once I'd had it down to articles about America, I had to sort through the ones that were to buy a book or sign up for a news letter. Once I did that, they were mainly about how they needed to train workers to keep up with technology, but one article was talking about training that needed to be done by current employees to foregners that are going to be doing their job soon which isn't cool and one was against work place training in IT which is a field I'm in.