TW's Bog

Yes.  I think learning communities can get too big.   I've joined several communities and networks around podcasting as I've tried to grow my show to help it reach a larger audience.  And while some networks do start out great, too often when they reach a critical mass, it turns more into the same few questions getting asked over and over.  There is still good debate and collaboration, but it seems not as much as we wished it to be. After some frustrations, another podcaster and I started our own Master Mind group for podcasters geared towards agriculture.  Now the four of us did sort of know each other first, but none of us have met just yet.   Each month, we make it a point to listen to each other episodes, write down some feedback, take feedback, and discuss other key items like social media use, monetizing, etc.  It's turned into a great little community that has genuinely helped out each of our shows.  We are just honest and open ab...

 A friend of mine told me about AI Content Generators recently and I thought it would be cool to bring up in this class.  The idea is that artificial intelligence software has gotten so good, that you can simply type in a prompt, and these generators will create articles for you based on one sentence. How wild is that?! So for this experiment, I typed in "The evolution of online education."  Below is the article created using a website AI called, frase.io .  You'll notice some interesting claims, one of which is that "online learning has been around since the early 1900s."  I don't remember reading about MOOCs from the 1930s, but maybe there were? So check it out and be sure to give it a try as well! 1. Online Education Online education has been around since the early 1900s. In fact, some of the first colleges were created that way. However, it wasn't until the late 1990's that we started seeing a huge surge in the number of students taking courses o...

Sadly, I never joined Boy Scouts when I was younger so I never really got a chance to earn all those cool badges.  However, now it seems like badges are becoming a new norm in terms of showing your online activity.  So maybe there is still a chance! One of my favorite websites, the Art of Manliness, has a program called the Strenuous Life .  The program os designed to help you get out of your comfort zone.  The program even comes with, you guessed it, badges that you can collect and display!  So it's sort of like a Men's Scout program.  How cool to be able to show off some cool achievements like community service, building a fire without a match or lighter, uncovering your family heritage, and a lot more. I've even noticed that badges are becoming a norm with various learning management systems (LMS).  My current company has adopted an LMS to keep track of our learning material for our software users.  The LMS not only offers certificates for each...

 "Hive Mind" is something I usually hear in science fiction movies or even video games. It took me a second to realize I'm actually part of a hive mind currently. And guess what, you are too! But we all know it better as the internet.  I guess you could even say that the internet did in fact start out as a Hive Mind as it was originally created for the sharing of research at different universities. It's transformed to include social media and blogs that allow anyone with a stable internet connection to share their lives, knowledge, view points, and more. This has developed a sort of Hive Mind where we can all "plug in" and learn from the collective.  And as weird as that might sound, I think it's a wonderful thing. When you focus on the positive, you can really see the benefits of sharing information in the volume we are now. Makes you wonder what strides we can make within society over the next 50 years.  Gotta keep on jiving with the hive!

 As recommended by Dr. Dennen, I used Feeder to help with keeping track of all of our blog posts for this course as well as keeping track of a few other blogs and websites I like to stay up to date on. And can I say, I should have been using this tool for a looooong time. This tool has simplified everything and it has also removed the ever-so annoying online ad that springs up on every...single...website!   I've heard about tools like this in the past but never looked much into them.  Now, it's got me thinking, "What else am I missing out there?!" I'm excited to learn about the countless tools online that can better inform us and even make us more productive with our learning.  One tool that I will plug that I absolutely love is Notion .   Notion is sort of like a super-duper-DUPER spreadsheet software that you can customize to your heart's content. You are able to create pages and lists and tables for any sort of data tracking. I use it to keep track ...

 No, I don't think so.  And here is why. Anytime an iPhone update happens, I ALWAYS get a call from my parents.  Or, anytime I visit my grandparents, they greet me with a quick, "Hey son how are you?  Could you fix our printer?" I was always curious as to why this is. Indeed, my parents and grandparents, who are all super smart, could figure out even what I might consider trivial tech problems, right? Not exactly.  Younger people (I feel really old for saying that) have experienced countless changes with technology over the years.  From going to dial-up internet to wifi, flip phones to iPhones, and even huge desktop computers to building our own gaming computers after watching a few YouTube videos.  We are used to technology.  And honestly, technology has grown alongside us.  As we grow older, most technologies are becoming easier to use because we get more and more used to them. Older generations, not so much.  Most of their lives were ...

 Web 1.0 was the early form of the internet, used mostly by universities.   Web 2.0 was the focus on more user-generated content. Web 3.0 is almost here and includes more machine-based data learning...or something like that? Maybe we should focus on developing Web 2.1.   User-generated content has really shaped our culture.  People are making careers off of making content that they are passionate about and most of the time, they are able to build pretty big audiences.  How cool is that?  But maybe we need to redo how some of these social media companies manage the algorithm and countless tools. I'd say every social platform wants to make money.  Which I get.  You've got to make money to stay in business.  However, the shady side of data harvesting, targeting specific users, or even locking out some users has really soured the taste of social media.  It seems like for platforms we apparently can control, we actually can't contro...

Ok, not really.  I do know how to tweet, unlike my dad. But that's a story for another day. Twitter seems to be a fantastic tool that acts as a virtual public forum.  So long as you don't say anything too crazy.  Therein lies my biggest problem with Twitter.  The politics of the platform and how you can see the absolute worst of people.  But, that shouldn't take away from the power of the platform.   I've been using Twitter a bit more for social media engagement as well as promoting my podcast and engaging with its audience.  It's been pretty fun so far.  I also follow several community leaders and developers for a multiplayer game I play, called Destiny 2.  The communities are great and pretty fun to follow and chat with given I love the content of both.  One being Si-Fi and the other being agriculture/podcasting.  What's not to love? The more I try to look at the good of Twitter, the more I see the good.   "Well, ye...

Social media often gets a bad rap.  Kinda like those zero-sugar gummy bears with all the hilarious reviews on Amazon.  And while some of that bad rap is a little deserved, social media is also an amazing tool that has absolutely changed human communication forever. If you would have told me 20 years ago, that we would almost be obsessed with the number of "likes" and "followers" on our online profiles, I would have called you crazy.  But, now we all obsess over it (to a certain degree, of course, some waaaaaay more than others).  My thought is, can we actually reverse this focus on "likes" and "follows" and instead maybe focus on learning?   Lately, I've heard a ton of people say "Guess what I learned on TikTok?"  And then they spout off about some cool fact or how they learned to fix a leaky facet.  How cool is that?!  Talk about a shift!   Maybe we can do that with higher learning too.  Maybe we can build more focus on not ju...