General Feedback on Topic 3
Well done for all your efforts in topic 3 – certainly the most popular topic so far in terms of volume and enthusiasm. Keep it up! Your individual feedback is now posted – simply open the original link that was emailed to you and scroll down. There should now be feedback included on your topic 3 work now too.
You will find that topic 4 is also very “big” – this doesn’t mean longer and longer posts please (we warned about word limits in the last feedback) – as long as you acknowledge the broad scope of the topic, it is absolutely fine to focus on a specific aspect of it. Collectively, there should be a good coverage of a range of issues when your posts are all taken together. We will be interested to see what “ethical” aspects you each consider to be particularly important (or not important).
The prize for the best post of topic 3 goes to Sam for her note about the importance of checking sources.
And here is Cris’s response to it:
“This could have been any of us… myths travel as quickly as facts on the web … and we all have been ‘victims’ of it. But there is nothing like a ‘robust’ network to help distinguish what is reliable from what is not. This brings a couple of ideas to mind. The first is about Rheingold’s proposal of digital literacies http://rheingold.com/netsmart/ – He mentions “crap detection” as a key literacy for the 21st century, but, at the same time, he also emphasises Networking and Collaboration as key skills/activities . I guess they go hand in hand and what you described in this post is a very good example of it. The need to cultivate networks that inform and boost our knowledge is crucial, especially in times where information is so abundant and when its publication is no longer restricted to selected users.”
This of course links back to topic 1 when we discussed the evaluation of sources as a key digital literacy skill – or “crap detection” as Howard Rheingold (well worth following by the way) calls it. Here we see the value of our networks in adding to our understanding through constructive correction of our errors, as well as praise when it’s due.
As we’ve said to many of you on your individual feedback, now that you are comfortable with the style and structure of the module, why not experiment a little? Try some video or audio input to your posts, for example. And you have the Easter break to work on your own profile building without a specific module topic to focus on (the final topic 5 will start on 28th April).
Don’t forget to check the “announcements” section of the blog and the #uosm2008 regularly because there is a lot going on J