My Tweetwheel (or “why social networking matters”)

This week at Learning with Computers, Ana Ma. Menezes is helping us all learn about “Microblogging with Twitter“. She’s a great facilitator, and despite my limited availabilities I’ve felt eager to give this issue some minutes… Somebody either in this community or at Webheads in Action had mentioned Tweetwheel, and I gave it a try. You can see the result above (click on the image to see the original page, and hover on any “friend” to see how many friends we have in common). I’m currently following 81 people, mostly EFL teachers, all of them usually twittering about EFL teaching and sharing useful resources. I guess I needn’t explain how this does away with the isolation of traditional f2f teaching in the classroom, and how it maximizes opportunities for professional development with like-minded colleagues!

Living in the Information Society

Communication, society and education

Today I start my first online course with , the site of Argentina’s Ministry of Education.  It’s called “Communication, society and education: Concepts and debates“. By now, online learning has become as much of a routine as f2f learning, the former being perhaps even more frequent to me in the last few years! Yet, this experience brings about two new challenges:

1. a new LMS… that always makes me just a little nervous…. I’ll need to look around and find my way! This time it’s e-ducativa… now, haven’t I tried this environment before?

2. it’s been the first time I’ve enrolled in a course that goes beyond “How to..”. See their welcome message:

 ”Concepto y tipos de comunicación, funciones del lenguaje, la codificación y decodificación como proceso, el universo del discurso, análisis y uso pedagógico de la imagen  son algunos de los temas propuestos en esta capacitación… La propuesta de este curso es brindar conceptos y modelos de análisis de diferentes problemáticas que permitan comprender los intercambios comunicativos que se realizan en la actualidad entre diferentes ámbitos y a través de las TIC.”

I guess it’s time I’ve started reflecting upon computer-mediated communication, apart from learning to master the tools… I’m glad about the new challenge I’ve set for myself, yet I can hear a soft voice in my mind wondering “Do you need another challenge???”

Let’s learn and live!

Gladys