Week 2

On Tuesday we were introduced to the term personal learning networks or PLNs. Personal learning networks consists of the people an individual interacts with and gains knowledge from. When we were first introduced to this term I didn't really think that my PLN was very large, but after Mike talked about what a PLN was and showed us an example of his I realized that mine was probably larger than I initially thought. I first thought that mine would have mainly be comprised of my university contacts, but I hadn't taken into consideration all of my online and social media contacts. My PLN is still relatively small, but I am hoping throughout this course it will increase.

The next term we talked about was Echo Chamber. In terms of media content an echo chamber refers to following people or news outlets that supports our points of view. The problem with this is that you creating a bias for your opinion by only viewing news that supports your beliefs and not viewing as much news from the opposing views. I never really thought about this, but I think I am guilty of this. I am a frequent follower on Reddit and even though I use it for personal use a lot of the sub-reddits that I subscribe to all consist of groups with my viewpoint. I can see how this can be a problem because by following news outlets that support your thinking it creates a confirmation that your viewpoint is correct. After learning about this term it made me think back to my student teaching when we were talking about politics and how most of my students (grade 7) had negative opinions about Trump. I always assumed that these students were receiving their negative viewpoints from their parents and relayed these viewpoints in the classroom (even if most of their points were valid, but that's not the point). As educators I think it is important to educate our students about echo chambers and that even if the majority of our knowledge gained through the media has a viewpoint that we need to be cautious that we are not just validating our own opinion through the media.

On Thursday we had the wonderful opportunity to listen to Alec Couros for speak on technology. Alec is a professor at the university of Regina and is an expert in the field of education technology. Alec is a extremely knowledgeable man and did a great job of keeping my interest as well as providing a lot of valuable content during his presentation. I really enjoyed the conversation he had about his open learning projects. This is something that Alec says he does with his students where they choose a subject that they are interested in and research that subject using various medias. I really liked this idea and hope that it is something that I can incorporate into my teacher. In my last placement I conducted a project that was similar to this and my CT called it an inquiry based assignment. Basically students were allowed to pick a topic that related to the topic that we had been discussing in class. It wasn't quite as broad as what Alec had been talking about, but I think the students enjoyed the process. Alec also talked about how important internet security was and provided us with many examples of when his identity was used on the internet by someone else. As educators this is something that we will have to educate our students on as it could happen to them. It was also important to all of us because this type of thing can happen to anyone who uses the internet. I am looking forward to continue to follow Alec on his blog as well as twitter as I think he will make a great addition to my PLN.