E-Portfolio Cover Letter

Ashley Pence

December 11, 2007

“What knowledge and skills have I acquired as a result of participating in this course?”

“O gallant Piglet!”  This seemed like an appropriate place to begin my cover letter for my E-Portfolio.  Some may ask why but as Mrs. McComas reads this i’m sure she will giggle a little, maybe even out loud because she knows it comes directly from her syllabus.  For those of you who don’t know what I am talking about it comes from the all knowing, wonderful little bear named Pooh.   “When in doubt, keep in mind that “O gallant Piglet” is always a very thoughtful way of beginning a piece of poetry.”  Although this cover letter is nowhere near being a poem, it still seems fitting.  I actually didn’t know how to start this letter because there are so many things that I have learned this semester through many different means.  That quote from Pooh actually made me realize that my CD 315 class objectives had been accomplished.  Even when I don’t know where to start I can still remember that there is something beyond that first train of thought that develops into something great and a result of what I have learned.

To foster in my students a love of learning…

Many times this semseter I would look at the course work for the week and mumble and groan about all that I had to do and how little time I had to do it in.  This remained true even until this cover letter  I’m not saying that I am any happier about it, but to realize that I have enjoyed learning and applying what i’ve learned is now evident.  My first realization of loving to learn was with our online class with Katie McComas.  It was very evident that the entire class was excited because you couldn’t get any of us to shut up.  We all had questions for Katie and would not stop at just one simple question.  We had to go deeper with the first question and add onto it.  This eventually ended with us running out of time and i’m not even sure if everyone was able to ask their question.  Nonetheless I had an awesome time and realized that it is very helpful to talk to someone who has been through the same things we are going through (recently).  The way in which we communicated with her through the online chat made the conversation relaxed and free flowing.  When this class discussion was over I realized how “geeky” we all are because we actually want to know the information that Katie had to tell us.  When it was time for the conversation to end I was a little sad and hoped that we could do it again.   

Cultivate a culture of inquiry as a means of knowing and sensemaking…

I can without a doubt say that this course revealed to me a whole new way of gathering information in more ways than one.  I discovered a plethora of new forms of research in order to obtain knowledge as well as sensemaking of whatever it was we were working on for the course.  I accomplished the majority of this objective during the second week of class by reading many articles as well as a chapter in our book.  I evidence this by the declarative knowledge section of my week 2 participation memo.

“This week began with reading about the things I should know about blogs.  I learned when, where and why to use them and also the positive and negative effects they can have.  The only negative being that sometimes they can be inaccurate and biased therefore you have to be careful if you are using them as sources of information.  The second article I read informed me that this is a digital world and the read/write web has exploded in this day and age.  It is very important to connect to students in this way otherwise they will far surpass us if we refuse change.  In the articles that contain information about netiquette, hoaxes, e-mail privacy and acronyms I realized that the web is a whole other atmosphere that I have yet to discover.  Although I was aware of some the information, I was still surprised by the other.  In the articles about discussion lists I realized that there are other ways to communicate and receive information about topics that interest you and it’s as easy as signing up to that particular list of interest.  In the articles that contained information about the world wide web I became more aware and gained a greater respect for those who maintain websites.”

Socialize students into the culture of both the theoretical and the practical aspects of the discipline…

I’ve never been a digitally literate person, until now!  Had someone told me a year ago that I would be blogging I would have laughed at them and said, what’s a blog?  So that’s a little exaggerated, I think I knew what a blog was before this class.  However, I did not know how obtain one or use one.  I learned very quickly and realized that it is a very efficient way of applying what I have learned not only as a journal for myself, but also a way to share my knowledge with others that may choose to read my blogs.  After I learned the aspects of blogging I was then sharing information about the other things that I learned as a result of this class.  In the third week of this class I evidenced in my participation memo that I had learned new ways of obtaining information.   The following is the information that I learned about in week 3.

“ This week I learned what a wiki and collaborative editing is, how to use it, who is using it, why it is significant, the downsides of both, where it is going in the future and the implications for teaching and learning.”

Inspire students to consider different ways of being, knowing, and doing…

As a result of this class I have now joined several mailing lists, created several different accounts for a number of things and learned that I can no longer take for granted the things that I “thought” were free to use online.  By doing these things I have become an active member in the online community.  I’m no longer just chatting on Facebook and using that for sources of “information”.  I now know how to find that information elsewhere and it’s not just by googling it.  Whether or not Mrs. McComas knows it or not she has created a searching monster out of me.  Google is not sufficient any longer and if it is from Wikipedia, don’t trust it!  I always used Wikipedia as a “reliable” source but realized shortly into this class that it is not what I thought it was.  I now actually enjoy searching for information and have learned effective ways of doing so.  By joining mailing lists I was communicating with other professionals who gave great factual information as well as experiential information.  This helped prepare me for my research project and actually got me interested in the topic more so than I already was.  Now that I have learned how to join mailing lists I can subscribe to lists that interest me outside of school.

I feel like the most impactful “doing” experience that I had this semester was creating my Movie Maker video.  I learned a new way to present my information in an interesting and fun way.  While uploading this project to Google I had an insight that almost made the project even more worthwhile.  I realized that this is an excellent way to share other projects that I have created without using programs such as Youtube.  Almost immediately after this project was finished I decided to share another video that I had made, using Photo Story, through Google Videos.

The most important thing that I changed since this class was the way in which I use images and audio that I get from the internet.  A specific week was spent on copyright issues and it made me realize that it is very important and the consequences of not following those rules can be harsh.  I now have a much greater respect for individual’s pieces of work as well as a greater knowledge base of how to go about getting permission to use other’s work.

Promote learning partnerships and learning communities…

How great is email?  After this course I can tell you that it is amazing.  Through our class mailing list that I had neglected in previous classes I was able to ask questions not only to Mrs. McComas, but also to my fellow students.  I realized how genuinely caring everyone was because they were so willing to help with any question that one of us might have had.  If one of my classmates couldn’t answer the question, Mrs. McComas was there monitoring to chime in when we needed her.  Class emailing helped right up until the end of the class by emailing our frustrations about our Movie Maker project.  This way of communication was extremely efficient because each person got to see what everyone was dealing with and could give helpful advice when needed.  Many times more than one person has a question about the same thing and this email list was great for answering those types of questions.  It has already been discussed that when we all graduate we will create our own mailing list to stay in contact for not only friendly emails, but also to provide eachother with helpful information about our experiences as SLP’s.  

While participating in our online discussions with Tapped-In we also created a new learning community that not many of us had participated in before.  From week 7 I obtained the following information by participating in the online classroom. 

“By starting the week off with the online classroom I learned how to function in an atmosphere such as that.  It taught me to log in properly, use different functions to make the classroom more user friendly, to take turns and most importantly it answered questions I had based on the ones that I had asked as well as the ones that my classmates asked.  I learned from our guest speaker, Katie, that being an SLP takes a lot of work and creativity as well as lots of knowledge.”

Facilitate improvement in the ability to communicate effectively, in the discourse of the discipline, in both oral and written formats…

This objective was evidenced by many things.  The most important one being our personal weblogs.  By blogging we were able to share the information we obtained using educated discussions of the material that we had read or activities that we had participated in.  By blogging we shared ideas and feelings about what we learned and shared that information with others who may be reading our blogs.  We used the discourse of the material and activities to discuss those things in our blogs.  When it came to completing our I-Search Paper we evidenced discourse of the discipline that we were researching.  The discourse was mainly literacy, but each individual student focused on different topics dealing with literacy.  Sharing our research with eachother by peer reviews we were able to effectively critique eachother’s work using that same discourse that helped improve eachother’s work.  Ultimately the fruits of our labor were evidenced in our video project that combined all our research throughout the semester.  This video used that same discourse that we had used all along, just in a more creative way.

I feel that I have achieved the learning objectives by participating in class discussions, whether online or in person, engaging with learning activities, and completing assingments.  This class not only provided the fullfillment of a credit, but it also met my life objectives by creating a new sense of being and knowledge as a person.  

13.5: Participation Memo

Ashley Pence

November 23, 2007

Aims & Objectives:

These past two weeks are likely to have been my most stressful yet unstressful at the same time.  To begin with my aim was to have completed the posts prior to Friday before Thanksgiving break.  This also meant completing my final draft for my paper as well as preparing to take the GRE that same Friday morning.  Things were a little shook up after I realized that I had an extra week to complete all the posts excluding my final draft of the I-Search paper.  Once that was realized I devoted all my time to preparing for the GRE.  We all know what that means, the posts were slightly forgotten.  Although I knew that I would enjoy writing the posts for this week they were drown out by family and turkey.  Now we see the unstressful part of my previous two weeks.  I loved this past week due to the excitement of family and shopping and sleeping in.  I even worked on homework for other classes, but the posts for CD 315 never crossed my mind.  That is until 7 a.m. on black Friday.  You know the biggest shopping day of the year.  I was rudely awaken by a dream of explaining to Mrs. McComas why my posts were so much later than usual and thanking her for giving us two weeks to do them.  Funny how life has a way of reminding us of things we have forgotten.  Therefore we all know now why I am submitting all my posts in one night.

Declarative Knowledge:

I have learned much needed information on how to give and take constructive criticism.  Although I gave and took this criticism in the previous week I really worked on the things that were mentioned.  It was interesting to see my paper through another person’s eyes and hopefully my criticism helped them as much as theirs helped me.  I also learned about writing a preface, acknowledgements and about the author.

Procedural Knowledge: 

My first experience this week was learning how to revise my paper by using the review that my fellow students provided me with.  This allowed me to see what I had done good, bad and what could use some work.  No editing was done on spelling or any other grammatical errors so hopefully I was capable and successful at catching any of those.  By only reviewing the content of my paper this revealed some mistakes that I may have made in expressing my research in order to effectively get my point across to the audience.  The content was praised as well as given constructive criticism which guided me in see where my strengths and weaknesses were.

When learning about writing a preface, acknowledgements and about the author I realized that I had never had to do something like this, but always knew that it was something that every author does.  I began by writing about how and why I chose my research question.  This was considered writing my preface.  I then wrote my acknowledgements.  I liked doing this the most because I feel like everyone needs to be recognized for things done well.  This allowed me to give thanks and credit to those who inspired me along the way while writing my paper.  Writing about the author was less like the preface and acknowledgements seeing as it had everything to do with me.  I basically wrote a bibliography about myself, but included only current information about my education, plans and a little about my hobbies.

Conditional Knowledge:

This week has prepared me for the future by teaching me how to revise by using reviews of my research content.  By learning this I not only made my paper better, but I can now do the same thing with future papers.  I learned so much about family culture and why it is so important as well since I had to continuously be involved with the topic and research of my paper.  I am thankful for this oppurtunity and hope that the information that I have gained does not fade.

A12.4: Participation Memo

Ashley Pence

November 9, 2007

Aims & Objectives:

This week I set out to accomplish several goals that were intended to help myself as well as my classmates.  The goals that would help me were to attend class and obtain information about Movie Maker which we will be using to complete our final project.  I also set the goal to reserach socio-emotional literacy and compile a mini research paper about it.  The goals that I wanted to accomplish that would help my classmates were to review their I-Search papers and comment on them.  I was able to accomplish all of these goals which have prepared me for continuing my research and completing my project.

Declarative Knowledge:

This week began by learning about how to operate Movie Maker as well as how to obtain photos and music that are free to the public.  By viewing Mrs. McComas’ movies I gained ideas of how I want to do my project.  I also learned more about a branch of digital literacy which was socio-emotional literacy.  By completing the peer reviews of my fellow students papers I gained a better understanding of what to expect when I receive my feedback.

Procedural Knowledge:

By attending class this week we gained a lot of information on how our final project will be presented.  We already knew that we would be using Movie Maker, but this week we got to see how it works.  We watched two movies and for the first one we picked good and bad things about the movie.  By doing this I realized that everyone has different taste and some may like certain pictures you use and others may not.  The same goes for the music you use.  I did not like the music that the producer of this movie used however it fit well with the storyline and there were others in the class that liked the music.  The same went for the pictures.  Some people liked the choice of pictures while others did not see the point in particular pictures that were used.  Mrs. McComas informed us that our movie is to be 3-5 minutes long and approximately 300 words used.  I quickly realized that this may be a hard task for me.  We must develop a script by condensing our introduction, summary and answer to be not much longer than the 300 word limit.  To obtain pictures that are not All Rights Reserved Mrs. McComas informed us of Flickr, a website where you can browse pictures and find pictures that are creative commons or public domain.  We also learned about how to save everything that we compile for our project.  It is a very good idea to save everything you find, music, audio and photos in one place like a jump drive.  We also learned the downside to Movie Maker which is the fact that it only lets you have one track throughout the whole movie.  This problem can be solved by using a program called Audacity.

This week I did further research into socio-emotional literacy and realized that it is something that I have never considered before, but use this type of literacy everyday.  I learned that it is the highest and most complex level of literacy because you must have obtained the other branches of literacy to be successful in socio-emotional literacy.  By having this literacy skill you can save yourself as well as many others from incorrect information and even dangerous people who lurk in chat rooms.

By completing my peer reviews for my fellow classmates I realized that there is more to reviewing a paper than correct spelling errors.  Those errors should be caught by the author themselves however other errors such as content may not always be caught by them.  By doing this peer review we not only commented on content, but we also were able to bless certain perspectives of the persons paper.  This provided encouragement to that person to let them know that there are good parts to their paper and sometimes can even outweigh the bad parts.

Conditional Knowledge:

This weeks assignments taught me skills that are helping me complete my project as well as useful information for future projects.  Projects like the one that I will be completing are interesting to me and by gaining a better understanding of them I will be more willing to use them in the future.  I have attempted to use Movie Maker before, but gave up because I became frustrated with it.  Now that I have to use it I can learn and maybe not be so afraid for future uses that could help me in my professional career.

A11.3: Participation Memo

Ashley Pence

November 4, 2007

Aims & Objectives:

I would first like to say that this has been a long week and one that was not devoted to my CD 315 class.  I realize that that is okay and all of my work will get done…perhaps a little less efficiently, but still quality work that is done to the best of my abilities.  My goals for this week were still met, just not in the timely manner that they usually are.  However, this was my plan and my plan came through. 

Declarative Knowledge:

I began this week researching Branching Literacy Skills in order to gain a better understanding of the 5 major types of digital literacy skills.  I realized that this one is not my favorite and that it was hard for me to really understand all that it deals with and I would like to gain more knowledge on what exactly branching literacy skills are.  I continued work on my I-Search paper and realized that I really like writing papers like this.  It makes writing something that I am interested in fun and easy to talk about. 

Procedural Knowledge:

As for branching literacy skills I realized that they are something that have really became evident in the last 15-20 years.  This was evidenced by Eshet-Alkali and Amichai-Hamburger’s study on Experiments in Digital Literacy.  The study shows us that the younger the group, the better they performed the task required of them.  This shows that we as younger participants have had more experience in branching literacy skills and it has really become a part of our everyday lives especially in the school systems. 

While compiling my I-Search paper I learned the basic parts to a paper such as this and what it should include as a final piece of work.  The first section of my paper will include introducing and questioning.  I began by briefly discussing what I already know about literacy in general and then talking more specifically about what I already knew about my topic.  I also include why I was interested in this topic that I chose and the essential questions to help me obtain my final answer.  The second part of this paper includes the research that I performed and what evidence I found to support my answers to my foundation questions.  For my final section I concluded and synthesized all the evidence that helped support my answer and cited my work properly.

Conditional Knowledge:

While completing the assignments for this week I became more knowledgable about other parts of digital literacy.  I also completed an I-Search paper rough draft that will gear me towards my final project.  As a student this weeks assignments helped me prepare to get a good grade in my class.  As a future SLP and citizen I am now aware of how to effectively use research to obtain knowledge that is or could be useful to me and others that I may serve.

A10.4: Participation Memo

Ashley Pence

October 26, 2007

Aims and Objectives:

For this weeks assignments I set out the goal to revise my project prospectus and continue research on digital literacy and it’s branches.  I set these goals to complete an assignment but also to gear my focus toward completing the overall assignment of my research project.  Both of week 10′s assignments helped me do that.

Declarative Knowledge: 

This week I researched further into digital literacy and its branch of reproduction literacy.  I was also able to find more information about my research question and bookmarked those for future use for myself as well as any other person who may want to use them.  While revising my project prospectus I learned that there are many different directions that I can take with my research question and that it is important to narrow it down, otherwise my research would go on for a long time.  I began looking through a few books in the library and was really successful in narrowing down the avenue that I want to take with my project.

Procedural Knowledge:

As I reviewed articles about Reproduction Literacy for my assignment this week I ran into the same articles that I had used the previous week for Photo-Visual Literacy.  I felt that it was appropriate to use those same articles because they all talk about each individual branch of literacy as well as the literacies as a whole.  The articles were very informative and helped me gain a better understanding of reprodcution literacy.  The article that I read about digitally, highly connected children has a quote from author John Kao that sums up how reproduction literacy is viewed, “taking a topic, a question, an idea, disseminate it, break it, manipulate it, and reassemble it creating something new.” I thought that by reading this quote I was able to understand and appreciate the work that reproduction literate scholars perform.

As I revised my project prospectus this week I realized that the library had some really great sources.  I located information on the changes in literacy, family literacy and literacy definitions.  The information on changes in literacy discusses how views on literacy are changing as the world views change.  The things we needed before are no longer enough to sustain the demands of today’s literacy needs.  The family literacy information discussed a lot about the role parent’s play in a child’s development of literacy.  This information also discusses intergenerational literacy or two-generation literacy programs which has now been termed family literacy.  This information focuses on two parent related factors, parental education and home literacy practices.  The information I found on literacy definitions describes other’s views on what literacy is and how the terms and their meanings have changed over time.

Conditional Knowledge:

The skills and knowledge I acquired this week have prepared me for a better ground to stand on when the time comes to complete my research project.   I have a better understanding of where I want to go with my research and can use that knowledge to complete my work.  As a future speech language pathologist I have realized that careful research and consideration is important.  To effectively create a good research project, you must take time and put forth a lot of effort.

A9.4: Participation Memo

Ashley Pence

October 19, 2007

Aims and Objectives:

This week my goal was to begin reflecting on the work I have done up to this point.  I wanted to focus in on what I had done, sort it out and make sense of it in order to prepare myself for my final project.  I am looking toward making connections to my reseach questions that will help me answer those for my final project. 

Declarative Knowledge:

This week began with a face to face class which is something we hadn’t experienced in this class for several weeks.  It was refreshing to catch up with our teacher and discuss things freely and actually see eachother while we were doing so.  We began this class by discussing any questions we had and our thoughts about the class.  After several questions were answered, mainly dealing with our mailing lists, we moved on to discuss the layout of our final project.  We were given information about the “I-Search Paper”.  After that was discussed we talked about a topic from our previous online discussion that concerned copyrighting and using creative commons to do so.  Outside of class this week I met with my instructor and we discussed my research questions so far and found a whole new perspective on it.  I also performed further research on one of the branches of digital literacy, photo-visual literacy.

Procedural Knowledge:

From this weeks class discussion I learned that my research paper will be in an I-Search format.  I realized that means there are quirks to writing a paper like this and a couple of those are, it can be in first person.  I can use the word “I”.  However the paper will still be formal.  I tend to think that when papers are in first person they are informal.  I’ll figure it out the more I learn and when I begin working on this paper it will become more clear to me.  I learned that an I-Search paper has four components; a summary of what the student knows, a statement explaining why the student chose the topic along with questions to be answered by the research, a record of research activities and concluding remarks about what was discovered as a result of the process.  During the class session I was also informed of due dates and how my final project will be laid out.  We were not given much information about that just that we will be using Movie Maker and will learn more about that in the next few weeks.  By exploring creative commons we are to come up with an idea of how we want our projects to be licensed.  When we choose our license it will be done so in three ways.  The first way is commons deed.  The next two are legal code and digital code.  We were provided with a website that when finished we can go there and they will do the licensing for us, symbols and all!  http://creativecommons.org/about/license 

When researching further into photo-visual skills I came across several articles that all led back to the first article that I read dealing with experiements in digital literacy.  One of the articles I found had one of the same authors as the first and the preceeding articles all quoted the first article by Eshet-Alkai and Amichai-Hamburger.  I assumed that they have done a lot of work with digital literacy and are good sources to gain more information from.  I gained an interesting view of how communication has transformed over time and is making its way back to the original form of graphics that the “cavemen” used.

Conditional Knowledge:

The knowledge that I gained from this weeks class has prepared me to complete my final project.  I am lacking a few things such as how to display my project using Movie Maker, but that will come later.  The skills I acquired this week are imperative to the completion of this class.  The articles I read on photo-visual literacy gave me a better understanding of what today’s society expects of us when it comes to digital literacy.  I learned that I must embrace this “new” literacy and use it on a daily basis to not only gain for myself but to gain for my future clients as a Speech Language Pathologist. 

A8.6: Participation Memo

Ashley Pence

October 11, 2007

Aims & Objectives

My goal for this week was to continue the searching and selecting of resources that are pertinent to my research question.  This was done through a class meeting reading the assigned article, revising my resources by reviewing the APA manual and completing my project prospectus.  I also accomplished updating my listserv in order to obtain research information from a more reliable source.  I learned that APA can be hard and you must be careful when using this type of citation.  This week I also succeeded in learning how to do a project prospectus that will prepare me for revisions and questions when I meet with Mrs. McComas to discuss my project so far. 

Declarative Knowledge

This week I learned about creating offices in our Tapped-In classroom, copyright issues that we have questions about and APA formatting.  I also reviewed digital literacy and read about a study that had been performed to obtain information about what age groups perform the best in the 5 different types of literacy, photo-visual literacy, reproduction literacy, branching literacy, information literacy and socio-emotional literacy.

Procedural Knowledge

In this weeks assignments I successfully created my own office in the Tapped-In chat room.  My office was created because I was chosen to be the group leader for this weeks discussion.  Once in my office my group members joined me and we began discussing copyright issues and the questions we had about them.  We discovered within our group that we do not understand who, what, when where and how to obtain permission to use  copyrighted material.  We also agreed that creative commons was a better way to go about copyrighting things over all rights reserved so we can put a limit on our information but still allow others to use it without so much struggle.  We had other questions but they all relate to how to obtain permission for copyrighted material.

This week I also realized that I needed to find a new mailing list in order to receive information.  I found out that the one that I had subscribed to previously did not regularly send out emails and I was not going to be getting much from them.  I did another search for what seemed like forever and finally came across an interesting one dealing with women, poverty and literacy.  I thought this was an appropriate mailing list that could give me insight on my research project.  This week also taught me that correctly citing information in the APA format can be harder than it appears.  I went about citing my information as usual and when I looked back over some things I realized that I had made several capitalization mistakes as well as using “from the (insert database of your choice here)”.

By doing my project prospectus I was doing an outline that will prepare me to answer questions about why I chose the research question, supporting questions, sources and also why I am interested in the topic that I chose. 

When reviewing digital literacy I was refreshed on what the Experiments in Digital Literacy had performed their study on and the results that came from that study.  I learned that this study concluded that younger high school and college students performed better on the photo-visual and branching literacy skills and the adult group performed better on the reproduction and information literacy skills.  Reading this article was a review but at the time of my first reading of it I had just began this class on literacy.  Now that I have had 8 weeks in this class learning about the importance of literacy skills across all things, I came out with a better understanding of the study and the importance of it.

Conditional Knowledge

The knowledge that I obtained this week has prepared me for the remainder of this class by really letting me focus in on what sources I want to use and why I chose the questions that I did.  This came mostly from doing my project prospectus.  I am now prepared to obtain information from my mailing list and can be assured that my sources are correctly cited in APA format.  Those same things apply to me as a pre-professional who will be continuing research in my field as well as a citizen who wants to obtain information for my own use.

A7.7: Participation Memo

Ashley Pence

October 6, 2007

Aims & Objectives:

My goal for this week was to survive it.  In case you didn’t know, I succeeded in doing that.  The week started off with me wanting to gain helpful information from the online class.  That was a success!  Within the mix of this week was a diagnostics test so things were a little thrown off, but once that test was over I was able to get back on track for my CD 315 class.  I was a little late getting started and that’s exactly why i’m doing homework on a Saturday night.  Who does that?!  I was also successful in evaluating two websites, one of which was easy because it was a very poorly constructed one and the other that took a little more time and concentration, therefore was not as good as the first critique.  I also accomplished another library search for new articles for my research and signed up for social bookmarking.

Declarative Knowledge:

In my first assignment I obtained information on using an online classroom and at the same time I learned about adult literacy when dealing with TBI and aphasia.  The next thing I learned was how to critique a website and to know if the information included in the website is accurate and up to date.  By reading McInnis’ article I learned about the three “R’s” and how they relate to researching in the most efficacious way possible.

Procedural Knowledge: 

This weeks class taught me to do several things that in some ways related to eachother and not so much in other areas, however in the end of the class I am sure they will all come together to create the most well prepared project.  By starting the week off with the online classroom I learned how to function in an atmosphere such as that.  It taught me to log in properly, use different functions to make the classroom more user friendly, to take turns and most importantly it answered questions I had based on the ones that I had asked as well as the ones that my classmates asked.  I learned from our guest speaker, Katie, that being an SLP takes a lot of work and creativity as well as lots of knowledge.  By performing the evaluation of the BetterDogFood website I learned that not all websites are full of good reliable information.  This website did not contain any sources and was definitely not clear on what it was even advertising.  Based on questions that Purdue University put together to evaluate websites that included accuracy, authority, objectivity, currency and coverage I could answer very clearly that this was a poor website.  When I chose my own website to evaluate it became harder because things weren’t as evident as they had been in the first website.  When I evaluated my choice I used guidelines from Johns Hopkins University that consisted of authorship, publishing body, point of view or bias, referral to other sources, verifiability and currency.  This showed me that in order to obtain good information from websites it is imperative to review these categories and apply them to the website of your choice.  McInnis’ article taught me to stop stockpiling information and turn it into useful research by sorting it out.  He also brought to my attention that “students look for and expect to find the answer to the question instead of the evidence to be examined”.  This is basically what happens due to the lack of education we as students have had on how to research properly.

Conditional Knowledge:

The knowledge and skills I learned this week have prepared me for future online class meetings whether it be in CD 315 or other classes in the future that I may take to continue my education when I am a professional.  This would be of great assistance when classes are offered at farther distances than I could travel.  I am now more informed on dealing with literacy in patients with apahsia and TBI as well as what working in that atmosphere is like.  I can now evaluate and determine if a website is use worthy and can become a more proficient researcher.

A5.5: Participation Memo

Ashley Pence

September 22, 2007

Aims and Objectives:  To say that this has been a busy week would be an understatement.  Therefore my goals and objectives have been spread out among several days this week.  As always my goals are to complete each assignment and gain a better understanding of what the articles and assignments discuss. 

Declarative Knowledge: I was successful with learning from the readings about social bookmarking, virtual meetings, and virtual worlds.  All three of these things were things that I had never accessed before and I now have a much better understanding of them.  I also visited my wiki to update my research question and add some other questions that can help me decide if my current question is a good one.  By performing library searches based on my topic I learned that using different key words can completely change your results within the searches and therefore it is important to change your keywords accordingly.  Something that will also help me throughout my researching was subscribing to a newsreader.  While I can subscribe to fun things that interest me I can also subscribe to things that pertain to my research topic. 

Procedural Knowledge:  Based on the readings I was informed of who, what, when, where, and why I would need to use social bookmarking, virtual meetings and virtual worlds.  From the social bookmarking article and chapter I learned how to save my favorite or useful sites to a public place that allows others to access what I have saved and for me to access what they have saved based on our interests and key words.  The article on virtual meetings taught me that as a student I could take part in meetings such as this that would save time and travel for me as a student or perhaps one day as a speaker.  The article on virtual worlds was very interesting and gave me ideas of how I can participate in real life scenarios but not have to worry about my real life mistakes.  They help you learn from your mistakes and don’t necessarily negatively affect you.  By performing my searches based on my research question, revising my research question and subscribing to a newsreader I learned that there are multiple sources that can help me gain as many sources as possible.

Conditional Knowledge:  The knowledge I have gained this week has prepared me as a pre-professional to increase and better my research skills and make it easier on me while at the same time producing a better project.  All of the readings and assignments for this week have shaped my way of thinking and will continue to as a professional on any project, meetings, or sharing of information that I may do.

A4.8: Participation Memo

Ashley Pence

September 13, 2007

 Aims & Objectives:  My personal goals for this week were to first of all take a deep breath and then breathe out.  Yeah, that second goal is some what important.  I have found that sometimes we can become overwhelmed and forget to do that second part.  Although the beginning of the week looked grim, I pulled through and accomplished every reading and assignment that I was given.  These were all to my advantage, because looking back I can see all the knowledge that was gained from those exercises.

Declarative Knowledge:  This week I gained knowledge in several areas that can benefit me on the worldwide web.  I now have a better understanding of wikipedia, RSS, how to use search engines, how to better develop my research question and how to actually subscribe to a mailing list.

Procedural Knowledge:  When reading about wikipedia I learned that it is not something that should be taken for granted.  It has a lot of great information, but I have to keep in mind that it is for collaboration and is up for editing at anytime by any random person, (educated or not).  The RSS articles taught me that I do not have to spend large quantities of time searching the worldwide web for information that interests me.  I can simply search once, subscribe to that sites mailing list and only recieve information that I want.  This saves valuable time and energy on the net.  Richardson’s text expanded on RSS and explained how to find, subscribe and keep up with them.  The tutorial on search engines gave facts about search engines that I would have never dreamed possible.  The biggest shocker was that not every search engine has the same results based upon their databases and their “spiders”.  This led to my investigation of the three main search engines, Google, Yahoo and Ask.com.  While searching for my last name and my research topic the results became evidence of what the tutorial told me about.

Conditional Knowledge:  The knowledge and skills that I have acquired this week will help me not only now, but in the future as well.  I can use this information for the research I am performing now as well as all the research that I will be doing in the future that pertains to my field.  If I were to perform research before these articles and tutorials I would be less successful with my results and final project simply because I did not know how to use the search engines correctly.  Now that I have this background I feel more prepared to complete future research.