Final Week Reflection

Last Week: Final Reflection

All the work has been turned in and the kiddies been tucked in. LOL! The semester is over and it seems like it just started. My final reflection is on our group project. I was teamed with Heather and Ken. Great partners I had and they did such a good job. I usually do not like group assignments but they did more than I ever expected. The team flowed very well together and we did not have any problems. I learned a lot about virtual teams and social loafing. I liked that we talked about best practices of virtual teams and how to cut down on social loafing.

On a good note I am half way to my masters. I have 5 classes left and have signed up for two in the Spring. I will be done before you know it!

See you guys later!

Week 13: Article Research

This week we started doing research with our teams. We each had to get two articles and write a brief synopsis on each. We also had to put key words at the bottom of the summary for quick reference. We also had to do a article evaluation. I am looking forward to meeting my team after Thanksgiving to start putting all of this research together. We will have to put a power point together for our presentation the first week in December. This semester is flying by.

On a happy note, Thanksgiving is here and Christmas is around the corner. These are always great times with family and friends. See you next week!

Week 12: Team Project

Hello,

I am posting from my sisters house tonight. My daughter and I are out of power tonight but others in my neighborhood are not so lucky. We have several houses tonight without a home or damaged beyond repair because of a tornado that came through. My heart goes out to those tonight. I am a little frazzled with all that has happened so close.

Tonight I submitted our work project plan. Looking forward to working with Heather and Ken.

Hope everyone is ok tonight and I will see if I have power back on at the house in the am.

Doug

Week 11: Second Life, Land and Building

Week 11 Reflection: Second Life

This week we covered the building portion of second life. This to me has been the hardest part of Second Life. Our assignment was to find three items and then build three items and put them into our virtual classroom. I found a leather recliner, table lamp, and a stack of books. I built a picture, picture frame, a tie-dye rug, and a round glass table. I thought this was a true challenge because I have never done any of this before. I had a tough time with the picture frame and picture. I was able to finally make the wooden frame but was hard to line it up with the picture and get it straight on the angled wall. It took a lot more time than I expected.

Another thing we did this week was to create some kind of business in Second Life and present as a group. We did an upscale mall. I thought my favorite was the resort done by another group. Everyone did a great job on their project.

See you next week.

Week 10: Second Life

Week 10: Second Life

This week we dressed up for Halloween. All of us had great costumes and was fun to do. We also had a Scavenger Hunt to do in Second Life.  We had to go to different places, look around, and take pictures to show the instructor that we had been different places. The one place that I liked was the Sistine Chapel. It was very interesting to go inside and see all of the pictures there. Something to actually see even thought you are not actually there. The other place was very cool was the virtual state fair. It had a haunted house that was very well done. Below is a picture of the front of the house.

 See you next week!

Campus Week in Second Life

Campus Tour Week:

This week we were suppose to pick a partner and go into Second Life. We needed to tour and explore another college campus in Second Life. My partner was Holly and we were assigned Bowling Green State University.  The University was very well done. I thought the detail in everything was very well. I could not help myself from comparing it to Epcot at Disney. It had that future world appearance with all the buildings but then it had some old country areas as well. It felt like I was back in Epcot. It had a couple of good things in there. I loved the dance and music area. You could click on the dance statute and your Avitar could do all kinds of crazy dances.  Also the campus was divided up in 4 areas or islands; Creation, Collaboration, Community, and Interaction.

Below is the other part of our Assignment. We had to take a couple of pictures together while we were touring.  Ok, we will see you next week!

Reflection: Second Life

This week we signed into Second Life. I was not too happy about this from when I first heard of this. But the more that I work with it the more I like it. The first class meeting we had was the first time that I really felt a part of a class while being online. It was strange at first but it does seem like a good thing. I can see why so many people get hooked on this type of thing. Also, I see how it is a very important to Universities and other educational programs. Another advantage of using this for educational reasons is the fact that you don’t have to actually go to class and you can save money on gas and tuition being a distance education option.

See all of you later in SL

My Avitar: DougieAustin

Ok, here is a little description about my avatar. This somewhat looks like me. I am a jeans and short type of person. I love wearing layers of shirts. Like with this one I will wear a long sleeve shirt under a t-shirt. I like doing that in the winter instead of wearing a jacket. I have a goatee and wear glasses. I am also a big hat and visor person. This hat I am wearing kind of looks like the hat I and all of my friends wear when we are out on the lake in the summer. Ok, don’t ask hahahahaha. Nike shoes are my think unless I’m at work in church.  Hope you enjoyed reading about my avatar and looking forward to yours.  My name of the avatar is DougieAustin. My nick name for years was DougieFresh but that was taken. So some of my friends call me DougieAustin.

Wordle and Facebook

Wordle and Facebook

This week we finished up our Facebook assignments. We were able to join our ECU class group page on facebook. Now we will get assignments and other tasks from this social networking site. This will be something new for me. I have always just worked out of Blackboard or Moodle. I think it will be new and interesting.

Also this week we worked with Wordle. This is something that I have some knowledge of. The teachers in the district are working with this and helping students with this program. For my Wordle picture I took the Delicious and Flickr blog postings. I copied this into Wordle and thin used the windows built in snipping tool. This is the first time that I used the snipping tool and it worked great. So if you get a chance to look at my Wordle it is below. I thought it was cool which words were eye catching and gave you different look at what was posted.

See you next week!

Wordle on Web 2.0

Social Networking & Twitter

This week we learned about twitter and Facebook. This week was a fun week. I was already familiar with Facebook but we did some things that I don’t do a lot of. I don’t join a lot of groups on Facebook. We joined the BITE group so we could keep in touch and see what was happening in our group. Twitter is another 2.0 tool that we learned about. This is something that I have never done before but have seen this on just about everything you look at. You see professional athletes getting in trouble all the time with what they say on Tweeter. It was cool to post something in a 140 characters or less. I found myself trying to put as much as I could in one tweet. Also thought it was cool that you could join a group and only certain people could see what was being posted or said.

Ok, that’s about it this week. Was a good weekend. Went to the Dixie Classic Fair and had a blast!

Flickr and Delicious

Flickr and Delicious

This week’s assignments were on two web 2.0 tools that I found very handy. One, I had used before and another that I was new to.  Flickr was a site or tool that I had used before. This is a great site to upload videos and pictures that you like and want to share. You can tag these so others can search and find them fairly easy. Another cool thing you can do is make projects. Things you can do are; calendars, prints, canvas prints, collages, and photo books. I like the fact that with this sited you can create groups and join groups. Then you can post pictures up to a group page.  Ok, so the coolest thing was the map feature. I liked that you could mark a place on the map where pictures were taken. This gives you an idea where you have been and also to let friends know where all your pictures were taken at.

My account is FDAustin if anyone would like to see my pics or contact me.

The second tool I was not familiar with at all. The tool was called Delicious. At first I was a little skeptical about this tool. The more that I worked with delicious the more I liked the idea of it. The idea of this tool is to create a list of all your favorite websites and their links. Then if you are anywhere in the world you can log in and locate them. They add another feature to this where you can share these with friends or whoever and they can see your favorite sites. They then can visit them or you may have posted them to help others find certain things. A good example would be research sites. You also can see what the most popular links are and what others are seeing.  You also can tag these for easy searching and giving the viewer and idea of what each link is. Once you work with this site it gets a lot easier.

If anyone wants to see what I have posted, my account is austinf06

See you next week!

Podcasting

Hey everyone!

Today has been a long day, well it’s been a long week since I last posted. This week’s assignment was a task of learning about podcasting. There was a lot of material to read through. After reading through the material,  I did some research on the topic of Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants. I started recording my podcast in Audacity. I liked this program. It was simple to use but seems to have a lot of features that I have not even tackled yet. After about a few hundred takes on my podcast I had to finally settle on one. I then had to convert the file to a mp3 for podcasting. This was a little tricky. You had to download a file for Audacity to convert the file. The next step was tricky. I had all kinds of issues trying to figure out what site to upload my sound file and how to RSS feed. I finally hosted my podcast at podbean and then ran it through feedburner. I don’t know if I did it right but it was a good try. Anyway, hope all of your podcasting went well and I will check back in with all of you next week.

Wikis Help Meebo

Article: Meebo and Its Language Wiki

http://www.businessweek.com/the_thread/blogspotting/archives/2006/07/meebo_and_its_m.html

The arthur talks about about the Company Meebo. This company or website allows people to share information and documents on the web. The interesting think about Meebo is they used a Wiki to get support to help with a Language barrier. They had been asked for Spanish translations. They basically asked the users for language requests. So with a response for other languages they asked for translations to common phrases. The posting came in and had several languages. Some were Zulu, Thai, and Bork.

Soccer and Football

Today was mostly spent at the soccer field watching my daughter play. They tied 1 to 1. We had 2 balls hit off the cross bar to win but they just wouldnt go in.

Today was opening day for the NFL. I am a big fan. Didnt get to see a lot but I saw some highlights on Sports Center. I did see that the Ravens beat the Steelers. Go Ravens! Getting late and I have to get up early and go to work. I am going to bed!

Intro Video

All About Me

Hello,

I hope all of you are doing great! My name is Doug Austin. You will probably see my name as Fredrick Austin. That is my first name but I go by Doug. I work for the Lexington City Schools as the Technology Director/Supervisor. I have worked there about 8 years. I have about 19 years in with the State as of now.  I hope to move on to the Davidson County Community College after I graduate to teach. The summer is just about done so the lake days are over. We go to the lake pretty much every weekend during the summer.  We did go to Disney last April and had a blast.

My Major is Vocational Education in the Department of Business and Information Technologies.  I am in the Master Degree Program. This is my 5^th class so far. After this semester I will be half way done.

I have a pretty small family but a close one. I am a single dad of a 12 year old Daughter. I have one sister who lives close by with her husband and two children, my niece and nephew.  My mom and dad live close by as well. About 15 minutes away. We love to get together and have cookouts, go to different places, and sporting events.

My favorite TV show now would have to be Storage wars. It’s a show that follows people around and they bid on storage units that other people have lost due to nonpayment of the storage unit. They go through the unit and find unique things and sell them for a great profit. My hobbies are golf, football, tennis, basketball, and anything my daughter wants to get me into. I do like music but I don’t know if I have a favorite group. I do like all kinds of styles of music. I like Kid Rock, Jimmy Buffet, and Toby Keith. My favorite fast-food place is Wendy’s because you can get a variety of things like chili, baked potatoes, and salads. Beyond a shadow of a doubt my most memorable success in my life is my daughter. She is what makes life worth living and doing for her. My perfect dream vacation is on a cruise somewhere tropical with clear blue seas and me sitting in a lounge chair drinking a Corona like the commercials!

My favorite links are:

www.google.com If you were with technology you know what I mean. If there is a problem, you can find the solution on the web through Google.

www.nfl.com I am a huge football fan so this is a great site that I can keep up with all what is happening with the NFL.

www.ebay.com Yes, I am an auction junkie.

Good luck to all of you in the class and I hope I will see each of you soon!

Doug Austin