Week 1 in Review: Defining the Field

The first week of summer courses here at FSU has already come and gone, wow! It is a little bittersweet for me as this is my second-to-last semester in the online Instructional Systems and Learning Technologies master's program. I will have my master's before I know it, a goal that I have been working toward for so long, and it feels amazing! This week in class, we read some articles and textbook chapters that define Web 2.0 and the tools that make it up. We also set up these blogs and our Twitter accounts, beginning to interact with and get to know each other. It already seems like a lot of my classmates have unique and valuable insights to me, so I am very excited about getting more acquainted with them and picking their brains about the topics that we discuss in class!

As a millenial, I do not really remember Web 1.0. When the Internet was that young, my parents didn't really even use e-mail and I was just using our computer to play Rollercoaster Tycoon (does anyone else remember that game?) I have been a citizen of Web 2.0 for as long as I can remember; utilizing participative web tools and applications really comes as second nature to me, so I had never given them much thought before reading the required articles and textbook chapters for this week. They have made me realize that almost all of my Internet interactions are not with my laptop itself, but with other human beings. Even when I have to write a paper for graduate school, ultimately that paper is read by at least one other human being. Does that make learning management systems Web 2.0 tools as well? As educators, should we be paying more attention to the participative features of Internet tools than we actually are? These are just a few of the questions that this week has raised for me. I am excited to see what the rest of this semester looks like!


Comments

  1. KendylMay 17, 2020 at 6:36 PM

    Hi Erin!
    1.) I loved Rollercoaster Tycoon. My friends and I would rotate between our houses and play that and Sims on our various family computers together. are family computers are thing anymore??
    2.) You have an interesting musing on if an LMS is considered Web 2.0. I would say yes in almost all cases! Certain learning management systems are designed to be more of a resource library of static documents. While there may be a comment feature, I don't think this would be considered Web 2.0 if it was not frequently used. If the comment feature was used as a discussion board of sorts where learners were engaging with each other, I would say that would qualify. Other advanced systems that include scenario-based simulations or gamification with other players I would say counts as well.

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  2. Omer ArslanMay 22, 2020 at 3:43 PM

    Congratulations on your progress in your program, so far! I love the question that you've raised at the end of your blog post on integrating participatory features of the internet. That can be a challenge sometimes across diverse contexts. Also, wonderful visual!!! How did you get it? No doubt that it'll be a great semester. Keep it up! :)

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