Week 5 Report/Reflection

What comes after Week 4?  Week 5 of course!

Oh...you thought it was a trick question?

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Week 5 is all about building your Personal Learning Network, more commonly abbreviated and referred to as a PLN.  It was touched upon in my blog earlier but will be further fleshed out this week.  To recap, a PLN is a network consisting of people learners interact and learn from in a PLE.  With enough technology and social networking at our fingertips to have people take it as seriously as a full time job, building an effective PLN is growing increasingly important.

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This week's learning activities call upon the powers of popular social networking site Twitter.  I did make a Twitter account about 2 years ago.  That said, I didn't stay on it and tweet for very long.  I grew bored of it really quickly and following celebrities and their constant self-promotion or some of my friends' extremely mundane statuses every 20 minutes was not really my cup of tea (no offense friends).

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I did raise an eyebrow when I found out this would be a tool incorporated in the course to enhance my learning.  I was unable to put the two concepts of learning and Twitter together until I actually tried it and pleasantly surprised me.  Chris Betcher describes it as, "Tiny Bursts of Learning" in his insightful plea for teachers to utilize Twitter.   He goes on to post some very useful articles he acquired off Twitter and it was then I realized that perhaps this site wasn't so useless after all.  Like Reddit (which I no longer frequent), it's all about wading through mountains of annoyances and finding the right subreddit/person that piques your interest.

After making a new account with a professional name and choosing who I followed much more carefully, the tweets I got were far less annoying.  It was either a neat image, an interesting perspective or article, or great food for thought.  Like Betcher said, just skimming your Twitter for ten minutes can fill your head with great ideas and information, much like the RSS feed we explored in Week 3.  After my week spent on Twitter, I can say now that it definitely can be just as an effective learning tool as blogs, textbooks or newpapers.  Acquiring learning skills from professionals as well as my fellow ADED 1P32 classmates can be a great experience in my journey of self-improvement.  I look forward to including it in my PLE, likely where I placed Facebook.   Feel free to follow me @MarkAChong as I continue to make sense of being a digital citizen.

This week, it dawned upon me that if I were to use Twitter, I would want to post things that reflect me as someone who is interesting and learns things on a frequent basis.  Becoming what I hate on Twitter is the last thing I want to become (ie. the tweets of getting out of bed, how you got a papercut, the tasty water you just had, and other tweets that make you say cool story bro).  Becoming a digital citizen, it is important that others see you as someone not only good and polite, but also interesting so you can build your digital network.  Things are becoming digital at an alarming rate and eventually it may be our gateway to everything.  Becoming digitally literate is becoming more important than ever and using Twitter is a great tool for not only speaking your mind, but educating others around you and keeping a positive reputation.

As for this week's Feedly contribution, it has to do with the 5 senses, particularly hearing and sight.  In the article, scientists did a study on adult mice and kept them in darkness for a week.  Researchers then monitored activity in their brain while mice listened to different tones with varying pitches and volumes.  Mice kept in the dark had more neuron activity to both changes in pitch and volume.  The effects persisted for weeks even after the mice were exposed to light again.  This was surprising because often when born blind, people have sharpened senses, particularly hearing.  If by any instance you become blind after early childhood, your senses generally do not sharpen as neuron activity connecting your brain to your senses has already completed by that time and cannot be rewired, unlike an infant.  To summarize, a lack of input in the visual cortex temporarily sharpens the auditory cortex for weeks even after sensory development has completed.

Catch you all later in Week 6.