Weekly Report & Reflection blog post #5

Hola a todos,

For people who did not get my greeting, it means hello everyone in Spanish. The reason I started this blog with a Spanish greeting because after experiencing the extreme cold we have been facing, I really wished if I could escape to a Latin American or Caribbean country. This week has been an interesting week as I would never have expected a course where Twitter use is promoted and encouraged. Many educators still live in the 20^th century when it comes to social media and believe that social media is usually a waste of time, this new viewpoint of using twitter as a personal learning network is really refreshing take on learning.

http://www.playbuzz.com/maximumpop10/which-celebrity-twitter-feud-are-you

My experience from today’s lesson and using a personal learning network has been nothing but positive. A personal learning network, in essence, allows me to participate in what I would call a global classroom. It is a place where learning happens through collaboration, I personally think I can really benefit from this sort of atmosphere as in essence a PLN is a vast think-tank. One difficulty I faced with twitter is its character limit, this constraint makes it a little bit tricky to get your points clearly across.

I have been using twitter for a while now but never have I used it for learning. Twitter for me was always served as a medium to stay in touch with pop culture (At my current age I don’t know why I ever thought that was important) and laugh at the stupid things some celebrities tweet about (Which I still do as laughter is the best medicine). But now I think that twitter can be a valuable tool for learning as nowadays all companies, professional institutes and news sources have twitter and I can just as easily follow people who have something valuable to offer. Twitter has been a part of connect and share section in my PLE diagram created in week #2 even though it was only for “learning” about pop culture.

Using microblogging tools such as twitter can greatly help in education as it truly encompasses digital citizenship. As it encourages global discussions and gives me the opportunity to share and collaborate with a large audience. Having a social learning environment has given me the ability to challenge people’s ideas and vice versa. This really expedites the learning process as you get the ability to learn from the experience of millions of people.

This week on my Feedly I found an article (Click here) that every college student needs, a lesson in savings for the future. From personal experience, I know that not long ago I was very bad at personal finance and an article like this would have helped me greatly. The article about the building an emergency fund and lists out some very simple yet interesting methods to build your savings. I think all the methods are interesting, however, my favorite method is the “Weekly challenge” as it is very simple and can lead to some pretty substantial savings.