R/D13

My favorite activities that we covered this semester were screencasting and wikis because I feel those can be used in the greatest variety of situations. I have used both Camtasia and Captivate for screencasting and I have found that Camtasia is the most user friendly. While Captivate is good for creating branching scenarios, the recording and editing interface in Camtasia is much easier to use; I figured out the basic process of using it without reading any of the instructions. However, it has enough advanced features to make it very handy for creating professional quality instructional videos. While I already knew how to use Camtasia, I can apply what I learned in this course--theory from chapter 30 in particular--to improving the effectiveness of my screencasts.

I also enjoyed working with wikis quite a bit because I believe that they are one of the most effective collaboration tools in online learning. Wikipedia is a great example of the vast possibilities that a wiki holds. What I like about using wikis is the informal nature of them. It is like writing a rough draft; it is okay to publish an addition to a wiki with the intention of improving it later on. You can focus more on sharing useful content when you do not have to worry about formal structure and organization. Many times I quickly provide links to web sites and uploaded content so that they are available and then later go back and organize them when I have time, possibly moving them to another wiki page or creating a new page for the content.

If I was to only consider activities that were fairly new to me, my favorite one would be social bookmarking (RSS feeds were a close second). Delicious was new to me but I already had a Diigo account set up; therefore social bookmarking was not something I had never seen before. However, I did not use it for much more than a portable list of bookmarks prior to this class. While I do not plan on using Delicious, this activity was still very beneficial because it challenged me to look deeper into what lesser known features were available in Diigo and also how I could integrate it with other web applications to develop rich content. Furthermore, it made me think more about what rationale I could provide to my co-workers to convince them it was a tool worth trying out. That is why I consider it to be “fairly new” to me.

What I found most intriguing in chapter 31 was the section on neuroscience. I think it is neat that by monitoring electrochemical activity within the brain they can determine what part of the brain is associated with “actions such as psychomotor behavior, information recall, and decision making” (329). Most importantly, neuroscientists are examining level of knowledge acquisition and retention by monitoring brain activity and the neural pathways in use. What made this particularly interesting was the ethics debate concerning active manipulation of neural activity. It sounds like something out of a sci-fi film, but there are questions about the potential abuse of this technology for mind control.

Lastly, I found the detailed example of advanced performance training to be interesting because they have actually have a facility at UF that is used for this type of analysis. Tim Tebow, University of Florida’s star quarterback, used this technology to improve his passing motion and supposedly it helped him keep the ball up higher (and less likely to be victim of a forced fumble). I think it would be a lot of fun to try this technology out. Maybe someday it will be widely available for a reasonable cost!