honolulu

wikis. oh to wiki. 

To me wikis are probably not used too often by teens other than inside of classroom settings and perhaps to edit a few of their interests on wikipedia. Wikis generally are a little bit dorkier and solitary than the other tools we've been discussing.  It involves understanding and creating code and also delving behind the scenes in the case of wikipedia and feeling a bit like a "know-it-all" or at least that you know more than the people who wrote the page.

It's a very empowering tool, you can see other people's typos and fix them you can research something more completely than another and have instant gratification.  They are great for connect as well as we've seen through class and i still go to this blog by first going to the wiki to click the link i posted. Basically wikis are a great way to have a group of minds come together and combine. 

Teens or young children, I guess I don't see them using a wiki as often as they possibly could be, this may be a bias in my mind, but it seems more like something you would do in college when your bored and beyond that point to be a bit of an intellectual show-off.  Perhaps someone will prove me wrong.  When I think of wikis I subscribe to the TED conference video podcasts and this one was very enlightening about the mindset and world of wikipedia.

Taking a pass on the previous week of SNS blogging, I think I was thrown off on the wiki. Coincidentally wikis are up next! More on that later this week.

flickr!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/nycsignstory/

lesson planning

For the final project I'm having a few ideas and about what to do with a group (pick me pick me)

• I've never made a lesson plan, so I should definitely be in a group with someone(s) that have had experience doing such things.
• I have planned things before events, talks, conferences, etc... so I think I can bring some "planning" to the table.

Now that those two points are out of the way more about what I'm actually thinking

• I would like to focus the lesson perhaps on 4th-6th graders.  
• I would like the lesson to involve a lot of hands-on learning, more physically then moving into using more technology as the lesson progresses.
• The focus that I am leaning towards for the lesson itself is teaching about sources of medias, having a find/seek different entities that own the local newspaper, who owns the company of their favorite movie, who is the CEO of Twitter.com... learning more about these I feel would be a fun and enriching lesson that will leave them to start feeling savvy about the media.
• Hands-on - Bringing in newspapers, books, etc... Using resources in the library (maybe at a public level an open learning session or in a school where other reference tools are available)
• Tech - going to maybe the same newspapers website and seeing the newspaper's history listed there or on the more fun side: video games and determining the different categories that video games and the large company behind these categories.  It seems that most video game companies always release the same sort of categorical material (movie/tv show promos, serious game, games targeted at girls, sports, etc...)

Well those are my initial thoughts I hope I can find a little niche of people who would like to incorporate a little of this or all of this into what we do at the end.