h, and I think it’s going to be fun. I’m very excited to have an opportunity to think deeply about this topic, which I believe could transform educational endeavor over the next ten to twenty years. I almost wrote “revolutionize” …but I'm not sure I know enough yet to make that judgment. It's knowledge I hope to gain over the course of the class.I suppose I’ve done my fair share of e-learning over the years. I’ve used common informational websites like Wikipedia and read scholarly articles online; I’m also quite interested in language learning and used to be a serious language mp3 junkie. (I admit, it still kind of wows me that I can download an introductory Spanish Podcast or a Stanford professor’s lecture on early Christian history and listen to it standing up on the Boston subway.) Still, I realize that my own experience is just the tip of the iceberg: there are so many more tools out there, and I’m pleased that this class will give me a chance to explore them. I’m particularly looking forward to delving into what makes certain tools more effective than others and how to apply those principles to new projects.
I thought one of the most interesting parts of the class was actually the introduction/ discussion with two of my classmates. I mentioned an interest in girls’ education, and we had a great conversation about female empowerment in developing countries. Prof. Kim had spoken earlier about web-conferencing as a means of granting women greater access to male scholars in parts of the world where gender segregation is the norm, and our group found itself talking about the importance of online learning communities, where gender anonymity might encourage women to participate more freely with male classmates. Conversely, a male classmate in my group spoke about how he’d played an online role-playing game as a female avatar, and was struck by how it felt to be treated as a woman participant.
I’m particularly interested in language learning, and I already think it’s likely I’ll create a digital artifact on this subject for our first assignment. I have some awareness of existing web-based language-learning tools—LiveMocha, Lingus TV, mobile apps like Spanish Anywhere, and even traditional social networking sites like Facebook--but it’s by no means exhaustive. The trick may be to narrow it down: there’s a lot of material out there.
I know it's early, but I am already thinking that for my final project, I might like to pull in some insights from the NGO for which I’ve been volunteering for quite some time, the Nanubhai Education Foundation, which works to improve technology and English education for students at rural public schools in India. Lots of possibilities there, and—as I know!—plenty of constraints to work around. It would be really interesting to take a look at what tools are both needed and feasible in the schools where we operate, and I'd love to come up with a prototype that might be worth developing further for our kids and teachers.
