ADED 1P32 Session #4- Weekly Report & Reflection

The main theme of Week 4 was the curation of the internet. Fiorelli (2011) describes content curation  as the "filtering and adding value to the content we receive." So basically discovering and sharing the good stuff of the internet while discarding and ignoring the useless parts. Quite the task if you ask me! A number of tools were suggested to aid this quest, including RSS Readers, which we talked about last week.

The new tool discovered this week was called Diigo. Diigo is kind of like a virtual notebook that allows you to mark up websites with highlights and notes and save them for use on any device. A number of other resources were provided (Internet Detective and Trash) to provide some background on how to decide what's good and what's not. So now armed with knowledge and Diigo, the internet can be tackled, picked apart, and stored for further use!

Diigo. (2015). Logo (Online image). Retrieved from https://www.diigo.com/

When working with the tagging and highlighting options with Diigo, I instantly realized some practical uses for researching sources for assignments. I would usually take notes on paper, and then save the web link as a separate document to get back to it later. But now with Diigo, the document is saved and accessible anywhere, the important and relevant info is highlighted for quick recap, and it's all in one space! I will definitely be utilizing Diigo for future papers!

I checked out Google Alerts to see how it worked. I found it similar to Feedly, except instead of finding specific sites that update regularly, you punch in more generic terms and Google provides a wider search. Although some interesting updates and articles came back, a lot of the resources were not ones that I wanted or could use, so I would be reluctant to spend a lot of time with this on assignments. I also didn't like that it connected to my email address, as it began to clog it up a bit. But with some more fine tuning it could prove to be useful.

So far I definitely feel like my digital literacy is increasing every week by leaps and bounds. Every week I learn about a new resource that I can apply to both my personal and educational life. But I would say the most important thing I'm learning is the experience of trial and error for tools on the internet. I would never have the patience or the desire to go check out new tools on my own, but this course has forced me to take the time to check out resources that I would otherwise miss. Not all of them end up being hits with me, but I have found really useful tools that will benefit me and many others. So I guess just my general knowledge of what's available out there on the web has never been greater!

So my Reader post this week is once again from the New York Times. This time it has to do with the Ukraine Crisis, and whether or not the US should send weapons and munitions to the Ukraine government. It was an opinion piece, with the author emphatically against such a tactic. I tend to agree with him. I believe the cons outweigh the pros in this case. While Ukraine could use the weapons, it would risk direct Russian intervention, which is something I believe Putin is fully capable of. It's a dangerous road with an unclear ending, so for now I would prefer caution. Read it and decide for yourself here. http://nyti.ms/1EQROrN