Week #8 - EDUC5101G Responses to Posts

Response to Mary-Ann

Mary-Ann's Post:  http://mvardakas.weebly.com/blog/week-8-augmented-reality-and-virtual-reality-wearable-devices#comments

Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality Wearable Devices

This is a fascinating topic – a field of technology that is still quite new, but growing so fast.  Great blog post Mary-Ann.  You shared that over 50 billion wearable technology devices will exist in 2018 – that’s only two years from now.  This is a great example of how quickly technology advancements are happening.  I have to admit, I sometimes get confused between augmented and virtual reality.  A CBC News reporter covering TED 2016 stated the difference as whether the images join you as holograms in your living room (augmented) or transport you to another world (virtual).  I found this helpful.  The CBC site makes a good point when it states, which gadget will prevail is uncertain indeed, but evangelists for this technology see applications far beyond video games – from shoe shopping to confronting your fears (Johnson, 2016).  Helping people confront their fears I thought was particularly interesting and definitely has tremendous opportunity for application.

In another M.Ed course this semester, we studied wearables.  Some of my classmates provided critiques on wearables such as Microsoft’s Hololens (augmented reality glasses that let their wearer see and interact with holograms), the Occulus Rift and Google Cardboard.  Google Cardboard is an inexpensive way to dabble in virtual reality.  This is the only wearable I have actually experienced.  Some of my classmates actually made their own Google Cardboard as one of their field activities – apparently it worked very well, so we might want to consider having students make their own wearable especially if budgets are tight (could also serve as a cross-curricular activity).

Mary-Ann, you might find this video interesting - The Future of Virtual Reality.

http://www.cbc.ca/player/play/2681179941/

References:

Johnson, L. (2016). TED 2016: Virtual and augmented reality steal the show.  Retrieved from http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/ted-virtual-augmented-reality-1.3453884

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Response to Shannon Brandejs – Social Media Overhaul

Shannon's Post:  http://sbrandejs.weebly.com/blog/week-8-blog-post-the-social-media-overhaul-at-my-workplace#comments

Hi Shannon!  I enjoyed your post.  What a great exercise – I think all of us would benefit from doing this – personally and professionally.  Since digital tools are being developed and updated at a rapid pace, we should step back periodically and assess what are the best tools for our purposes.  I am not surprised to see your final decisions on which tools to keep.  In a learning environment, YouTube and Twitter are valuable tools.  In an earlier Blog post, I shared the Top 100 Tools for Learning 2015 (Hart, 2015) – Twitter was #1 and YouTube was #2.  Professional networking still leads the way which is why Twitter is still the #1 tool for the 7^th year.  The year of 2015 was the year of video which is why YouTube, TED Talks, iMovie, etc. are so popular.  We are also enhancing the eLearning experience by incorporating richer content that is more visual.

You might enjoy this site.  It speaks to the pros and cons of social media in the workplace

http://www.egroupengage.com/blog/the-pros-and-cons-of-social-media-in-the-workplace

Since I work in corporate training for a bank, there are firewalls and high security that limit us as far as what social media tools we can use.  However, we have advanced quite a bit.  We do incorporate YouTube videos into our learning programs.  You will not see tools such as Facebook and Twitter in our organization.  But we have incorporated the concepts of some of the tools, such as the collaboration tools.  Executives will share posts for others to comment, but it is all internal to the bank.  Linked in is used by our HR group for recruitment purposes.  Many employees have Linked In profiles and we can access other profiles, but it is mainly used by HR.  We use Google Chrome as one of our browsers, but are unable to use any of the apps such as Google Drive.  We use Outlook for email and Lync for messaging and presenting.   Personally, it’s time that I do a social media overhaul – thanks for the idea!

References:

Dagliano, A. (2016). The pros and cons of social media in the workplace.  Retrieved from http://www.egroupengage.com/blog/the-pros-and-cons-of-social-media-in-the-workplace

Hart, J. (2015). 10 trends for workplace learning (from the top 100 tools for learning 2015). Retrieved from http://www.c4lpt.co.uk/blog/2015/10/02/10-trends/