Week6: Discussion Reflection

 I think a really good way to document networked knowledge activities is a bibliometric analysis. I'm still learning about it but to be very rough, it's basically investigating which paper cited which. It clusters the papers according to their keywords, authors, and citation relations so that people can see how the discussion about a certain topic has been developed so far. Social media is more about personal lives and professional development but I think we can definitely broaden our view to embrace the whole field. 

Also, I want to note that Megan brought up a really good point about the fifth topic, tools and educational rationale. As she said, technology isn't learning and it merely affords another avenue by which to learn. It doesn't necessarily mean that it's better to teach using technology. This reminded me of a conversation that I had with Korean scholars in our field. There is an in-service elementary school teacher who has been using a math learning app named 'Knock! Knock! Math Expedition'. It just got released by the time I applied for a leave of absence to start my doctoral program. I was interested in it (It is an AI-based mobile game application for elementary math education) but never had a chance to use it. I was only able to watch the demo video and I saw that it has many levels for math questions. So, to be very rough and harsh, it was merely a collection of digital worksheets on a pretty screen. And the teacher who was using the app in the class also admitted that some students actually preferred traditional paper-based worksheets because although they understood the mathematical concept, they weren't familiar with the UI and struggled to get through the levels. Then what is the point of using the app? Although it is not related to social media (at least the app doesn't support networked knowledge activities to my knowledge), it was a good opportunity to think about the technological affordances of educational tools.

Lastly, I did a concept version and I wrote about Indischool, a Korean online elementary school teacher community. It is a very interesting case but it was amazing that there were only three available papers published about it. The latest one was in 2013. I see a huge area to explore about Indischool so I'm thinking of asking one of my collaborators in teacher education if he's interested in investigating more about this community. I was thinking of comparing it to GitHub, but as I have been in Indischool for more than four years and somehow grew to be attached to it, I couldn't really afford much word count for GitHub. I guess I'll have a second chance in the future.