Week 1 - Reflection

Web services used in week 1

There are lots of new things that I’ve learned through the discussion in the first week of the Web Skills course. Even though I have some experience in integrating web-technologies for my class, but I can easily confirm that the course has given me more insights in organizing essential phase of the technology integration; setting up course guidelines. Setting up the course includes the first stage of getting all the students to fully understand about the objective of the class. In addition to that, the teachers who are in charge of the class should always be responsive to any queries addressed by the students by keeping in mind that integrating this kind of technology are completely new for most of our students. Besides, the technology itself is not always performing at its best. Internet connection, for example, is not always fast, it lags in most of the time. Fast Internet connection is rare in most of the place in various countries, in the city that I live for example, Broadband Internet connection are mostly only available in campuses, and big corporate offices, which those who want to have a reliable personal Internet connection should always pay a relatively expensive cost. The conclusion is that not all of our students can get. Thus, we might need set a steady slow pace at first, and see how they can catch up.

Web log, which is now called blog comes with very handy features for students to express their personal views and thoughts. In spite of the fact that there are many blogging service that students can choose, a simple blog that gives simple input interface with comments feature can be a suitable option. Later, once the students are confident using the simple blog, they can explore by themselves finding a more advance blogging service that will suit their advance needs.  The blog will be very useful as students portfolio to post their reports and comprehensive personal views and ideas that enables other participants of the class to write feedback and comments.

Nicenet.org provides a very good feature enabling the teacher to post some course materials and threaded discussion topics. Threaded discussion feature is suitable for asynchronous conference. Not like conference chat, interactive discussions can be conducted without having all of the participants to be on-line at the same time.

nicenet.org frontpage view.

To have threaded discussions to be done smoothly, the class should understand the basic rules that cover the posting etiquette, replies organization, and acceptable language. Some other web discussion service provide a more extensive features for its user to be able to customize the typeface, font color and even to attach files to their posts. This also needs to have a specific rules, for example, guides on acceptable typeface to be used in the post, limiting size of image/file to attach (as for some Internet connection, this can be a bandwidth killer that can demotivate some of the users to take part in the thread. Posting links to another source/site needs to be monitored. A teacher or a person assigned to moderate the forum discussion should always carefully verify that the link posted is safe to open. We might not know if the board is spammed, or a verified user account has been compromised by other unwanted subjects, which eventually used by the bad guy to do bad things in the board, which in most cases were used to spread links that contain virus or webscripts to steal E-mail account passwords. This is another important thing to keep in mind, that we could never know who is posting in the board, because we can’t see who is behind our ‘screen’. Web discussion board is never 100 percent secure, unlike Intranet discussion that has multi-layers of security verification.

Last but not least, that we have to always be patience to encourage our students and monitor their achievement in a regular basis. Always take a serious attention to students having difficulties to catch up with others. We surely don’t want to have students to abandon the class due to losing motivation of not able to adapt with the “modern way of teaching” that we try to establish.

Thank you for reading. Comments are always welcome.

Best,
Rahmat