ALES 204 - The Journey and the Pearls

Why social, interactive communication is every student's imperative

I find myself looking back at the progress made in the ALES 204 Communication course with new-found appreciation and insights that I believe will carry me forward more successfully in my career.  Looking back at my first ALES 204 class blog comment, I get a good chuckle and am clearly able to see the positive effects of this experience.  In September I wrote:

Today I can appreciate that my communication scope and skills have broadened remarkably over this term, particularly in the area of social media.  Through experiences like creating this e-portfolio, ALES 204 has taken us students to the current and cutting edge!  As I reflect, I see three exciting and overlapping areas to carry my new found communication skills forward: 

1)      For self-promotion and for establishing social connections and collaborations within my field.  Now with the use of Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, I can distribute my CV and profile to a large number of people, contact and follow people and groups in my field, and receive notices and updates of job opportunities. 

2)      For creating online teaching tools and disseminating information.   For the dissemination of information, open publishing certainly opens many doors. With the help of what we’ve learned in the ALES course, I’ve completed a first draft of my own volunteer website for the Brookview Community League (please visit the website at www.brookviewcommunityleague.ca). 

I've also published my first informative nutritional article on Wikipedia (see earlier blog post) and am looking forward to publishing more.  I plan to take this e-Portfolio blog forward by incorporating it into my own nutrition-teaching website in the future.  Tools we learned such as Flickr, Slideshare, and AudioBoo will be useful for this endeavor.   Learning management systems (discussed by Ian in lecture http://ales204ian.blogspot.com/) also look like very promising teaching tools to explore.

3)      For my own research.  Clearly technology has made data collection and analysis and information storage and retrieval much simpler.  Tools we’ve used this term such as online databases for searches and Refworks for citation management will be useful for this purpose.  For collaborative work, Google Docs has proven itself an incredible tool.  I'm looking forward to further engaging pre- and post publication open-peer review (as contributor or reviewer).  My first submission for peer review (Wikipedia article on Dexatrim) is still awaiting a response! 

The biggest pearl I’ve taken from this course is an openness and fearlessness to try different media for getting out and communicating and connecting with people. ALES 204 focused on the broader picture-- not only the importance of learning, but also the importance of sharing what we’ve learned either on- or offline. 

I met some wonderful students in my faculty and got the opportunity to see what they were thinking and talking about and to engage discussion in their blogs.  Please see:

Alyssa’s blog

Amanda’s blog

Emily’s blog

Sydney’s blog

Linda’s blog

I am confident that some time in the future, the contacts made with people in my ALES 204 class will bring forth various collaborative efforts!

All the best to Dr.Laccetti, my TA, Marie-Claude, and all my classmates! 

Google Docs Wins!

My classmate Linda Phan presents a very good case of Twitter vs. Facebook as favorite social media tools (http://lphan22.blogspot.com/2011/11/twitter-vs-facebook.html).  Although Twitter and Facebook have rated well, Google Docs wins hands-down this term as my favorite social media tool. Google Docs is a document management, editing and storage tool that is full functioned, excellent for collaboration, and free (perfect for the student)!  

Google Docs is an office suite, like Microsoft Office, for creating or importing documents, presentations, spreadsheets, forms and drawings.  My first exposure to Google Docs was for the purpose of creating a document from scratch.  Setting up an account was very simple—Google Docs is free of charge, so just requires access to the internet and a Google mail account.   While creating my document, some features of Google Docs seemed limited relative to Microsoft Word such as simple copy and paste features.  However the usefulness of the tool became evident soon enough.  First, Google Docs automatically saved my work after any changes and stored my content on its own online server.  As a result, I could access my Google Docs document on another computer without the need to send my file by email or save it on a USB stick.  After years of having transferred Word and Power Point files via USB sticks, I was delighted!  Google Docs also accepts most popular file formats, including DOC, XLS, ODT, ODS, RTF, CSV, PPT, etc., so I was also able to go ahead and upload my existing Microsoft Power Point Presentations:

Google Docs preserved my images and fonts flawlessly for presentation despite changes in the computer platform - a big plus. This highlights the beauty of Google Docs browser based universality, by working exactly the same way on both Macs and PC's (unlike standard office suites like Microsoft Office).  

Soon after my first exposure to Google Docs, I had the opportunity to use the tool collaboratively.  A typical group project in the past would have included emailing each person with the document, getting separate feedback, and then manually compiling the feedback to the original document.  With Google Docs, after creating my document I had the choice of visibility (choices below) and accessibility  i.e. choice if others can view only, comment, or edit the document. 

All people allowed to collaborate on the project could do so at the same time, edits were visible to everyone involved, and any compilation could be done in real-time right in Google Docs.  Google Docs also has a “show comments stream” in the right-hand side bar – a handy feature for real-time exchange between collaborators.  Please visit http://www.google.com/google-d-s/whatsnew.html for more Google Docs features. Here is a sample of a document that I wrote visible to the public on the web with a comment added (courtesy of roy4):

For other inspired ideas on how to use Google Docs, please see Jen Merkel’s article at  http://engage365.org/2010/11/17-ways-to-use-google-docs-for-meeting-planning/ or Google’s For Educators Google Docs page at http://www.google.com/educators/p_docs.html .