I started looking through the course outline for INF506 and I'm a little overwhelmed to say the least. Most of my courses up to now have had a text book, or two textbooks, supplemented by lots of reading of journal articles as we move through the modules.
This course has no prescribed text, but we've been given a list of 66 resources (mainly books) which are considered to be relevant, all found in the library IN AUSTRALIA, not many ebooks, and few articles. Joy. I've looked a few up and found them in the Singapore National Library, looks like I'm going to either spend a lot of time in their reference library or be a regular for their reservation and pick up service. The question is however, if anything written pre-2010 is actually of relevance if it's a book, given the 2-3 years lead time before a book is even published.
And then I spent about an hour linking all the 26 blogs (and adding to my already growing list) we're supposed to be monitoring on the subject. Quite a few had changed address since the subject guide had been written and one had a posting last from 2009. The question is how many of these are relevant really, and worth following. I'm going to have to curtail my Facebook habit severely and start reading blogs instead ... brain food as opposed to quick snacks.
I've also set up a delicious account (I'm a diigo user, so this is a major pain - must I pretend to use delicious, or duplicate stuff for this course?), resurrected my Flickr account, which I'd emptied a while back when I moved to the MacBook, and opened a Second Life account (yawn, that came and went around the time my son was born - and he's 10 now). I have the Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and blog, must say I'm not an avid Twitter fan - I may get there if I give it more of a chance though.
Based on the clever recommendations of a fellow student from my last course, I've also started organising my learning life onto Evernote - I'd much prefer we used that as it's more immediately useful to us as students - and my Zotero is getting some new collections for this term's subjects.
I see one of the things we need to do as an assignment is to do a social networking project - I may try to deconstruct this course and set up some more useful social networking for students - like putting all the books into goodreads group - and then we can all review the books together or in turn. The format of the modules and the forums are so passé it drives me nuts. Or maybe this is not the type of thing I should be saying at the beginning of a course.
This course has no prescribed text, but we've been given a list of 66 resources (mainly books) which are considered to be relevant, all found in the library IN AUSTRALIA, not many ebooks, and few articles. Joy. I've looked a few up and found them in the Singapore National Library, looks like I'm going to either spend a lot of time in their reference library or be a regular for their reservation and pick up service. The question is however, if anything written pre-2010 is actually of relevance if it's a book, given the 2-3 years lead time before a book is even published.
And then I spent about an hour linking all the 26 blogs (and adding to my already growing list) we're supposed to be monitoring on the subject. Quite a few had changed address since the subject guide had been written and one had a posting last from 2009. The question is how many of these are relevant really, and worth following. I'm going to have to curtail my Facebook habit severely and start reading blogs instead ... brain food as opposed to quick snacks.
I've also set up a delicious account (I'm a diigo user, so this is a major pain - must I pretend to use delicious, or duplicate stuff for this course?), resurrected my Flickr account, which I'd emptied a while back when I moved to the MacBook, and opened a Second Life account (yawn, that came and went around the time my son was born - and he's 10 now). I have the Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and blog, must say I'm not an avid Twitter fan - I may get there if I give it more of a chance though.
Based on the clever recommendations of a fellow student from my last course, I've also started organising my learning life onto Evernote - I'd much prefer we used that as it's more immediately useful to us as students - and my Zotero is getting some new collections for this term's subjects.
I see one of the things we need to do as an assignment is to do a social networking project - I may try to deconstruct this course and set up some more useful social networking for students - like putting all the books into goodreads group - and then we can all review the books together or in turn. The format of the modules and the forums are so passé it drives me nuts. Or maybe this is not the type of thing I should be saying at the beginning of a course.
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