The Road Less Traveled - Not Always a Good Thing...

Hi all #PLEK12 followers,

I am having a very good moment.  A lightbulb went off for me tonight about my personal learning environment (PLE), and I am looking forward to the next several weeks of investigating the many tools and opportunities for organizing information in my new PLE world.

This week I am learning how to organize my world.  I have been on the "road less traveled" here in the PLE environment - not really having things click for me and feeling like I am on a scavenger hunt or a treasure hunt (scavenger hunt is probably more appropriate - trying to find a list of specified things for an ultimate prize - I just recently heard this definition on "The Office" television show).  My scavenger hunt included tweeting, blogging, Diigoing, discussing, writing and trying to figure out where I was going while I was going. I had a frustrated feeling along the way, and I felt lost and in the dark. I really can't explain why - because I am normally very comfortable online. But this entire process of using various tools and communication options has been so wide open and free, that I was uneasy that everything I was doing wasn't tied up neatly in one location.  It turns out I had failed to correctly bookmark our classroom link to the googledocs area. While this seems like a minor issue, it caused me a good bit of strife, and it taught me that the road less traveled is not always good.  I'm back on the right path now, and I'm really feeling great about all the things I am learning.

This week, I am making an effort to explore all of the tools available to us, and I look forward to figuring out how I can use these tools for creating an ongoing personal learning environment related to health and fitness. Forward and onward.

Allie

#PLEK12 Week 2 Update and Topic for Inquiry

Hi everyone,

I just signed up for the netvibes site, so I'm twittered, blogged, and net vibed now... I think I'm connected in all of the various places to which I was guided by our MOOC.  I would normally describe myself as someone very familiar and comfortable with the online learning environments, but I'm very challenged with the personal learning environment idea. My past experience was with "contained" learning tools, such as blackboard, eCollege, and Moodle. I have never used blogging, twitter, or netvibes for any classes in the past, so it's a learning experience for sure.  I am at the same time excited and filled with anxiety. I have the feeling of wanting to draw a line around the various tools and pooling them together into one area. I feel like I'm missing something. #PLEK12. Just put the hash tag here so this paragraph will be picked up, but where is it being picked up? Twitter? Netvibes? Not really sure, but I think those two areas will pick up my blog.

For those of us new to social networking and personal learning environments, I wish we had a map that would provide the jump off points to the various tools we can and should be using. How do we know that we are addressing all of the areas we should be? This is not an environment for "checklisting" if you are a checklister - making a list of tasks and wanting to check them off. It is an environment for freedom, and freedom and networking can lead to great things. I'm embracing the concepts and ideas of our class, I'm just not "feeling it" yet. Hopefully that will come with more experience.

As far as a topic for inquiry, I'd like to focus on the following:

I aim to study electronic performance support systems for weight loss programs, including online communities and tools.  I am interested in how online tools might help with the overall behavioral success of a person following a weight loss program beyond just diet and exercise. Electronic tools are becoming more and more part of every day life. With the personal learning environments and growing dependence on PDAs for constant communication, I am wondering how these types of tools (performance support for weight loss such as food journaling, exercise tracking, and motivational tools) help overall success in weight loss programs beyond diet and exercise. I am especially interested in how these programs might intertwine with childhood obesity programs.

Allison

#PLEK12 And Other Thoughts

Hello world,

I am involved in a massively online open class, and I'm learning to view blogs, twitter, and other electronic communication tools as a personal learning environment of sorts. I am very new to this, and I am feeling a little anxious about being "out there" on the internet in a more open way than I have ever been in the past.

I titled my blog site "blogging, and tweeting, and diets oh my" (even though I really don't know what grammar/punctuation to use for that phrase) as an obvious reference to The Wizard of Oz.  First, I was trying to be clever.  But that line in the film is also at a point where Dorothy and her friends were entering a scary world, and they didn't know what they would find. I am in that situation as we speak... Though I have used email and facebook for a long time, I have never been very open in the online world. (I rarely even post statuses in facebook).  As to the topics, I included blogging and tweeting because that is what I'm learning about. I included diets because that has been a main area of online community usage that I have experienced in the past. I have joined many online discussion groups focused on diets and losing weight.... So it's fitting that I include that topic because it has been a major point of reference for me in posting online.

I am using the #PLEK12 tag because I think it will be useful in tying to my twitter account posts. Though I'm really not sure of the interlinking between all these online avenues. I guess I will learn more about that soon.

Allison