Jessee Macapagal ITEC 299 Social Learning

1. Synthesis Project
Social Learning

2. Name
• JesseeMacapagal

3. Describe your personal learning
preferences
• In the beginning of class, my scores for the learning style survey were as follows: for active, I scored
a 0, for reflective, I scored a 1, for sensory, I scored a 9, for intuitive, I scored a 0, for visual, I scored
a 0, for verbal, I scored a 1, for sequential, I scored a 3, and finally, for global, I scored a 0. The
scores ranged from a 0-10. Scoring a 0 meant least likely and scoring a 10 meant more likely. As you
can tell, I favor sequential and sensory learning skills. This meant that I when I am taught new
things, I prefer learning the new information in linear steps. I find myself wanting to understand the
baby steps when solving a complex problem. Also, I am a sensory learner meaning I prefer
familiarity with subjects. I also concentrate on what I know, which leads to me being less innovative
with new ideas. At the end of class, my views towards my learning preferences changed. After I
finished taking the preliminary test, I didn't whole-heartedly agree with the results. But as soon as
classes dragged on, I found myself supporting the scores I scored on the test. I was fairly sensory
and sequential when it came to learning new concepts in my physics class. At the end of class, my
thinking changed about learning preferences overall. I believe that the learning preference test we
all took in the beginning effectively demonstrates our learning tendencies when it comes to school
and classes. Learning about our personal learning preferences certainly does make a difference in
learning success. Knowing our strongest and weakest characteristics forces us to focus on what we
are strong at and stick to it while working on our weakest characteristics and strive to change it.

4. Describe the learning pathway you
chose at the beginning of the class
• In the beginning of class, my learning pathway was a
learning warrior. After completing the social learning
quests, I do feel like I gained deeper knowledge about
social learning technologies as a whole. For example, I
learned that microblogs and Screencasts are really
versatile when learning new concepts. If I don't
understand what's being taught, watching through a
screencast lecture will help clarify things. Towards the
end of the semester, I have never changed my learning
pathway. I never did because the pathway of a learning
warrior always appealed to me. Understanding and
learning about the whole concept seemed more
beneficial to me than the two other learning pathways.

5. Describe how the activities you
completed contributed or did not
contribute which your learning pathway
• The specific activity,
to helped me get a broader understanding of how
to use social learning technologies for learning, was the forum posts. The
forum posts helped because everyone has to post a question for others to
answer. Everybody's questions were all different from each other, thus
introducing broad questions regarding social learning technologies. I
learned a lot about the different areas of social learning technologies. The
forum posts helped introduce many different topics. The specific activity,
which helped me get a deeper understanding of how to use social learning
technologies for learning, was the quizzes. The quizzes regarding social
learning technologies each had questions with definite answers. Every
question pinpointed important information I should know about mobile
technology. The activities, which worked the best for learning about social
learning technologies, were the forum posts as well. The forum required
every student in the class to participate collaboratively by asking and
answering various questions about the technology.

6. Using one paragraph each, describe
the top 3 social technologies you
explored for learning
• The social technology quest, Microblogs, helped me
with my learning. The microblog which was most
helpful was twitter. Twitter has various trending topics
usually categorized with hashtags. The topics generally
reflect breaking news from the day. This was especially
helpful with the recent shooting of Trayvon Martin. The
news about the shooting was all over Twitter and I took
advantage of this. In my criminal justice class, we were
discussing the murder and I learned all of the
necessary background information and was kept up-to-
date through twitter. The tweets were categorized into
well-organized groupings that helped my analytical
learning styles.

7. Using one paragraph each, describe
the top 3 social technologies you
•
explored for learning Sites, also
The social technology quest, Social Networking
helped tremendously with my learning. I especially
explored the site, Delicious.com. I have never heard of this
website and I discovered that it was a social bookmarking
site. All you have to do was search a topic and a virtually
endless list of relevant websites appeared for you to
explore through. However, this website does not really
accommodate my learning preferences. Sometimes, I found
that websites seemed out of order. For example, the top 3
websites I visited about a subject wasn't as useful as the
bottom three websites. Being an analytical and sequential
learner, I preferred if the websites were listed from most
useful to least useful

8. Using one paragraph each, describe
the top 3 social technologies you
explored for learning
• The social technology quest, Screencasting, aided in my
learning as well. Screencasts are essentially mini-
lectures usually presented in a PowerPoint style type of
media. Screencasts are then shared socially amongst
many different types of people like students and
teachers. Screencasts successfully accommodated my
learning preferences because of all the Screencasts I
watched for my different classes, all were presented in
sequential order. The topics of the Screencasts each
followed logically after one another. Being a sensory
and sequential learner, the Screencasts were really
helpful and easy to follow

9. Synthesize your experience
investigating your use of different
•
social technologies for the most, were
The social technologies, which interested me
learning
microblogs and screencasting. The social technology, which
surprised me the most as a learning tool, was social networking
sites. The social technology that did not seem to work as learning
tools was podcasts. The social technology that I want to further
explore is microblogs. I feel like microblogs will change the way
people obtain information. Twitter and tumblr are excellent
examples of the change. Twitter users start trending topics by
hashtagging their tweets. When millions of tweets are hashtagged
with the same keywords, it begins the trending topic. Breaking
news throughout the day is usually found to be trending within
minutes from discovery. This allows millions of twitter users
throughout the world to stay up to date with breaking news by
reading succinct tweets in 140 characters or less.

10. Synthesize your experience
investigating your use of different
social technologies for learning
• The social technology that worked best for my learning
preferences was Screencasts. This social technology
worked best because the entire screen cast lectures I
watched were thoughtfully organized. Every slide in the
Screencasts that I watched was clear and to the point.
The new concepts the screencast taught relied on
material presented in previous slides. This is helpful
because as a logical learner, I would expect things to be
taught in small, logical steps, eventually leading up to
the concept as a whole. Screencasts effectively
accommodated this need of mine. This allowed
Screencasts to be a pleasant learning source for me

11. Describe how you will use what you
learned in this class after this
semester
• The social technologies that I will continue to use after this
class are microblogs and Screencasts. I will continue to use
microblogs and Screencasts because I found these two
social technologies to be best suited at accommodating my
learning styles and preferences. Every screencast that I
watched throughout the semester were all neatly organized
when presenting new ideas. Microblogs websites such as
Twitter and Tumblr are also well organized thanks to their
hashtag feature. The social users of these two websites all
hashtag their tweets or posts with hashtags for other users
to find when they conduct a hashtag search. This allowed
the microblogging websites to be extremely helpful for me.
By searching current news by using hashtags, this allows
microblogs to help teach me about current events.

12. Describe how you will use what you
learned in this class after this
semester to use for learning after
• The social technology that I will continue
this class is screencasts. I will continue to use this social technology
because throughout the semester, Screencasts were really helpful
in helping me to learn concepts relating to what I was learning in
school. Screencasts are essentially portable lectures you can access
from anywhere. The social technologies I will continue to use for
non-learning purposes are social networking sites like Facebook. I
feel like facebook was intentionally created for socializing with new
people rather than trying to educate you about different things. Out
of all the social technologies I used throughout the semester, I
would continue to use them all. I wouldn't stop using any one of
them. I found all of them to be useful in one-way or another