Michele Brannon-Hamilton ePortfolio

ETEC 511 Foundations

ETEC 511 covered the foundations of educational technology. In this course, I learned how philosophy, education, history and many other areas are related. I found this course the most difficult to understand theoretically; yet, I found it interesting to try to comprehend how all the pieces fit together.

Also, I learned that educational technology is not just a tool but a process. In accordance with this belief, we were required to set up a blog where we would upload our assignments and reflect on our learning process. Therefore, I chose to include my blog as my main artifact for this course because I plan to continue writing there indefinitely. My blog can be found at the following link: Michele Brannon-Hamilton’s Blog 

Other activities in this course included writing a theory of educational technology which proved to be both challenging and enlightening. Before this course, I had an idea of how I defined this term but I had not considered it as concisely and theoretically as I would for this assignment.  Also, a practical part of this assignment was uploading the theory to my blog.

One of our major assignments included gathering into groups to design and teach one of the basic foundations to our classmates. Our group developed a website using Ning to present Psychology and Phenomenology. Besides learning about our topic and becoming familiar with Ning, we also learned how to collaborate effectively to such an extent that our group remained in contact beyond this course. Indirectly, I learned the importance of being part of a safe, nurturing online community where I could communicate and collaborate with other students.

Another indirect lesson I learned from this assignment was that free website providers can disappear or change with little notice. Ning changed from free to paid and our group lost its free site. However, I was able to copy and paste each page into a Word document before it disappeared.

Artifacts

Michele Brannon-Hamilton’s Blog

http:// Michele Brannon-Hamilton’s Blog Etec-511/