Weekly Report & Reflection blog post #5

Social Media

This week, one of the news from my Feedly was about the release of video showing beheading of Christians in Libya. In the day where Twitter and PLEs are used to foster Personal Learning Networks, not only do we learn about the things that help with our personal growth, media such as these beheading videos are also spread. While it is the agenda to discover information, there is some information that is damaging to society and promotes the agenda of those who seek to instill fear in others. In a situation such as this, would the New York Times be responsible for reaching the subscribers with this ill news, or is it the maker of such content? There are much bloody or inhumane content created by immoral individuals on the internet. I think the New York Times is one of the many central hub of information where decisions needs to be made on the appropriate kind of content they should share, and whether these contents are beneficial to society. I think that Personal Learning Networks are similar in a way that the network is only as smart as the people within it, and only as resourceful as the content that the members decides to share. Like the New York Times, the Twitter's 1p32 Personal Learning Network serves as a hub of information. The members of this network have the ability and responsibility to decide what kind of content they would share with others.

Twitter Learning

So far, I have discovered insight from other members of the 1P32 Personal Learning Network.@missbrittanyeva especially, shared a tool she used to make diagrams which I find to be very useful. I will try to use this tool to make the PLE diagrams in the future. 

   Fan, L. (CC) 2015.  

Twitter also allows me to re-tweet the content with link to the original user. Adding a hash-tag with the name of the personal learning network group allows me to conveniently share this resource back with the group. I realize this is a duplication of an old resource. However, as mentioned in the lesson this week, good contents can and are repeated in Personal Learning Networks. More importantly, my twitter page becomes a collection similar to my Feedly reader. Unlike Feedly, which subscribes to sources of information, Twitter is a place I can collect and store specific content that I want to look at again later. This contributes to my ability to not only follow information, but to save and share any specific content of knowledge. I would categorize Twitter as a communication tool. I will be adding Twitter alongside the Blog tool. If I am to add this tool to my Week 2 PLE, I would add it on the left side between my information tools and my PowerPoint tool. 

Twitter further defines the internet as a place to not only seeks, but to share information. Twitter allows me the ability to listen in and receive information. it also allows me to share information and the source of the information. It promotes a collaborative group and enables the members of the group to learn from each other, collectively. I firmly believe that Twitter is a must-have tool for all who would like to gain digital literacy as well as participating as a digital citizen. 

$$ Weekly Report & Reflection blog post #4

Reader Article
This week, one of the articles from the Science section of my feedly reader stood out for me. The article is called: 

"To Get Parents To Vaccinate Their Kids, Don't Ask. Just Tell"

    Fan, L. (CC) 2015.  Click the screenshot above to visit the permalink.

It is very interesting to see that when doctors allow for discussion about vaccinating children, for the parents, the parents tend to not vaccinate their children if they were on the fence. Coming from a public health background, I feel that freedom of choice can be dangerous for population that does not have the knowledge or experience to make the best choice. Vaccination is not meant only to protect the person who gets it, but to act as a crowding effect that prevents disease transmitting within a population. The more people that vaccinates against a disease, then the less able that disease will be to travel to other vaccinated population. Therefore, the more people that are vaccinated, then the more protected the un-vaccinated population will be. I believe that like universal health insurance, vaccination need to be integrated at the system level for the entire population in order to protect the entire population, and lower the overall risk. This is the basic principle of the universal insurance coverage. This should also be the principle in using systematic vaccination in a population to reduce risk of disease in the entire population.

Reflection

In my exploration of bookmarking tools and the use of tagging, i realize that bookmarking only goes so far when using the browser. Having a cloud sync bookmarking tool allows me to retrieve and use bookmarks I add at home when I am away from home. This increase both convenience and access. From now on, I am able to add resources I find anywhere into my feedly reader, an online bookmarking service, or my snoop.it, if it is something that I feel I could use in one of my school projects. In the future, I can also revisit these bookmarks in looking back at the information that is used to inform my learning and projects. The curation tool is a great way to sum together different online information to share with others. However, I envision using the curation tools to sum together topics related to each one of the projects I have for class or work for myself to view and analyze. I can envision using these summary curated resources to locate, identify, and make sense of different social media information. I can also envision myself using the custom formatting tools to present this information to a group of people in a presentation. 

I would place these tools under the category of Organization or Curation tools. This is a new category I am making within my PLE diagram. My PLE is now changing dramatically! It seems that becoming a digital citizen and gaining digital literacy is a changing process. The tools we use to navigate the internet can change as much as the ways we perceive how we can interact with information online. It is no longer just about searching and using information. Now I have the tools to organize the information I find! I am so very happy! I do wonder how digital information could be best used as a tool to inform parents about vaccination during an implementation of a systematic vaccination program for the population. Instead of having paper cards for immunization records, perhaps the population needs a tool that organizes the vaccination information.

For example, each province has its own health insurance card. The health insurance card could be modified into a tool to collect and organize an individual's lifelong vaccination information that can be accessed with the card, or remotely like a cloud bookmarking service. Now wouldn't that be great! People will never have to spend time and money to "find" their vaccination information when they need it!

$$ Week 3 Thoughts & Reflections

I find that I could share the contents, as well as the direct link of feeds I receive with my readers through a Blog post. This informed my learning in a way I didn’t expect: it made me think. At first, I simply thought the general idea of the article is admirable and good, as it involves helping children. However, sharing it in writing, I am reminded of the first class in Health Economics I took with Dr. Ward as a part of my Public Health curriculum. In that lecture, we were asked to think about whether lives have different values. We were confronted with scenario of a hospital treating a baby not doing well in health, or an old man who is also sick. The cost of treating that baby may be a hundred thousand dollars, but at the same time, the money could be used for 50,000 vaccines that would save the lives of 50,000 children in Africa plagued by an easily treatable infection. So the question came to be asked of us is why are some lives seemingly more valuable than others, and if it is right. We learned that health care systems should be about allocating the resources available to do the greatest amount of good in a population. Sometimes this happens. Sometimes it does not. Human emotions play an important role in determining which path the decision making follows. With the looming mental health issues and illnesses shooting exponentially to the front page of every health care agenda, I feel this is something we are neglecting when we implement new initiatives. As we focus on one population group, another is forgotten. Often, such as in this case, the burden of responsibility in time and effort is expected of the parents. I think this is interesting as well, since many parents expect the system, such as teachers and schools, to be the ones responsible in educating their children.

     Fan, L. (CC) 2015.  

The RSS Feed Readers have many real world news feeds about events and happenings that I would otherwise never know about if I were not to have this feed. It allows me to be a part of the conversation as a listener, and gives me an opportunity to share and contribute to digital citizenship by sharing the news, and my thoughts. Moreover, this may generate further discussion. I am interested in what others think about this issue as well.

The RSS Feed Readers is definitely a curation/organizational tool. It helped me put together information after gathering them for me. I can use it to sort through information among all of the sources that I find. This means that my PLE is now obsolete! I am changing the structure of the PLE to include different categories of tools. I realize that this may mean the PLE is going to change quite a few times. I will have to develop different category of tools, and arrange the existing tools into them. The categories have to be flexible, and based on type of usage. More than anything, I am simply fascinated by the Feedly Reader!

My Experience with RSS Feeds

After adding Rachel’s Blog into my RSS feed, I read through other feeds I’ve been getting. As of this week, there are about 71 total feeds I’ve received. 28 of those are news. One of the news articles I thought was especially interesting is the “Reach Out and Read program promoting childhoodliteracy” article by The Toronto Star. Reach Out and Read have a goal of having every child processing a home library of at least five books by the time they enter kindergarten. I think this is a really good idea, and can contribute to higher literacy for children. However, I think their idea of having parents read with children is unrealistic for many families in Canada.

                                  Fan, L. (CC) 2015.  

While children have school and can read after school, parents have to work when their children at in school, make grocery trips after work, pay bills after work; shovel snow, mow the lawn, clean the house and cook after work.  What would the parents then find time to relax, have romantic time and generally time for their own mental health and well being? At a time where mental health issues are exploding across the Canadian population, I think it is easy to grasp onto the interest of a specific group of people while forgetting others. Health care, health promotion, or capacity building is not about re-allocating resources to increase the health of only a segment of population that can afford to spend as much time with their children as they like. The ultimate goal should be to improve the overall population health of everyone.