Nominations for STELLAR Blogs

Ok, so here are my nominations, really quickly:

Historical Content: Danny Patterson http://pucksonice.blogspot.com/

• Does a great job of using his personal knowledge and tying it into the concepts we are learning about history
• Shows that he understands the historical content we are studying in each of his posts.

Computing Content: Rhett Ferrin http://imrhettferrin.blogspot.com/

• Great posts that tie in the Computing Content to the historical topics that we are studying
• Doing a great job of keeping us up to date with the Missionary final project
• Extremely informative posts that really expand my understanding as I read them

Self-Directed Learning: Jeffrey Chen http://mrbasics.blogspot.com/

• Lots of Digital Literacy Labs
• Uses the Digital Labs to relate them to the topics at hand
• Great posts about how he is learning new and exciting things on the internet

Though, in all honesty, I've enjoyed reading all the class blogs that I have over the course of this semester. We have a lot of wonderful writers in this class, and it really is hard to just pick a few. In all honesty, I would nominate all the blogs that have kept up with every blog post this semester for one of these categories.

Web 2.0: Collaboration of Billions of People

The reason why Web 2.0 is becoming such a popular phrase in our day and age is because there has never been this many users of the internet all at once since the internet was born. And that number continues to grow. It allows BILLIONS of people to collaborate on projects, connect with each other, consume information, and create all kinds of new "stuff" for people to look at, play with, and remix. The Web really hasn't changed, it's the fact that the way we are using it has been expanded, because, with BILLIONS of people, come TRILLIONS of ideas.
Hence, the reason why our group is working on creating a couple different websites where people can go to find useful tools to help them Consume, Create, and Connect in our digital world.
As I've been working on our Wiki site (Which, by the way is found here: http://backpack2.wikispaces.com/), I have started to become familiar with a bunch of tools. First of all, wikispaces has become a huge tool in bringing this all together. It is really quite an easy way to design a basic website, and I've never worked with ANY web page designing tools, so it has been a lot of fun. Second, I found a cool website that will quickly create a jpeg logo for your website or company, which I used to create our Backpack2.0 logo on the wiki site. Check out the Logo Maker at http://cooltext.com/. Third, I've never worked collaboratively on a project mostly online, and it has been a new, and interesting experience. A lot of E-mails, and a lot of work on Google Documents is bringing this all together. Hopefully this all turns out looking great for the presentations next week! :)