Nancy Velasco's Blog

Week #10 Wrapping Up

nvelasco — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 19:54:35 +0000

It’s now time to put finishing touches and wrap up things for this class. I have already posted my “thank yous” and discussed with my team about thoughts regarding final paper edits. At this time I need to turn my attention to wrapping up another class and taking care of some personal business before March 30th. March 30th is the date on the calendar for the start of my next graduate class: Research in Online Teaching and Learning. I am only taking one class for the spring term. Two was a little taxing and did make my doctor concerned as well. By taking just one at a time, I will hopefully have a little more time to devote to some personal items.

Week #9 Finale

nvelasco — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 03:12:23 +0000

This class is almost over. At the close of next week I will officially be past the halfway mark towards my master’s degree. This week centered on reviewing our work. It included my own self assessment and will include hearing from others as well. I found the rubric easy to use; however, something inside of me resists that element of scoring. Maybe it’s seated in that free spirit of wanting to explore and contribute without feeling raked over the coals. Thankfully, the rubric does provide some level of objectivity. It’s not like an open inquisition that brings opportunity for darts to come flying from different directions. I will just have to wait and see how peer review works on a graduate level, and also see how my professor interprets our paper. I know I did my best, so that is really all that I can ask from me for what has already transpired. Once I receive feedback, then I can move forward with making revisions if that would prove helpful. I now need to focus on running this final stretch. After which there are just a few days before the next class begins.

Week #8 – Final paper prepping for posting

nvelasco — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 05:17:16 +0000

Our group did spend a good deal of time on our final paper. Some challenges included each of our own personal schedules, health, and juggling life balancing kinds of things. Another challenge was just getting use to each other’s writing style and trying to take the individual thoughts to make it more of a coherant group thought and unified paper.

We also found the editing and formatting in MS Word surpassed the Goggle Docs functionality. For the sake of time, at some point, we each ended up “checking out” so to speak the paper, editing and making changes, and then posting it back up to our Blackboard group discussion area.

At one point, there were two different revision versions, mine and another group member. I was tired and panicked just a bit because I had just spent a good deal of time on what I thought was my turn to make edits. However, it wasn’t so bad. It turned out that the other group member had MS Word Mark up turned on, so it was easy to see what changes she had made. I did my best to incorporate these. However, the third team player will just double check that all the edits did get in there and see if she has any other suggestions.

I think messing with document versioning was a stumbling block and may have taken away somewhat from us stepping back and fully grasping the synergistic paper that we did actually arrive at.

However, given that we are all novices at this part, I think it went fairly well. I’ll be interested to see what final changes got implemented by our third player prior to posting. The paper had gone around the circle a few times now in various forms.

In terms of interpersonal skills, I believe our team excelled in this area. Each team player has worked hard to cooperate and be polite to one another.

Week #7 – Paper Writing, Mind Mapping, and Rewrites

nvelasco — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 23:08:36 +0000

This week had a variety feel to it. More towards the beginning of the week I spent a considerable amount of time revising my midterm article and submitted it to my professor for evaluation. I received positive feedback regarding the revision; however, I am noticing that points were not adjusted in the online grade book. So, my expectations in this regard are a little unclear. I guess there is still that part of me that appreciates seeing some kind of outcome other than just a more polished paper.

Additionally, I did spend time presenting the article to Marketing, where I work. I was advised to consider sending the article to a church website or a Christian blog for consideration. Needless to say, I felt my time spent on the article was a little discouraging. I will look again to see if there is a place to publish or post the article. However, given other responsibilities and the amount of time I have already invested in this effort, it is looking a little dimmer. On a more positive note, I am posting it to my eportfolio.

I did spend quite a few hours exploring, installing, and playing with different mind mapping software tools and looking for resources regarding motivational factors associated with using such tools. I have since drafted about three pages worth for potentially contributing to our team’s final paper.

Our team is hoping to meet today to bring our pieces together for our final paper first draft. However, life happens, so at this point the actual timing of that is still being negotiated via email. I suspect it will happen this evening. Otherwise, my next available in synch time with the others won’t be until Tuesday evening. I have a commitment on Monday evening after work.

Stay tuned for more developments.

Nancy B. Velasco

Week #6: Weathering the storm

nvelasco — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 05:23:18 +0000

I think this week more than others has left me feeling pretty weak. The cold spoken of earlier developed into a full fledge flu. I did miss some days at work, and quarantined myself from my staff for a couple of days after I did go back. Thankfully, the flu has passed, and now I am in the process of regaining my energy, and catching up both at work and in my two graduate classes. It does make me stop and think though whether or not I should attempt to take two grad classes at the same time next semester. The first four classes of the grad program were held separately from each other and were only five weeks each. This is my first time to take two graduate classes simultaneously and have them be 10 weeks each. Anyway, I will make it through these two classes. There are only four more weeks to go.

During week #6, I made some minor edits to my article before posting it. These were changes recommended by some people that I had given my paper to for review. I also met with my group and we drafted out the outline for our final paper, divided roles, and encouraged one another on our strategy. I volunteered to summarize our thoughts from our online meeting, and prepared the email to go to Datta, our professor, as requested. I sent the email out to my group first for review and then sent it to Datta after receiving the buy-in from the other two ladies.

So, this coming week I will explore the Internet for advancements in one of my favorite areas: thought map tools. I use Mind Manager extensively where I work. My mind races back to how I first received Mind Manager.

My boss, kept seeing me take these large pieces of paper and manually drawing out thought maps with colored pens, markers, or whatever I had. One day he came in and put this piece of software on my desk. He announced that he thought I could benefit from taking a look at this new software. That was years ago. I am sure there are more modern and more collaborative solutions today — ones that promote a merging of community thoughts over the Internet. So, I have taken on the assignment of exploring and searching for such a tool. Who knows, I may just come back and discover that Mind Manager is still the best!

I did receive feedback from my professor for my midterm paper. It looks like she does allow for turning it in again after making some recommended changes. I will plan for doing as much of that as I can tomorrow. I need to spend time now doing some wrap up work in both classes before the stroke of midnight tonight. Then, I will crash and fall asleep quickly. Thankfully, tomorrow is a holiday. I am planning on taking advantage of that time after sleeping in!

Nancy B. Velasco

Midterm Paper – Week #5

nvelasco — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 04:32:22 +0000

The writing of the midterm draft flowed fairly quickly on a Monday morning as I was home from work. The time consuming part was filling in all the references and expanding out my initial thoughts.

Given the Christian slant to the paper, I was advised to seek a Christian source for publishing purposes. It seems the economy has taken its toil on the online publishing. I’m still searching out possibilities.

I have asked my friends on FaceBook. I’ve asked some people at work, including my mentor and the CEO. I did receive some recommendations back. Christianity Today and our own marketing department were the best recommendations it seems so far.

I have already submitted an inquiry to Christianity Today. I need to schedule time with Marketing.

I am contemplating updating my personal website to take advantage of what I’ve been learnig in the digital media class, and also to include this article. I may not get a chance to devote time to modifying the site until two Saturdays from now.

Overall, the paper, though time consuming, turned out well. It is currently in the hands of my staff, my friends, my boss, and my pastor. Oh…that’s in addition to my professor.

I now need to tidy up week #5 for this class as I have neglected the digital media class this week. I need to now focus my attention on the digital media class for the remainder of the week.

Nancy

Week #4 Wrapping up Soon

nvelasco — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 02:43:19 +0000

I still have a little bit of reading to do and one discussion post. I hope to finish this soon and move on to finishing up for another class.

Our team met via AT&T Connect late this afternoon. We were able to finalize our group guidelines and lay ground work for our final paper.

Our final paper discussion was jump started by a brainstorming session in which we through out Web tools that we have either heard of or used. We also discussed motivation factors.

We will initially all do research to see what we find and bring that to our wiki. After we contribute our pieces to the wiki, then we can get a better sense of where to go from there — possibly do an outline at that point or reorganize the pieces to flow in a more meaningful way.

Alright…back to studying. I do have a small cold — sneezing and runny nose. So, I’m traveling a little slower than I would otherwise. Additionally, my son just returned home. So he’s playing in the living room, and it’s no longer as quiet.

Week #4 – Team Adventures & Individual Out of Shell

nvelasco — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 22:42:01 +0000

This week held two primary objectives with other things thrown into the mix as well. However, the two key ones for me were to first off come up with my midterm topic, and begin outlining that. The second was to interact with the other two ladies in my team and develop our group’s guidelines.

For the midterm topic, I read the description of the assignment a few times, and decided that the key focus was to soak in everything that has transpired so far, take in everything that I’m learning and experiencing and apply a title to it. Then, write in 1000 words or less in a meaningful way to communicate to the audience of readers.

I decided that the key things I discovered in this class were as follows:

The online community provides potentially a safe harbor and more flexible environment for my personal learning experience and that of my future ministry participants.
I discovered through some of the readings that there is something called e-mentoring. Further there are other opportunities to partner with “the experts” or those skilled in areas that I am not. This is something I’m really craving right now as I’m in the very process of launching this new ministry.
Some of the articles I read mentioned the need for the community to partner and help one another. It also provided some indication that there are partners and organizations that contribute funds in such manner.

Thus, I am thinking of my readership as consisting potentially of those who are either directly involved in partnering, ementoring, and grant giving, or they have resources to further help in these areas.

The only problem is that I have no clue as to an alternate source for posting my article once it has been written. I could check out Christianity Today or Christian Managemen Association. Maybe one of these two have a posting area. It’s been a while since I’ve been to either of these sites, so it may be worth exploring next week as I move forward.

Our team opted to use the discussion board initially, and then began using the wiki. We’re finding the wiki to have more of a flex in it. We were getting lost in the discussion threads. We have a conference meeting scheduled for later this afternoon. However, our guidelines already look good to me. We do have quite a list.

That’s it for now. I may post more before the week is over.

Nancy

Closing Comments for Week #3

nvelasco — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 04:03:58 +0000

As week three comes to a close, I am relieved to learn that my professor had been trying to reply to my emails. We resolved the communication method delimma, and my assignments were at last officially received and graded.

Our group of three have worked well together thus far. Our individual topics that led to our group topic selection were all interesting. Johanna’s topic captured all of our attention and was quickly voted as our team’s topic for our final. Additionally, thinking ahead I motioned that we use our class’ already established wiki and just add our findings and pieces into a new chapter. Afterall, it is hopeful that the resulting final writings will end up there anyway to the benefit of the entire class.

This weekend each of us have been working on the wording of our topic. Johanna has volunteered to work the late shift and post our final version after everyone has had a chance to make any additional changes.

I am really enjoying using a wiki. It’s like a word oriented jigsaw puzzle. As team members enter the wiki, each puts in a few pieces, maybe interchanges some pieces that appear disconnected, and eventually the picture of the whole is greater than all the original beginning parts.

My only wish is that the wiki was a little more flexible. It’s not a true shared document in the sense that it appears that only one person can go in at a time. Either that or my computer is wigging out and just refusing to let me in to fix one spelling thing I noticed.

Alright… I’m off to working on developing an eportal for another class!

Week #3 Reflection

nvelasco — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 04:17:45 +0000

Please place an individual interpretation of the team process and final decision in your personal blog. During your reflection, my suggestion is to consider elements of culture and community found in your readings. When this is completed, email the instructor your blog address and notification that the assignment has been completed

Our group breezed through the process of narrowing down our individual topics to arrive at one to present as approved unanimously for our final project. I think Web 2.0 tools is something that we can all get our hearts and minds around, and we quickly reached that “ah ha… yes moment” as that topic was presented and materialized from one of our team players. I’m so jazzed about researching this one further. Additionally, my boss is thrilled. This is something that is applicable to my day job and to the launch of a new ministry outside of work. Just grasping this one area, exploring the tools, and having some good “take aways” will be well worth the price of admission (or tuition in this case) for this class.

I think our group does have a certain level of maturity and acceptance of each others views and values. I am sure this will be a strong suite for us as we move forward into developing our final paper.

Now, if I can just catch up on reading! I have lots of reading to do for this class and some reading in another class that I’m also taking. So, I’m currently planning to do that at Starbucks on Saturday. I find that I’m much more inclined to soak it all in if I dedicate Saturday morning for this purpose rather than doing that after a full day in the office.

I may modify my posting here or put thoughts in a different posting after reading the rest of the articles.

That’s my view on a Friday night!

Nancy B. Velasco