Finished!

I am officially done with all my work. Now, I have to work packing. I have a long flight ahead of me and I have yet to complete my packing. I really think that I should be doing that right now but I guess writing about counts as working towards it. 

I was so scared of the online assessment, thank god, it was not that bad. If you read the book and understand your material, you should be fine. If I can pass, so can you, and if you can't, well, I am not sure on what to say. 

My GED578 experience has been great. I really enjoyed the alternative types of learnings we engaged in. It is good to have a course like this one. I won't be able to choose one specific activity or session as I found each and every one of them to be very interesting. 

I truly think that once you take this class, your perspective towards acquiring and sharing knowledge should change. Its the digital age, your kids are walking around with iPODs. If you teach, you should implement these technologies in your classroom. 

Links for the week: 

NASA's classroom of the future program

Video Blogging!

Run your own Moodle, install Apache!

FatWallet!

Web Accessibility Test

Near complete

So I completed my GED578 paper. That was a major effort completed. While I am still trying to work on some of the material for other classes, I am starting to feel much better and lighter. 

What interesting is that when I was working on my GED578 paper, I found so many correlations between the 599 and the 578 research. Even though the topics were not the exactly the same, some of the sources I found were same so I had to go out and search for more sources. 

Having the library resources is truly wonderful. Using these resources I have been able to working on all my pages and my projects. From searching for scholarly work to reading a book online, its all available to us!

Peer reviewing also worked out very well for me. The suggestions that were recommended to me were to the point. I was able to go back to my paper and fix the changes. For some of the things that required further clarification, I re-wrote some content.

Links for the week: 

WiKi on Learning Management Systems

How to install Moodle!

Using the Ten Internet Collaborative Tools in K-12 Education

WiKi on synchronous vs. asynchronous

LMS vs. LCMS

Countdown?

WOW, what a busy start for a week. I must have only gotten less than 3 hours of sleep for the last 3 nights just finalizing some of the projects. The 578 paper is coming along pretty well and I am nearly completion. 

Tomorrow, I will have to focus on working on the presentation piece for GED578. I have been thinking of taking some screenshots and doing some photoshop work and then finally bringing it all in iMovie. I hope that all of this works just as smooth as it sounds. 

This Thursday is my flight! I will be leaving for Pakistan in the afternoon. What scares me though is the online assessment and finishing up this paper in just a couple of days; but, I have done miracles before :-) 

By the way, its sad that I won't be seeing you guys anymore for the rest of this quarter. One the brighter side, I will be coming back with my wife! In other words, Ali 2.0, better, faster! Now I shall return to iMovie and continue reading the tutorials. 

Links for the week: 

Do you BrainAge?

Buy a MAC, get FREE iPOD touch (Once a year)

My GED513 Portfolio

My GED 513 Final Project

WiKi on Roger's Diffusion of Innovations Theory

Wraping Up Quickly

Wow, this has been a very busy week for me. From writing papers to working overtime, everything has been experienced by me in the past week. Knowing that my trip to Pakistan is less than a week and a half away, I have yet to complete packing and complete some of my projects. 

For my GED578 class, the progress on my paper has been pretty good. I have completed my draft and am ready for peer reviewing. I must say that writing this paper was not the easiest thing as there was a lot of effort that I had to make for this paper. Overall, I may have invested over 50 hours researching and writing time in this paper. The end result looks good. It is also interesting to see how a new technology can be associated with so many different types of learning theories. 

I will upload my draft tonight and share it with Michael and Thea. After writing this blog, I will move on to my GED550 project. I still have quite a bit of work to do on my ActionScript project. There is just so much that I have learned during this quarter. I continue working exhaustedly as I know that all of this pay off very soon. 

Some useful links I found this week: 

• Learning Theories
  
• Learning Theories (WiKi)
• Social Impact Theory
• Seeqpod
• Google Experimental Labs

Starting to Blog

Well, I must say that this is the first time I ever blogged. There are so many things that are going on right now. In one hand, I have education that requires my full attention and on the other is my work which also happens to be full time. While both of these are critically important to me, the most important task for me right now is to bring my wife back to the United States. 

It is interesting to see how Bureaucracy works. If a person comes illegally to this country, they actually have a good chance of making it through and blend in. On the other hand, for people going through all the legit paperwork and legal processes, they end up waiting for nearly years before their beneficiaries can even set their foot on this land. 

There are two papers that I have been working on. There is the GED599 paper; in which I am researching Problem Solving for Adults using Technology. This research has given me a very hard time. For my second GED578 paper, I have been researching utilization of LMSs in High School Education. I must say that these two research papers have been keeping me very busy. As a matter of fact, I am making this entry from work because as soon as I go home, I will begin researching again. While doing my research, I have also been trying to keep myself relaxed and for some reason, I decided to work on the website of a friend at shopTJK.com. 

Also, during my research, I have been coming across some sources for researching and I think that our library website is really helpful since I am able to access a lot of content online free of charge. 

Library Link

Some websites that I quick-view during a break: 

SlickDeals

Woot!

Craigslist