Zaijian

Preparations continue as the day of departure approaches. One week from now our group will be in the air, perhaps somewhere over Russia en route to Beijing.

Today was not that exotic, though, unless you call a trip to Walmart exotic. On my shopping list were items such as an international power adapter, travel-sized toiletries and a small calculator to stick in my purse--my mental math isn't good enough to convert Chinese Yuan (CNY) to dollars on the fly. However, I might not need my calculator too often if I remember that 100 Yuan is about $15.

Today the exchange rate is $1 = 6.67 yuan, which is a little higher than it was a few days ago. China uses both coin and paper currency, and the paper currency is different colors depending on the denomination. For example, the 1 yuan bill is green while the 5 is purple. The 1 yuan coin has a chrysanthemum engraved on it and the jiao has an orchid (10 jiao = 1 yuan). There is also a coin for 5 jiao which pictures a lotus.

Speaking of money, a classmate recommended that we notify our bank and credit card company that we will be traveling to China so that our transactions will not be flagged as potentially fraudulent. That's still on my to-do list.

Last night I attended a Chinese New Year celebration at Central College in which the students who have studied abroad in Hangzhou, China, organized activities and showed highlights of their experience. Although Hangzhou is on the eastern edge of China, the students had traveled inland to Beijing on one of their excursions. They showed photos of many of the same places that our group hopes to visit such as the Great Wall, the Forbidden City, the Ming Tombs, and Tiananmen Square. They also visited Xi'an and saw the terracotta army, which is too far away from Beijing for us to visit but would be a fascinating site to see someday.

One of the activities at the event was a Q&A about China. The students asked these questions of the audience to test our knowledge (answers are at the bottom of this post):

1. Should you expect a fortune cookie at the end of your meal in a restaurant in China?
2. Which direction is considered good luck for a gate to face in China?
3. What color is considered lucky in China?
4. China is the __ (1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th) largest country in the world by area.
5. China is the __ (1st, 2nd, 34d, 4th) largest country in the world by population.
6. Approximately how long is the flight to China (air time)?
7. What are the main religions in China?
8. What is the capital of China?
9. Who is the head of state in China right now?
10. In December 2009, how many US students did President Obama propose to study abroad in China during the next four years?

Today's Chinese vocabulary word is "zaijian," which means goodbye. It is pronounced sigh-jin.

I ran across these Chinese proverbs that are worth remembering: "After three days without reading, talk becomes flavorless" and "Learning is a treasure that will follow its owner everywhere." This trip to China will be a learning experience that I will carry with me the rest of my life.

Answers: 1) No, that's an American custom; 2) South; 3) Red; 4) 4th; 5) 1st; 6) 14 hours; 7) Confucianism, Daoism, Buddhism; 8) Beijing; 9) Hu Jintao, since 2003; 10) 100,000

Xie xie

Flipping the calendar to February means that our trip to Beijing is only 18 days away and anticipation is growing! The more I learn about China, the more I realize how totally different it is from the United States.

For starters, its history goes back many centuries, and the United States is an infant by comparison. Its languages bear absolutely no resemblance to the West Germanic languages that I am familiar with such as English and Dutch. Did you know that Mandarin Chinese is the most natively spoken language in the world, followed by Spanish and English?

Chinese characters and sounds are so foreign to me that the only way to learn the phrases is to memorize the pronunciation. Today I learned "thank you" which is pronounced xie xie (sheh-sheh).

Those of us who are going on the trip are researching some of the major tourist attractions in Beijing, so I spent some time tonight learning about Chinese opera. I think I can safely say that there is no corollary in the U.S. and that it is probably an acquired taste. Check out this example:


This description on the West-meet-East website describes Chinese opera well and explains why it would be interesting for us Westerners to experience it: "Chinese opera has little in common with Western opera, and the screeching falsetto of the singers, the loud clacking of the clappers and the noisy banging of drums and cymbals can sound strange to Western ears. But it is the costumes, variety of facial expressions, the actors' eye expressions and martial arts movements that mostly attract Western audiences."

On a side note, I happened across what is probably the Chinese equivalent of an old wives' tale: a Chinese Gender Chart. According to the chart, my daughter's baby which is due March 1 will be a girl. We'll see...

Other preparations for the trip include working collaboratively with my classmates and professors on the presentation we will be giving at the Flat Classroom Conference. We've met several times via Adobe Connect, Skype, and Google Chat to analyze, design and develop our joint project, and will continue to do so until it is time to implement and evaluate it. In a way, we're using the ADDIE model to produce a presentation about ADDIE.

Xie xie to Dr. Z and the University of Northern Iowa for the opportunity to experience China firsthand!

Ni hao!

In about a month, I'll be going with a small group of fellow students and professors from UNI to Beijing, China. We will be participating as instructional technologists in the Flat Classroom Conference for part of the time, but there will also be time to tour some educational institutions and see some of the attractions of the area.

None of us can speak Mandarin Chinese (or any flavor of Chinese, for that matter), but we want to learn some common phrases so that we won't be completely helpless while we're there. I came across a helpful website that can help us reach that goal: Digital Dialects. I'm going to try to learn some of the words in the categories called Phrases & greetings and Phrases & greetings 2. There are lots of other websites that can help us accomplish the same thing, but this one looked less intimidating and even kind of fun.

By the way, the image above is Chinese characters for "ni hao" (NEE-how) which means hi or hello. According to the Urban Dictionary where I found the graphic, if you add "ma" to the end (as in "ni hao ma") it means How are you doing today? -- probably in the same way that we sometimes greet each other with an informal "how ya doin'?" instead of saying hello.

Fellow traveler Brandi Day is finding Google translate very helpful. Type in an English word or phrase and then you can listen to the audio translation and view the Chinese characters.

From K-12 to Higher Ed

Since the majority of my classmates are K-12 teachers, it's understandable that most of our class discussions and projects are geared toward the K-12 environment. However, much of what we've learned is also applicable to higher ed.

The first things that come to mind are social bookmarking and personal learning networks. My blog post of June 12 talked about the need to get more efficient at organizing web resources. Lo and behold, the next day Dr. Z and Lois Lindell showed us around Diigo and how to use iGoogle in conjunction with customized RSS feeds to set up a Personal Learning Network. Using those tools to also tap into library resources will come in handy down the road.

Faculty members at my institution, especially those who are actively involved in research, would benefit from setting up a PLN too. They could in turn show their students, who might be lured away from Facebook long enough to learn about an easy way to aggregate information from the web.

VoiceThread could be a useful and interesting tool for faculty to use with their students, such as those in the Modern Languages Department. There are some good examples of using VoiceThread at the college level here, and excellent how-to resources here.

Although Second Life is an amazing place, I think that its learning curve would be too steep. I'll keep my eyes and ears open for opportunities to introduce it as a possibility, though.

When I'm able to come up for air after these two weeks on campus are over, I'll take some time to reflect further on what we've learned in this class that is transferrable to my work in higher ed.

Photo source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/hmk/2741404653/sizes/s/#cc_license

The end of the beginning

There are only two days left of the Emerging Instructional Technologies class, which means that the end of the first class in the two-year Instructional Technology graduate program is in sight.

This particular course will be over soon, but I hope that the friendships taking root this week will continue to grow. Our final project team (see photo) was working so well together today that it was just plain fun. Another classmate and I have so much in common that we must have been twins separated at birth.

Earlier this week Dr. Leigh Zeitz invited our cohort over for a barbecue in his backyard, which was a very gracious gesture. It was nice to meet some of the other faculty members there from whom we will be learning in the months to come.

It's a privilege to be a part of this learning community!

The main thing

If the first day of the face-to-face portion of the Emerging Instructional Technologies class is any indication of what the next two years are going to be like, bring it on! What more could a person want than a roomful of educators and educator-support-people who love technology and are eager to learn more from an enthusiastic, connected professor?

Well, I can think of a few things that a person could want, such as a dorm room that has live network connectivity and a bathroom that doesn't require you to punch in a numeric code to enter. But that's beside the point.

It makes me sad to hear teachers talk about their desire to use some of the Web 2.0 technologies in their classrooms but being stymied by strict computer and network policies. Those policies prevent access to some websites or prevent the installation of browser plug-ins or other applications.

On the other hand, I've witnessed the mayhem that happens when viruses, malware, spyware, etc. infect a computer or a network, or when a computer slows to a crawl because it's loaded down with junk that eat up the system resources. It's not pretty. And when those things happen, it's usually not the end user who has to clean up the mess.

Still, those of us who work in the information technology areas of educational institutions must remember to keep the main thing the main thing. The mission of the institution is to educate students, and the technology resources must support that mission, not hinder it. This blog post by David Pogue, the technology columnist for the New York Times who could double as a stand-up comedian hits the nail on the head.

Network security is extremely important, but there are ways to minimize the risk by using software tools and methods that didn't exist a few years ago. Note that I said "minimize"---there is no such thing as a guarantee regardless of how strict the policies are.

Teachers, go have a heart-to-heart talk with your IT department and explain to them the potential educational benefits of what you’d like to do. Let them know that you are now more savvy and conscious of suspicious e-mail messages than you were in previous years. Promise to backup your important files elsewhere so that if your computer does fall victim to some nefarious plot, they are welcome to wipe its hard drive clean.

IT directors and network managers, listen to the teachers, provide appropriate warnings and predictions, and do what you can behind the scenes to protect them without crippling them. The next generation of 21st century learners will reap the benefits.

Photo source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/arthur-caranta/2906069843/sizes/s/ licensed under Creative Commons

Adding up the virtual miles

I wish my computer had an odometer. Then I would know for certain how many virtual miles I've travelled around the Internet. I do know, though, that I've logged more virtual windshield time and seen more virtual landscapes these past few months than I have in the last few years combined.

When I go on a physical trip, I use my camera to snap photos along the way so I can remember where I've been and what I saw. In doing research on the web, I need something like a camera too. Too often I find an outstanding website or blog and think, "Oh, I'll remember where I found that" and later search high and low for it without success.

When the web was still a toddler, my list of favorite websites fit on a sticky note. Then I graduated to using bookmarks in a web browser, and then to organizing bookmarks into folders. Now those URL collection spots have expanded to include a wiki and blog, Google Reader and iGoogle, which may further evolve into a Personal Learning Network. I wonder, though, as I do more research on the web, if I should use some tools like Diigo, iCyte, Zotero or Evernote. Does anybody have a recommendation?

Just as my own URL lists have grown exponentially over time, so too has the amount of information on the Internet. In spite of powerful search engines and carefully selected search terms, it's still a shot in the dark sometimes to find exactly what I'm looking for. Just as the world's information has outgrown the card catalog, is it now outgrowing the capabilities of the search engines as we know them?

That's the premise of this fascinating video by Kate Ray, which gives us a peek at what may be the next generation of information exchange: Web 3.0, a.k.a. Semantic Web. The Semantic Web will look at relationships between pieces of information and use those relationships to build context. Since context gives meaning, the result might be among other things more intelligent search results.

It sounds quite esoteric to me, but the idea is intriguing. And the sound effect at the end of the video made me wonder if, in a few short years, we'll look back at the Internet as it is today and remark about how unintelligent it was.