Describe the learning environment you
are interning in.
I am interning at Georgia Southern with
Professor Giddens. We are using the Georgia View online learning
system, which I prefer to the Desire 2 Learn (D2L). The Graphical
User Interface (gui) on GA View is far better organized than the D2L
environment. One reason that I prefer GA View to D2L is the spatial
organization and formatting of the discussion areas/boards/posts.
There is too much white space in D2L. The tabbed style of
organization would be fine for a simple back and forth conversation,
where there may be only a couple of volleys, but when you are
navigating between conversations that have 5 people replying to
replies, then texts tabs over 4 times within a window that is only a
few inches wide and ends up with only about 5-six words per line
before returning to the beginning of the next line. This makes a
short reply take up a lot more space because of the abundance of
white space on the left, residual of the tabs. I could not imagine
how foolish this would end up being in a class with 20 or more
students responding to a single topic. I shudder, really at that
thought.
In retrospect, I must admit that the
situation I described took place on a full screen monitor at normal
resolution, maybe just a 1024 by 768. However, after looking at
things on my widescreen laptop monitor, things really are not that
bad, and was probably the result of “sticker shock” at the sudden
change from one environment to the other.
Moving on, the 'see who's online', new
email, discussion, reply, etc. functionality changing from an
automatically displayed icon that takes you directly to the new
content, changing to a drop down box after you clicked on the class
takes some getting used to. That said, it just seems as though it
was easier to be social with GA View, because it seemed to have been
designed with the intention of fostering, encouraging, and easing
communication regardless to what. I mean think of this logically,
the main page after you login is like the hallway after you arrived
in school. You don't just chat with people you are in class with at
the time, so why have it organized that way with the D2L online
environment. I guess it made sense to somebody, but not really to
me. Yes, it is highly convenient if I want to chat with a person in
a particular class, but, though I have never used this word
previously, it just seemed that the communication features for GA
view have an “intuitive” and/or natural design.
One last thing, I like the way that GA
View had the main topic always just above where you are on a
discussion page, so that you could always look up to remind yourself
of the context, with D2L it requires more scrolling. And that goes
for other things. For instance, changing from one discussion to the
other requires an entire page change, rather than just a switch via
in frame navigation and there is no left title skeleton/tree to
navigate through. It makes the environment seem disjointed in
comparison to GA View. Furthermore, you cannot collapse individual
replies to take up less room on the screen and have the original only
one line above, you can only bulk collapse all replies to a single
entry at a time.
D2L is not all bad though. I do like
the calendar being on the front page. It reminds me of how Dr. Green
had a calendar of due dates on the main page of her class, which kept
you informed of your deadlines, whether you liked it or not.
A lot of this, I think, boils down to
the way Dr. Hodges put it in a discussion that he, Dr. Clark, and
myself had this past Friday, “Do you really not like D2L or is it
just that you got switched midway and haven't gotten used to it yet?”
I had to really consider the validity of that statement, because it
was indeed somewhat true. One of the most foolish things that we, in
this technology field, could ever do is get comfortable and set in
our ways. Ceasing to change, grow, learn, and develop; to stop
adapting to our environment, which hurtles along advancing at the
near light speed of human imagination, is a faster path to extinction
than a meteoric “E.L.E.” (Extinction
Level Event). The innovations and changes which are the
hallmarks of this modern world should always be welcomed and embraced
with open arms. Not stubbornly constrasted against the past,
simultaneously declaring ourselves antiquated and inflexible, but
compared to the past for the purpose of merging the wisdom,
discretion, and morality of past experience with the much anticipated
and amazing new possibilities made possible through innovation.
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