Week 15. (December 6) Networks of Personalized Learning (e.g., language learning, tutoring, etc.)

Week 12. (November 15) Mobile, Wireless, and Ubiquitous Learning

Connectivism

Week 14. (November 29) Podcasting, Webcasting, and Coursecasting

week6 OER & OCW

Week 11. (November 8) Alternate Reality Learning: Massive Gaming, Virtual Reality, and Simulations

Part 2 Blogging (11/15)

My First Podcasting......

I was taught by a lot of teachers.

And, they really did a good job!

W12 educational blogging

What a memorable class tonight! We went through the educational blogging. Surprisely, this topic originally wasn’t interesting to me so much, as it is too common now to pique my interest. However, the speech Professor gave us tonight reminded me of the way I prefer to learn English or things.


We checked in everyone’s blog tonight together, while someone has developed a cool blog. This personal space enable people to share things, connect with friends, and improve writing etc. And, now I still remember Elliot’s practice of British accent, Shuya’s deep understanding of Connectivism, and above all Jason’s long paragraph. Thus, blog is not just used as a tool to share personal issues, but also a tool to enable people to recall the specific information embedded in your friends’ place. Similarly, I always like to practice my English listening by watching movies without subtitles. Therefore, I am not only able to recall the vocabulary I have learnt from movies, but also use it in similar movie settings. 

 Furthermore, I as a teacher have to introduce an article on how people are using Twitter during Conference. The twitter is a useful tool for micro-exchange of information and communication (Reinhardt, Ebner, Beham & Costa, 2009). Since I am a heavy Facebook user, it’s not hard for me to figure out the use of twitter, which I have never used before. The microblogging like Plurk, Jaiku, is providing extremely useful for fast exchanges of idea and information sharing. Take myself as an example, I always like to share the cool things I heard with friends via Facebook.
 
An interesting aspect of microblogging is that users are able to hashtag one’s mirco-post, or tweets. What is hashtag? Hashtags are a simple way of grouping messages with a “#” sign followed a name or a special code with form a unique tag for a special purpose. And, such hasgtags are especially meaningful when used during a particular period of time, because it not only allows people to generate a resource based on that special thematic, while using the hashtag, but also bridge knowledge, and knowing, across networks of interest (Reinhardt, et al., 2009).
Six purposes for use of hashtags are as follows. (See http://twitter.pbworks.com/w/page/1779812/Hashtags)

•Events or conferences, e.g.: "Tara's presentation on communities was great! #barcampblock"
•Disasters: "#sandiegofire A shelter has opened up downtown for fire refugees."
•Memes: "My #themeword for 2008 is conduct."
•Context: "I can't believe anyone would design software like this! #microsoftoffice"
•Recall: "Buy some toilet paper. #todo"
•Quote: "Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people."


What does hashtag look like in authentic ways? 

Then, how to create group on twitter?
Check it out on third party site, hashtag.org, to know how many users use a certain hashtag on Twitter. (I’d like to check in “Thanksgiving” since it one week left.)

The result shows me how often is the Thanksgiving being used and the latest one used.

Another example “Bloomington” is not as hot as the Thanksgiving, for sure.

Moreover, twitter can be used at different stages of a conference. Take Facebook, a tool similar with twitter as an example. I joined a conference in Singapore this year (the conference, the night scene with Casino imagine that!, sentosa). The conference organization provided attendees with detailed information on place, time, agenda, and so on via Facebook. During the conference, Facebook was often used to take notes, post reflections, and above all share pictures with everyone. And, after the conference, Facebook was used as means to give a huge thank to all participants as well as the conference organization, and also celebrate the success.
Further, twitter is view as a tool to discuss, spread and share information as well as build “tie of soft communities”, as it allows people to be a part of community by tracking the hashtags as well as enables networking and knowledge building.     

References:
Wolfgang Reinhardt, Martin Ebner, Günter Beham, & Cristina Costa (2009, March). How People are using Twitter during Conferences.

Week 9 shared online video

 

There is no denying that the use of shared online video content on YouTube, Facebook, or Google videos ect. has become popular for years. Take myself as an example, I love to watch the films that my friends posted or shared on Facebook, especially music videos. And, we could have a conversation about the concept that film tried to convey. It seems to me that we no longer need to download the mp3 or mp4 to follow the fashion music, because we are able to find any songs on YouTube at no cost. That is extremely exciting. 

  Not surprisingly, younger adults are more likely to watch comedy or humorous videos (Purcell, 2010). People like to share and watch a variety of interesting films online. I, too, shared my project film the small red pedestrian last year on YouTube:



 But it still begs a question: How to make the connection between the use of video online shared and educational purposes? First, watching a video is not the same as just reading a piece of paper. We could use the video as a means to teach students knowledge so that students would be able to recall the knowledge through both verbal and visual channels. More importantly, the animation or action in the video makes the information alive in such a way that students could be more engaged and immerse themselves in visual learning environment.

Moreover, as we know, the importance of dual coding theory plays an important role in visual learning. Dr. Bonk (2008), for instance, chose a series of quite fascinating videos on Daniel Tammet who is a savant from the United Kingdom with rare mathematical and language abilities in order to introduce cognitive theory and the limits of each stages of human information processing. That is, interesting shared online videos are used as a means to attract students’ attention.

Further, I just recall prior learning experience. Then, I found out that reading papers and being taught in a boring lecture are the only way to build my basic understanding of learning theories. Frequently, it takes times to figure out the abstract concept of learning theory. If we as teachers just use shared online videos and mesh-up videos to introduce the abstract concept of learning theory to students, it would be much more useful for students to make sense, as it allows them to better understand the content in more decent and delicious ways.

References:
Bonk, C. J. (2008, March). YouTube anchors and enders: The use of shared online video content as a macrocontext for learning. Paper presented at the American Educational Research Association (AERA) 2008 Annual Meeting, New York, NY.
Purcell, K. (2010, June 3). The State of Online Video. Pew Internet & American Life Project. Pew Internet & American Life Project.  

Week 10 Interactive and Collaborative Learning

 
As we know, the teamwork palys a dominant role in online courses so that learners need to use interactive technoloies to communicate with peers. The use of interactive technologies in online courses will affect the virtual teams’s process and performance.

In my opinion,  it is more convenient for learners to take online courses more easily and efficiently. For example, they could not only distribute information and resource to peers more efficiently, but also have the online community for extended discussion. Nevertheless, online courses still have some drawbacks, including the lack of nonverbal cues, potenial misinterpretation from text-based communication, and above all low effectiveness of teamwork etc.


The crucial points I have learnt from week 10’s readings with reflections are as follows:

“Successful online teaching and learning require thorough instructional planning and knowledge on appropriate usage of advanced technologies.” (Lee, Magjuka, Liu & Bonk, 2006).

We could classify three different modes of interactive technologies, including communication, cooperation, and collaboration. And, each of tehm has its weakness and strengths. Instructors should effectively integrate the technology into instruction based on the need of online course.

“Asynchronous features of discussion forums boast the potential to foster reflective discourse among virtual team members by allowing them enough time to think about and elaborate their ideas before participating in discussions.” (Lee et al., 2006).

Although some online discussion messages seem to fall on deaf ears (Clark, 2003), asynchronous features of discussion forums allows learners to have enough time to think about the idea more deeply.

Also, as far as I am concerned, learners may need time to come up with a valuable idea or feedback in online course community. Compared with face-to-face courses, learner are required to reply immediately due to the limited time, but those replys usually are not deep and coomprehensive enough to make the interaction more meaningful. 

“The nature of team tasks should be taken into consideration when instructors select particular technologies.” (Lee et al., 2006).

Because of the attributes of each level of technologies, they have different advantages and disadvantages. Thus, instructors should find out what’s the need based on effective technology integration so as to select the appropraite technology for learners to use. Also, adopting the newest technology doesn’t necessarily mean that learners would be more active and engaged in teamwork. Sometimes, Complex technology would confuse learners somehow.  

“Older distance learners were much less likely to participate in active and collaborative learning and had fewer enriching experiences and less contact with faculty than younger distance learners.” (Chen, Gonyea & Kuh, 2008, p.3).

Older distance learners were more familiar with online learning then younger distance learners.  Not surprisingly, older distance learners don’t need to contact with faculty for the basic questions on  However, old distance learners were less likely to engage in collaborative learning, which begs the question: Are these older distance learners less likely to participate in active and collaborative learning in face-to-face courses TOO?

Interestingly, these older distance learners were more engaged in deep learning activities and have greater gains in practical competence than learners of traditional age. And, it reminds me that when I take the online course this semester for my first time, I find out that some of older distance learners are not inclined to communicate with peers, mainly because they don’t have enough time for discussion.    

"It seems that the online environment provides students more opportunities to be involved in active learning as individuals, but limits students’ ability to collaborate with each other." (Chen et al., 2008, p.3).






References:

Chen, P., Gonyea, R., & Kuh, G. (2008). Learning at a distance: Engaged or not?. Innovate, 4(3).
Clark, T. (2003). Disadvantages of Collaborative Online Discussion and the Advantages of Sociability, Fun and Cliques for Online Learning. Proceedings of the 3.1 and 3.3 working groups conference on International federation for information processing: ICT and the teacher of the future. Melbourne, Australia.
Lee, S. H., Magjuka, R. J., Liu, X., Bonk, C. J. (2006, June). Interactive technologies for effective collaborative learning. International Journal of Instructional Technology and Distance Learning.

Week 8 Wikibooks

 I did not write a chapter of Wikibooks before. After reading some articles related to Wikibooks, I suppose that Wikibooks will definitely play an important role in the future online learning. I recall when there was no information technology available, a small group of scholars had to work on the paper-based book or encyclopedia. On top of that scholars had to spend a very long time to edit it. Nowadays, however, Wikibooks provides a platform for collaboratively writing and freely reading textbooks, and developing a more participatory learning environment. Moreover, Wikibookians viewed Wikibooks as a way to contribute and share their knowledge, to obtain personal growth and enrichment, and to learn new ideas from others (Sajjapanroj, Bonk, Lee, & Lin, 2008).

  In my opinion, it is very exciting for a book written collaboratively online by the Wikibooks community in which anyone involved will be able to play a distinct role, such as a reader, editor, and coordinator etc. Nevertheless, there is no denying that it’s difficult for a scholar to produce a high-quality book with comprehensive references and convincing perspectives, not to mention writing or completing a book by a group of people via Wikibooks. As a result, I think some points should be taken into consideration extremely carefully as to how a book is to be written in the Wikibooks community.

  First, because each chapter of the Wikibooks would be written by different people, I was more concerned about the consistency of the Wikibooks among different chapters. As we could imagine, a published book requires a coherent structure for readers to easily make information meaningful among the chapters. However, it usually takes time to edit and proofread the content before publication. As a consequence, Wikibooks may need more editors to maintain the quality of each Wikibooks publicated. Moreover, there would be a lot of incoming Wikibooks in different subject areas. A book about the calculus, for example, would be appropriately proofread by mathematic scholars before publication. However, it might be very difficult to find a mathematic scholar to do that online, which might just be the tip of the iceberg in the Wikibooks community.

  In addition to the consistency, Wikibookians were inspired to share knowledge and learn new ideas, and above all make a learning contribution to the community via Wikibooks (Sajjapanroj et al., 2008). From my point of view, being an active online navigator, I really appreciate those benefits offered by the Wikibookians. Wikibooks makes open educational resource available at no cost and, moreover, enables readers to edit, organize, and acquire the latest versions of the book. Thus, it allows everyone to be engaged in informal learning as well as formal learning.

  In the past, readers could not get the updated version of paper-based book very soon. However, for the Wikibookians, the situation is different. As long as they are interested in a certain subject areas, they in general will actively contribute their existing knowledge, even though it required them to spend time and energy. Also, digital learning participation is now a key factor for reaching readers at any age (Bonk, Lee, Kim & Lin, 2010). For instance, the development of Wikibooks may encompass experienced and young people both bringing their valuable ideas and knowledge into the book, which was not possible in the past. Furthermore, a central aspect of the Wikibooks is that anyone can determine where, what, when, and how much to contribute (Bonk et al., 2010), which means that Wikibookians are allowed to have more freedom to decide how much they are going to write. That indeed is the beauty of Wikibooks.

  However, I wonder when Wikibooks could be completed. As we know, Wikibookians are allowed to modify or improve the content of Wikibooks. Therefore, it still begs an inevitable question that Wikibooks may encourage abortive book projects (Sajjapanroj et al., 2008), because the completeness of Wikibooks all depends on the Wikibookians’ contributions. No one likes to read an incomplete book, but who will be in charge of the issue? How can you be sure that Wikibookians have enough enthusiasm for collaboratively completing Wikibooks together? As far as I am concerned, Wikibookians may just be interested in developing some chapters within Wikibooks. And, Wikibooks might thus be incomplete for a long time. Additionally, even though it is relatively easy for people to edit the Wikibooks, there still have been few females using Wikibooks. The lack of females contributing to Wikibooks will result in imbalance between the perspectives of female and male.

  When it comes to Wikibookians’ standpoints, I wonder how we could deal with the objective and subjective opinions in Wikibooks. Besides, there still have been some issues to be dealt with. For example, abiding by copyright laws may require more time and skill than a traditional course paper, the direction of the project confusion, definitions and terms used (Bonk et al., 2010). Therefore, a comprehensive standard must be needed, because creating Wikibooks is not as easy as creating Wikipedia, for a book is expected to have more comprehensive and serious knowledge and information as well as objective perspectives. And Wikibooks is not the same as Wikipedia, as it is not just the definition or introduction of one term or topic, but it has to be written by more critical thinking and independent thinking.


References:

Bonk, C. J., Lee, M. M., Kim, N., & Lin, M.-F. (2010). Wikibook transformations and disruptions: Looking  back twenty years to today. In H. H. Yang, & S. C-Y. Yuen (Eds.), Collective intelligence and e-learning 2.0: Implications of Web-based communities and networking. Hershey, PA: IGI Publishing.

Sajjapanroj, S., Bonk, C. J., Lee, M, & Lin M.-F. (2008, Spring). A window on Wikibookians: Surveying their statuses, successes, satisfactions, and sociocultural experiences. Journal of Interactive Online Learning, 7(1), 36-58.

the open-source softwares- Apache, Linux, my own servers....

  First, I am a heavy user of the open-source softwares, including Linux, Apache, and Moodle. Last year, I just developed the interest in building up server due to a friend of mine who has been teaching management information system for more than ten years. I installed Apache on my computers myself and connected to mypage server(welcome: http://mypage.iu.edu/~linji/) via putty. And, those open-source softwares are very convenient for me to store the data and immediately show my friends photos taken on campus no matter where they are.  In the past, however, I have never thought about where these softwares come from; in other words, it seems to me that I am supposed to download them at no cost. It wasn’t until this semester that I begin to realize the importance of the development of open-source softwares in American, China, Taiwan, and elsewhere.   



  What are the advantages of the development of opens-source softwares? According to the technical evaluation report in China, the reasons included lower cost, benefits to the local industry, and cultural and political reasons; interestingly, distrust of American imperialism was also included. The free use of softwares, as far as I am concerned, may be the most important to the citizens who get used to using private softwares. China, however, hasn’t done well so far in developing their own information industry, especially in eucation-related open-source sofewares, partly because  the development focuses on technical skills and distribution of softwares. Moreover, China scholars use the term Localization to implicitly describe that they just develop their own open-source softwares by simply modifying western.   




  Apache Software Foundation (ASF), supporting the open-source softwares movements, has developed serveral rules for protecting the copyrights of peer production and sharing. ASF also authored the Apache License for preservation of the copyright. Take one of my favorite servers as example, apache server has been released under the Apache License. The original spirit of open-source is that, in fact, people who are capable of modifing the source code of software program could devote themselves to making the programs better in order to meet people’s certain needs. At the same time, the distribution of the extension of open-source softwares should be taken into consideration based on the “openness”. As a result, following the rules of open-source, you should provide people with both your original and derived source codes. On the other hand, if you made efforts to successfully achieve others goals people will appreciate what you did for them; in other words, this is called gift culture in which people are motivated to do others a favor.          




  Furthermore, when it comes to the share, we can offer any information we want to share on the Internet. Yochai Benkler, for instance, professor at havard law school, presents networked information economy that  we are capable of distributing, producting information by decetralized individual action without depending on market strategies. Perhaps,  there was a debate about whether the networked information economy threatens the current proprietor-like regulatory structure. As far as I am concerned, on the one hand, proprietary production could make the software more stable and reliable, as it takes responsibility for the product whenever users have difficulties or problems of using it (Kapor, 2005). For example, Who will be helping me solve the problem as I use Photoshop? Of course, Adobe. because I paid for it. Peer production, on the other hand, like the open source software should continually be supported, because it could uphold the spirit and freedom of sharing and improving the product within the community for no cost, and it could also satisfy learners' futher educational needs through self-selected, decentralized individual actions.

Week part 2 onlice course

   According to the week4 papers, the online course has been popular for years. Several papers reporting the development of online course in the United States with recent years showed that the proportion of students involved in undergraduate-level online education (83.9 percent) is slightly below that of the total population of student involved in a standard undergraduate education (85.6 percent).

   The economic downturn, which resulted in increasing rates of unemployment, led to an increasing demand for online courses. One of my university professors once told us that bad economic time are often the best times for pursuing a degree, as admissions are often not competitive. 

  As we can see from the reporting, most of students take online classes attain an associate's degree, which means they might only want to spend two years doing graduate work online. Interestingly, most of  these students are new, which means they wouldn't have enrolled in a traditional program with face-to-face classes. Thus, after initial shock my question is:   Should a college student spend four years engaged in studying? When beginning my bachelor's degree I took courses as many courses as possible, including core courses, elective courses, and physical courses etc. A friend of mine, being a senior career and technical teacher for more than ten years, has ever told me that most of his students are not interested in conducting research or any academic papers, but more concerned about the most efficient way of finding a good job.

  In terms of the two reasons why students took the online course: decreased availability of good jobs and those currently employed seek to improve their chance for promotion by pursuing higher degree,  have you ever thought of the reason why online courses have been mainly taken by the learners who are not currently full-time students? I think this somehow explains the drawbacks of online course. Just like while some of new technologies tried to threaten or replace the traditional tool, they might be coexisting in the end. According to my reading, further, when it comes to "for pedagogical advantages" and "for personal and professional growth", the percentage of chief academic officer rated it as "important” are distinguishably higher than the percentages of online teaching faculty rated it as the same; this shows that in terms of the perspective of online teaching faculty, online course has few enhancements to their pedagogical and professional growth. Above all, when it comes to “To earn additional income”, 40.7 percent of chief academic officer rated it as "important", but 19.9 percent of online teaching faculty rated it as the same:  Is one  of ultimate goal of building online course to earn much money? I was really disappointed at this point. We have been talking a lot about the merits of online course, but does online course really help the learners find a better job or gain more knowledge efficiently? Or even their professional growth?  I doubt it. Further empirical evidence on those kind of concerns might thus be needed.

  Moreover, Bill Gates’s idea that going to universities to get an education is going to go away relatively soon. I kind of appreciate his thoughts, especially he has been a kind of anti-open person. Yet, after initial applause my question is:  Are the online courses and all the learning web-resources ready for all of the learners who are about to go to university relatively soon?   Are these resources capable of replacing the fact that going to colleges in such a way as to find a good job or gain the knowledge?

  Surprisingly, after I had read the points that "However, it was found that less than 1/3 of CAO believed that faculty accepted the values and legitimacy of online education" from Thanompor, I found out that Xiaojing’s "Academic leaders do not believe that there is a lack of acceptance of online degrees by potential employers".

   My questions are:  How come the academic leaders had this kind of thoughts?  Does the most of the academic leaders themselves believe that online courses won’t be making the instruction meaningful at all? If so, how come they could expect that the potential employers will appreciate the value of it? Really, I am being curious about the reasons beyond this issue!  I hate to say that, but it seems online courses are not appreciated by the academic leaders somehow.

0922 week4 online course

After going through the class discussion and peers’ fantastic presentations, I found out that the online course will definitely play a crucial role in the future instructional setting. From my point of view, however, when it comes to the proportion of content delivered online, I am inclined to prefer the blended/hybrid courses rather than online courses.

Admittedly, online courses benefit learners a lot, such as offering more flexible, extensive, and affordable learning environment. All the course content will be available online, so we are able to grasp the information any time anywhere. Further, there are face-to-face meetings in which learners have to spend three hours per week in class. Thus, I believe that online courses are capable of overcoming geographic and time barriers.

As an international student on campus, however, I prefer blended courses to online courses, for there is a significant difference between face-to-face and online instruction. R685, for example, is a typical case of blended course; we regularly have face-to-face meetings every week, which is helpful for my skills of making presentations and engaged with peers in English. Obviously, face-to-face interaction is totally different from online interaction: in terms of the weekly group discussion, while I have come up with other ideas and thoughts, I can immediately have a discussion with peerss. Above all, we can easily change seats to join other groups’ discussion. This is what we can’t do easily in online course; while I came up with new ideas, I might have to spend times sending my group emails, and then waiting for their feedback.

In addition to face-to-face meetings, Professor Bonk always brings much first-handed information and valuable knowledge into the class. Being an international student for the first year(not including the one year in Columbus, Ohio when I was ten years old), I truly need enough time to digest what I have learnt that night. Personally, while I enjoyed my peers’ reflections and interactions on the oncourse forum, I really learned a lot from their invaluable thoughts as well. As far as I am concerned, writing is sometimes better than speaking in that it allows one to come up with more thoughtful ideas and to reflect on extensive discussion, which will be of great assistance for me to understand better what I confuses me.

Finally, I find that for the blended course, the online part appropriately complements face-to-face meetings. The social ice breaker, for instance, was used to introduce ourselves and get to know each other, preventing peers from being too shy to introduce themselves. Further, in terms of my poor English skills, I know I need to catch up with peers through diligent works; therefore, I have not only been trying to enhance my English speaking, but also English writing skills as much as possible. Interestingly, I have found that browsing peers’ comments is an invaluable source as it allows me to imitate the writing style of native English speakers.    

09/09/2010

Only if we are responsible to ourselves are we able to use the Internet effectively and efficiently.

  Do we use the Internet to benefit our life or waste our time? As far as I am concerned, it depends.

   I firmly believe that the Internet plays a double-sword role in our life, which might benefit us or distract us somehow. According to author Nicholas Carr mentioned, our Internet use really changed our brain activity; I used to surf my friend’ blogs frequently. When I clicked their link, all of a sudden I heard a lot of noise and faced glittering text. I found out I can’t see very clearly what my friends wrote, let alone figure out the meanings of their writing. On the other hand, I should say that we have access to look for the latest information, check our mail box, share our perspective and experience of the use of new technologies; there is no doubt that the Internet is such a useful tool to human beings, and it truly somehow changed the way of our living and communicating.

   However, our Internet use is able to turn us into shallower thinkers. Many of us, I believe, have got used to surfing the websites, information searching, and social platforms on the Internet. Similarly, we get used to a lot of photos, noise, and advertising as using the Internet, which might distract us when we’re trying to read a passage online. Additionally, too many hypertext links might weaken comprehension of our reading; we might turn out to be the superficial thinkers, for the Internet use gradually declined our concentration and ruin our independent thinking and critical thinking: we may have limited ability to acquire the knowledge on the Internet. When it comes to the physical part, I prefer to grab the information and knowledge in the traditional linear-text format, because my eyes might not feel comfortable to deal with digital document, especially the links surrounded by images.

   Furthermore, in terms of the cognitive effects the Internet use might bring, we should call for a balance between using the Internet and not using the Internet. Nowadays, the information explosion has led us to face too many resources, which might ruin our ability to transfer the information from working memory to long-term memory, for we have always been overloaded using the Internet. Besides, I frequently forget what I just read online; the outcome of depending primarily on Internet might be that we are unable to remember what we have learnt yesterday: we frequently rely on the web searching, upload the files on the server, and even friends’ cell phone numbers etc. Interestingly, nevertheless, it’s very hard to imagine the life without the Internet, and I was wondering can you enjoy our life without the Internet. Yes, we all can. Yet, we have been gradually wasting a lot of time using the Internet day by day without any significant purpose.

   I do know we all need the Internet, but there is a possibility that we might have truly been addicted to it. Although I’d like to learn almost everything available on-line, I found out that I always want to be online aimlessly as possible as I can. Frequently, for instance, I chat with friends on MSN; I might be in a bad moon today trying to talk to a friend of mine, which probably makes me a little bit comfortable. However, when I have to study hard trying to concentrate on the work I find out I have difficulty concentrating and focusing on what I must deal with.

  The Internet led us to a convenient life, so we are able to do what we couldn’t do in the past. For example, I used to get involved in the daily news via TV, newspaper, and radio etc. However, now things changed; we're allowed to do what we can't do simultaneously in the past: the Internet do offer a lot of functions as you can imagine; we can see a movie, gain the latest information, and even go shopping on the Internet. Furthermore, the Internet brings the information, people, and things all around the world, which makes us broaden our horizons; we feel so close with family and friends via skype. In other words, the Internet makes it possible for us to broaden our horizons and touch the base so easily with our friends.

  Finally, we frequently use the Internet for nothing but for fun once we have access to connect it, which might have a significant impact on life style, such as reading behavior, time management, and personal privacy. Moreover, we seem to have lost ability to choose what kind of information would benefit us on our own, not because the Internet somehow facilitates our life, but because we unconsciously follow the rules set by the programmers, website developers, and platforms’ regulators etc. like "a tool". The worst is that so far the problems might be beyond our ability to handle and be worth evaluating in the near future. Perhaps we should get rid of all the distractions either by closing our computer or by achieving the goal within limited time period. In the end, I will conclude my reflection by demanding that we won’t be completely benefited without any by-product until we are responsible to ourselves for using the Internet.