Week 5 ramblings and insights

The lectures and slides were helpful in the fact that they were a guideline or benchmark to use for the specific week. Professors gave their view and experience with each to give us a starting point. Their experience and knowledge from years of helping and doing were invaluable to us novices.

The readings held many good thoughts and insights to ideas that were never in the forefront of my mind. They offered many different and sometimes unique ways to look at, evaluate and even investigate a situation. There were many readings that did not offer any new insight but were just as important to revisit thoughts and ideas. At any rate this is the reason reading is good, to separate the currently useful from the less useful.

Searches are perhaps the easiest and quickest way to get your hands on a lot of information. The internet has brought information to our fingertips and it is that easy and quick to ascertain what you are looking for. The hard part is the next step, which is to disseminate information you need from that which you do not. It seems as though there cannot be any more research able to accomplish because everything that can be researched has already been researched. Wrong! How about this famous quote: “Everything that can be invented has been invented.”

Charles H. Duell, Commissioner, U.S. patent office, 1899

Although this has never been verified that Mr. Duell made this statement it is just as absurd. Searches have a wealth of information and so much more can be shared that it should be a never-ending process.

The assignments were, for the most part, helpful. It did seem that there were some that overlapped each other too closely to be called “working together” and others that were put in place just to make us work overtime. The rest though, were thought provoking and made me think outside the proverbial quadrilateral parallelogram. Sometimes as I was writing I was wondering why, and how this will ever be needed for me. But after finishing them the answer became clearer. You never know exactly when this information will be needed, but it will. Better to have the bullet in your belt than not to have it at all.

The discussion board was more like a warm up to begin the class. It was made to stimulate the brain into the thought process again, no matter how tired we were from a long and frustrating/rewarding day of dealing with our students. The more I wrote the more direction I found for other ideas for the lesson. Tiredness be darned.

At times the blogs seemed a redundancy to the discussion boards. It was the same writings to the same question or statement. It seemed as though it is put there just to make us take more time and pay our dues to “earn” our degree. I had the same type of work in another master’s program. However I do understand its significance due to the different professors we will encounter in the program. It is easier for them to read our blogs since they are on-going and the discussion boards are not.