“Who knows, you might be talking to weirdos and psychos?”

My Mom raised a concern of networking learning during the interview. She’s very fond of the idea of sharing and exchanging thoughts with other people in the world, but she’s worried about that unknown person’s identity.

Listen to our talk here

Interviewing someone who doesn’t know a lot about network was interesting to hear in comparison to someone who does know a lot about it.  My Mom tended to show worries about this topic whereas the “pros” talked about what a good system this is.

I thought that it’d be important to find out the two opposite sides of this topic.  Getting in touch with others around the world wasn’t as hard as I thought.  But when in desperate needs, someone near you may be the one you need.

(mr.burell, click “here” instead of the audio icon.  then it works)

I’ve done it. I’ve accomplished my goal. But this is just a start.

Just a couple days ago, I recorded my first interview with Diane Cordell, a librarian from New York. It made me realize that organizing interviews weren’t as hard as I thought. All it took was confidence, but I guess it took me a while to find it.

The conversation flowed very smoothly and everything went great. Diane answered my questions with gentle and kind tone which got rid of my nervousness at once. Since I met her through Twitter, I asked her opinions of network learning opposed to the old-fashioned learning method of listening to teachers the whole time. Her replies showed positiveness towards that idea. Learning and interacting through different people from different backgrounds sounded very educational to Diane.

Then I raised up a concern about encountering unknown people through online. One of my biggest fears was to contact people without knowing what kind of people they were. Diane suggested that the environment that I’m involved in - with a teacher’s supervision - should be pretty safe. The project that I’m working on deals with education which means that I’m mostly interacting with people who are willing to learn. Learners love new ideas.

Through this interview, I learned that Diane is not only a learner, but also a learner who loves to share her knowledge. It was a great start of interacting with more people in the future.

In Moscow, believe it or not, I heard compliments from my English and Social Studies teachers that my writing was really good. I didn’t, and still don’t believe it, but I am proud, if not too proud to say that I also got twenty-nine out of thirty for my TOEFL exam, which I grudgingly took in Moscow.  As a writer, I found out that in whatever field I work and study in, there will be tons of people, more people than I expect that are better than I am, such as writing. I may sound very proud in this, but I’m not. I’m like a frog in a well, as a Korean maxim says. I can only see the sky above me which is created by the opening of the well, but I cannot see the whole world.

I’m the sort of person who thinks a lot when I sit in front of my desk to study. There are two reasons for this. One, I hate studying, especially when my mom finally screams at me to study after hours of watching my state of eating watching the TV. Two, I like thinking. I constantly think about things around me and far away from me, I won’t specify. I think that’s a good thing, except I can’t think properly when other people tell me to think. As thinker, I found out that I am capable of thinking, but sometimes being a helpless airhead when I don’t. I consider myself funny on these measures. Once in Moscow, I was running to go the cafeteria through the door, and unfortunately, I wasn’t exactly thinking about what I was doing, blinded by my hunger. As a result I bashed into the door because I didn’t open it. I guess it was pretty hilarious to watch a random person  running and bashing into a door. My friends made fun of me for a good month about that.

I’m not very productive. I know that. Even though I try hard, what my brain lacks is not my fault, it is my mother’s. As a producer, I realized that this is the part I need to work on. Trying is good, but it also needs to have an effect on my performance. What I’m saying is that I should do better than what I did in English Seminar.

I didn’t understand the word social being/networker at first, but now I guess I do. I wrote things in my blog, and I got only one comment from an international movie blog. I tries comment back, but it didn’t work, so I gave up. I am an active networker, I can’t live without a computer for a day, because I watch Korean cartoons, and chat. I found at that as a social being/networker, I suck. I don’t talk to people I don’t know, and I don’t expect them to talk to me. I need to improve to talk more freely towards unknown people.

Me as a problem solver? That’s funny. I can’t even solve my own problems, as shown by my lack of ability to arrange a time to shoot the video. That is why I never thought of becoming a counselor. I need to think more to improve my problem solving skills, not just for math, but more importantly, for the outside world.

I have babbled enough, and I think I should end with a word of thanks to Mr. Burell.  Thank you for bearing with my weird accent, clumsiness, and lack of sharpness. I know it would have been hard. Once again, thank you.

I don’t think that I’ve grown a lot as a producer, because all the blogs I wrote I only posted them up on our class blog. I didn’t do anything special. Only thing that was different from what I normally do was the interview I did about restaurant design.

As a social, networker I don’t think that I changed a lot. I had chances to interact with people outside my country by using twitter and skipe, but I did not much use these. I didn’t have much interist in talking and interacting with people who I don’t even know. I could get help in some projects or assignment from the, but I think that there are other ways I could get help. I still have my way of interacting with people online, but I think that I just don’t seem to use online tools as much.

As a problem solver, I grew a lot. I learned a lot of new technological things. I did improve as a bloger and in using computer. I learned a lot of convinient thinkgs about using internet and solving technological difficulties. I firstly learned how to use firefox, and a lot of other tabs. I learned that interisting and unique topics would bring in a lot of viewers from all around the world.

Over all, I think that this class really helped me as a learner and writer. It drifted me away from the schooly thinkings and got me to think as an individual. I learned to use my thoughts and ideas as something I could publicly show.

The greatest success in life is failure. The sentence is a paradox in itself but it’s also true. Take America’s Pastime, baseball, as an example. Just the other day Johnny Damon of the New York Yankees had a perfect 6 for 6 day, which means he had six hits in six appearances, a rare feat only accomplished by 64 other players. Perfect games (when a pitcher allows no baserunner to reach base during the whole game) are even a greater rarity having been pitched only 17 times in one day. Perfect days are celebrated all throughout baseball, the sad thing is it’s only for a day. For a day a select few get to rise from the ashes of mediocrity and get a taste of what it’s like to be immortal. Careers are an even greater example of failure. Ty Cobb, who was notorious of being one the most racist and vicious men ever to step on to a baseball field had a career batting average of .367. For those of you who don’t follow that means his total hits over his career plate appearances. .367. It’s a number set to be a standard for all baseball players but instead of saying Ty Cobb succeeded half the time why can’t we say that he had a .633 chance of failing to get a hit. That’s because we as humans are afraid of failures. We come to dread the feeling of defeat, knowing you couldn’t succeed in goals you set for yourself. Failing, in a sense, is the new ‘F-word’. But in reality if we choose to wake up, and only if, we will begin to realize through failure comes greater success.

The term failure has always been a associated as a dirty, filthy, god-forsaken, foul, and sometimes, a murderous word. The Oxford Dictionary defines failure as this:

” Lack of success“

That is complete and utter bullcrap. Failing is not a lack of success, as those brainiacs from Oxford say it to be, it is the road to success. The greatest success stories in life are built straight-up from failures. That’s what I learned from this class. To be truly successful we have to learn from our failures. That’s what differentiates the success stories from the so called failed ones. So what is my definition of a failure? For me, a failure is somebody who failed yes, but somebody who failed and didn’t learn from it - they merely sat there scratching their heads wondering what went haywire. Looking back on my past blog posts (which I exported all to my normal one The Sushi Bar) I succeed as a writer because I learned. I learned sentence patterns, beautification, and the little things that held me back from fully achieving my potential. Here’s a snippet from what I wrote on my first blog post: Comedy and the Web.

“Boredom always seems to get the best of everyone, even when they’re on the web - it’s an inevitable feeling in life. To somehow get rid of such boredom, one usually goes to youtube (if you haven’t heard of it get informed!!!). There’s basically everything on youtube, funny videos, useless videos, and even the occasional weird videos. To be famous on youtube is another story. To stand out between the millions of videos that are uploaded each day is a task easier said than done. Guess what? I’m gonna be one of them.

I’ve always loved comedy - the amount of jokes that can me made and done has always fascinated me.“

The first thing that popped into my head when I read this was “I wrote that piece of crap?!“. The sad reality is I did and the happy reality is I improved. Based on first impressions, the writing absolutely sucks, sucks like a baby licking on one of those big-assed lollipops. The second impression (actually my first) was that the title is lame, really lame. And that it sounds something like a tailor-made Disney movie. But I looked at this writing and I felt good. It shouldn’t have been the sensation I should have been having but I was genuinely happy I got this far as a writer in a span of five months. This class taught me writing is not a tool for getting ‘A’s’ its a skill to be used for everyday life - it’s an art. I walked into this class having writing as a mere footnote of my abilities and I walk out knowing I know wield a more defined sense of purpose with my keyboard.

I like to think of myself not just as a thinker, but a critical thinker. I have always thought this and I walked into this class with that status as well. Mr. Burell put more things in my head. He had me question the school system and the true meaning of learning. In school I memorized. In this class I learned. The thing that differs from this class is that everyone is pursuing a different topic and it makes us think what we want, not the school. It’s like the book 1984 by George Orwell, people were brainwashed into thinking the same thing. School is the power, we are the servants, this class is our outlet. I began to think about myself as a person and now know I truly appreciate what this class has done for me, perhaps later I could appreciate it more.

Now I made four videos in five months. That’s not a lot considering how much me and Mr. Burell expected out of myself. I was suppose to be this class’s star turned out to be the biggest fluke. It’s a sad reality I’ve come to accept. But, I like to say I gained more than I learned. For this whole class I seemed to be indulged in the unique experience of doing what I wanted I seemed not able to handle that luxury. I wanted my videos to be perfect, stressing quality over quantity, Mr. Burell wanted quantity saying that we learn from our mistakes. As usual he was right. I started to be more causing penning scripts and improvising myself on camera, some worked and some didn’t - but the ones that did made it on the web. It taught me more about failure. Don’t afraid of failure as long as you are willing to learn from them. Which got me thinking, the most successful people in life are those with experience. How do you get that. By failing. So my message to the WWW is this LEARN TO FAIL AND FAIL TO LEARN.

Unlike every other person in this free world I don’t do facebook (not yet anyway). I had no idea of what Twitter was and did. The only thing that me remotely close to ‘networking’ was the comments I left under videos on YouTube. Like I said I’m a clueless person. The reason for that was partly because I was afraid. Afraid of interacting with strangers. Afraid of saying dumb things. Afraid. But this class turned me from afraid to brave. I read people’s blogs, I post some stuff on Twitter, and I leave comments on every webpage I come across. I learned from this class that the only reason I was afraid was because I wasn’t interacting with the right people. I learned that by actually conversing with people who share a common interest we are able to do so much more. The web is not a gathering of people with corrupted interests but rather a community of living, breathing, moving people who genuinely care for people across the globe. I’m grateful I learned that.

I think my greatest problem is not being able to solve problems. It’s not just me it’s everybody. No one in this world is a perfect problem solver, we are problem causers (take the President for example). But, the only when we admit defeat, only when we are able to acknowledge that we were wrong and they were right are we able to be true problem solvers. To be problem solver we have to think critically, be smart, and learn to accept failure. It’s no coincidence that these are the exact same qualities we learned in English Seminar. This class taught us, not in the conventional manner, but in things we will actually need for life and I am grateful I leanrned the things I did.

Lastly I would just like to thank Mr. Burell for actually teaching us over the semester. I have truly evolved from a 20th century boy into a 21st century one. I also would like maybe periodically contribute to the Students 2.0 blog. Let me know and I hope we will keep in touch.

Photo Credit: Left Blue In Black and White, churl, kevan_cooke, Stabilo Boss

“Huh? What are we supposed to be doing?” was probably my favourite phrase during this semester. There were lots of new things that I wasn’t familiar with which also happened to be confusing. But as time passed by, I started to get used to the whole system and joined the rest of my classmates.

This class has taught me that a student can be a public writer who is capable of getting just as many feedbacks as the adults in the networking world. Especially in the beginning of the year, I didn’t know that writing with a simple language could be more effective than using hard SAT vocabulary. Adding silly jokes and catchy metaphors/smilies were also necessary for the world to see. The major thing was different about this class compared to other classes was the fact that we can enjoy writing without having to think about the complexity of the text. Editing was still essential, but no particular format was needed. We were given with an opportunity to write whatever we wanted to.

The thought of me being a good writer has never come up to my head - not that I’m a “good” writer - but after getting feedbacks from real people out there, I gained more confidence. Diane Cordell, whom I interviewed about 2 weeks ago told me that she could see a personality in my writing which didn’t hesitate her to keep scrolling down. Also, Heather, from Mr. Sharesky showed interest in my blog posts which did amaze me. As a writer, I think I’ve learned to put personality in it, but still have a bit more to go with holding the readers’ attention.

Numerous topics went through my head this semester, such as designing restaurants, online recipe book, comfort foods. I don’t think that I was able to make any of these “super effective” at all. Only if I figured out this system of networking with everyone in the world I could have moved on faster, but there have been many bumps on the way.

First of all, the bar design group did not work so well because we had no idea how we could incorporate other people’s idea when we wanted to design our own bar. It was way too complicated. Then I went off by myself thinking that it’d be easier. Well, I was wrong. All the responsibilities and pressures were on me, but at least I could control everything that I do. It was May when I set up my first interview. After spending so much time in this class, I finally got the purpose after 4 months. In a way, it sounds like a waste of time, but I still accomplished something before the semester ended.

I realized that talking to other people weren’t as hard as I thought. As I’ve written in my other posts, confidence was all it took. No one would want to come and find me unless I go and search them. It’s too bad the semester ended when I just started to get the hang of it, but I can still continue on my own.

Bumpy roads, narrow path, and freeway. I’ve gone through numerous roads during this experience. Perhaps now is the time to go my way instead of following the made paths. Hopefully I’ll continue to do more networking and set-up interviews to post on my project blog and/or my own english blog.

PLN – which stands for Personal Learning Network – seemed nothing more than a ‘C-block class’ to me when I first encountered such a differently shaped class. Frankly, I should say that I was a little bit ticked off at the fact that I had to deal with a ‘new’ thing, and I couldn’t be bothered; without knowing that such system will find out things about me that even I wasn’t aware of.

I am a freshman in high school this year, and I came from a Korean public school, where English was treated something like a dog-food. It was no wonder that I was afraid to write about my opinions, because I knew I’d have many flaws that I fail to detect. So, naturally, I developed this sense, so that I give a deep, depressing sigh when I am put to a writing moment. I thought this sensation would last for way longer than I expected, but soon, as a student going through the PLN program, I found out that writing is freaking fun, and that writing about what you really like is what makes it fun. Unlike other classes or occasions when I have to write, I was given an opportunity to actually become a writer, a real writer, for the 77 minutes that I had in C block, and during my own blogging time. As a writer, PLN was more than a mere class but a huge device that I desperately needed, which ended up discovering my potentials. Now that I have had my chance to find more about myself, I will be using this momentum to keep going further, until I become a ‘real-world-writer.’

A while ago, I wrote a post about ‘navigating’ my career through the PLN program, and as this piece of writing tells me, I have to admit that PLN had made me into a deeper thinker in general. What I mean by a deeper thinker is that I have become more mature in terms of thinking, and such change had made my writings look better compared to the ones in the past, and I have actually become a more efficient problem-solver. PLN was never an easy-A course, and it required the students to take full responsibility and maturity. Writings needed to be in a form that is appropriate to the audience out in the world, therefore I spent more time than any other writings, when I was typing for my blog.

Other than being a more creative thinker for the sake of writing, I can also say that I have become a more responsible problem-solver. Before, due to the fact that there were always people at the back in case of a problem, I didn’t care much of what I did. If I made a mistake, I could easily lean back, hoping for those supporters to push me back up. But, in the world of global and networked society, such method didn’t work out. So, PLN had introduced me to how things in the professional-world are done, and how I needed to grow up. As a result, I developed a sense, so that I prevented many mistakes from occurring, and even if it did, I was able to find the most efficient ways to come up with a solution.

PLN was also being a guideline of how I should produce quality work. Mistakes were fine, because that is the source of all the good experience and education, but such thing did not make laziness tolerable. Once, I was thinking and dragging too much with my project, and I was inflicted with a low grade which now, I think I deserved. That had taught me a valuable lesson that if the production rate is significantly low, no matter how high-quality my other works are, people would not be interested, and will abandon my idea easily. Laziness is never accepted in the pro-world. In the end, I grew up, and kept on producing whatever I needed to produce at an acceptable rate. After all, I wanted attention, and I needed to prove myself that I deserve such thing.

Lastly, as PLN – personal learning network – is self-explanatory in the sense of being a guideline, I was introduced to the whole new world of socializing and networking. Before I even knew PLN existed, I thought just talking and chatting to my friends was good enough to be considered ‘networking’. However, now that I saw how world-wide network was running, I was dazzled, and was excited to try so.

Unfortunately though, seeing from what I have done, I didn’t really succeed in becoming a good, world-wide networker. I had a habit where I was lazy to do stuffs that I didn’t usually do. So I did use Twitter - Mr.Burell’s probable favorite networking application – but I never used it as I used MSN and Skype with my friends. That is the conclusion, but is never the end of the story. Just like how I learn from my own mistakes, I did the same thing for this particular event, and I will, not may, develop as a young networker, and hope to be recognized, linked, and running.

Now that I finished writing about such a special program that I faced for one full semester, my head nods automatically in agreement that PLN was the course that had influenced me in the most ways. I thank Mr.Burell and myself for giving me a chance to experience this sheer brilliance, and I will never make all the times I spent here a waste, but will develop this into something that will shine in the future.
Photo credits to marttj

I certainly became a better writer that cares. Through my project, I had real audience. In order to succeed, I had to have a good writing that catches people. I’ve learned to make the title catching, and I’ve learned to make sure the audience wanted to read. To do that, I had to think about the sentence styles, order of what I write about, and maybe throwing some nice metaphors. I’m starting to care about what I write a lot. And one can observe my improvement in writing if one reads my own blog.

As a thinker, I’ve learned to think. After doing a project about something I’m interested in, I’ve learned to think in my own way, that things  I like can turn into something like this. After realizing this, I’ve learned to write about things that I like. And to me, writing is just like thinking. When I write about something I like, then I feel good. I’ve learned that ultimately, I would want to please the audience, but it all starts from pleasing myself with my own thoughts.

As a producer, I’ve learned that I’m a producer now.  I produce things. I’ve produced my website, I’ve produced the interviews, and I’ve produced the productivity. I never turned in anything. Everything I did in this class, was what I produced. I’ve learned that by producing, I can learn more.

As a networker, I’m not a big user of twitter. But using our connection, we’ve reached three big-time interviewees. One of the tools that helped us was facebook. There are many “non-educational’ ways to use facebook, but it still keeps people in touch. It’s easy to contact people, and it’s easy to expand my network by becoming friends with my friends’ friends. This method led us to interview three big basketball figures in Asia. Connection is important, because with one, you can have a million.

As a problem-solver, I’ve learned to consider everything possible. One of the problems we had in our project was the contact with Graham Bensinger. It was great that we got into cantact with him, but we just couldn’t arrange the time for our interview. We’ve exchanged tons of emails trying to figure out the time. When we finally did, about 6 hours before the time arranged to interview, the time difference between Korea and US changed because USA just entered the spring time. So we could never do our interview. The problem was the time difference. But I’ve failed to consider USA entering the spring time. After that, we fortunately got new interviews, so we never contacted Graham anymore. Mr. Burell did suggest some video chats that we could do regardless of the time difference, but interviews are live, and I wanted to do it live. For the next interviews, I made sure the time difference didn’t change. So maybe it’s not as a problem solver, but I’ve learned to learn from the mistakes.

Again, I thank Mr. Burell for this revolutionary class. It was the only real experience I had at school.

During the last two days, I got about seven mosquito bites. I live with my mother and grandmother, but I’m the only one that got bitten by mosquitos. My mother and grandmother are clean. I developed a hatred for mosquitos, so the more those obnoxious love to bite my skin, the more I hate them. I figured out that there were at least three mosquitos that tortured me. I caught two, my mother caught one.

When I lived in Russia, our family went to Estonia by car on a holiday. While I was sleeping, a mosquito bit me, resulting in a huge fist-like swell. It was disgusting, and the scar lasted for about one and a half years. This is one of my reasons for hating mosquitos so.

Yesterday night, I was trying to sleep. As I laid on my side, and was about to roll off the bed, I heard a familiar, yet very unpleasant sound. A freaking mosquito was near me! As an instinct (which I am now quite proud of) I stood up ran to the kitchen, and got the chemical substance to kill mosquitos and sprayed it aggressively around the room, since I am paranoid about mosquitos and those critters biting into my skin and leaving scars there. About twenty minutes later, I looked around the room for the unwanted mosquito, which I assumed would be dead. After five minutes later, I just fell asleep. That stinking mosquito took my blood, and thirty minutes of my sleep.

What I assumed was wrong. The next morning, while I changing, I heard the low buzzing sound again. Annoyed, I looked down, and saw the mosquito struggling in the ground. I was darn scared. How the heck did it survive the night in a room full of mosquito medicine?! I became scared, and punched the mosquito. There was no need for that, but I was quite frightened.

This post has nothing to do with crime, or films, unless one counts the crime when the mosquito took away my blood. This post was a purpose for warning dear readers to be careful of mosquitos. I hope other people don’t get bitten like me.