Ghazala Bilquise

I'm an IT teacher and teach mainly practical courses that involve technology applications. One such course I'm teaching this semester to two section is CIS 1203 - Web Technologies . Throughout this course students learn about the web and emerging web technologies. They learn to evaluate websites and plan and design their own. This course is a very hands on and practical course. I've decided to use education technology tool in this course. There are two Web 2.0 tools I want to use in this course. The first tool I want to use is  Facebook , as a means to build a PLN between the two sections taking this course. The reason for the choice of this tools is two fold. One thing is that students need to be exposed to various web based emerging technologies as part of the course. The other reason is that I would like to expand the students understanding of the potential of social networking tools beyond entertainment.  I've read a lot about how facebook can be used in a clas...

Fourteen years ago I got my first job as a programmer. Being a newbie and an amateur I faced many challenges which made me realize that there was a lot I didn’t know (duh!). In my quest to figure out how to accomplish the tasks set ahead of me, I found an online resource called Experts Exchange. This website was kind of like a point based discussion forum. Members could ask technical questions in any category of their choice like SQL, VB, Java etc., and other members (the experts) would try and solve their problems. Once your question is answered some of your points get transferred to the person who answered your question. This site helped me a lot to get my career started. Not only that, after finding solutions to many of my issues, pretty soon in my spare time I was making contributions to this site by looking for unanswered questions which I knew something about. The motivation being - to increase my points and thus increase my ranking on the site. There was a certain thrill in know...