Posts

Topic 5 - Lessons learnt & future practice

Image
This is it. It has taken me a while to put the learning experiences together and reflect upon how my journey in this course has been. As I look back at my first blog post, I realise that a small step has been taken. I manage to write a few blog posts! As some of the fellow ONL course participants, I also believe this could be the last blog entry for a while. The picture above shows a swirl, or whirl, which made me think of the expression "I was caught up in a whirl of work", where the word whirl describes a moment of confused movement . This is the reason for my choice of image for this post. It is how I could describe my journey in this course: a whirl. If we think of learning as doing things differently next time we do the same thing, I have learned a number of things, mainly from other course participants. It has been a turbulent few months spent trying to keep all the 'plates whirling around' without falling. I feel I need time to let a number of ideas si...

Topic 4 - Online and Blended Learning (ONL181)

Image
My favourite topic in the ONL course. Sadly, I had little time to explore it as I would have liked to. But when I see the result of our PLB6 group work, I realise I made a small contribution to the overall result. I would like to start this reflection by looking back at what I learned a few years ago in a course I took, a blended course taught by Martha Cleveland Innes during the time she was affiliated faculty to our Department at KTH. First a definition of what the difference is between online and blended. o    e-learning = technology enhanced o    online = 80% of the content delivered online o    blended = 30 to 79% of the content delivered online o    traditional / web-facilitated = 0 to 29% of the content delivered online Unfortunately I missed the webinar but have just watched the recording. Great to hear Marti’s calm and well explained points. I loved listening to her again talking about the drivers of change in...

Topic 3 - Learning in communities

Image
Topic 3: Learning in communities – networked collaborative learning This post is intended as a reflection of my own experience as a learner dealing with technologies and finding a way to work collaboratively. For this reason, instead of referring to known articles, I will use material from the #ONL181 course, blog posts from fellow ONLers, and my own PBL group work. Let’s start with my PBL group’s attempt in trying to work topic 3 out. Have we succeeded? Mostly yes, I would say. We have all have tried to work towards one goal – complete an assignment while gathering information and constructing collective knowledge. I could then argue that we have managed to achieve networked collaborative learning as we worked online. Now I wonder if this assumption is correct. Next point is an example of a source of frustration. When I finally found time to look at what Sonja, Gizeh and Francisca’s webinar was - since I had missed it - I found out that I needed the new A...

Topic 2 - To open or not to open?

Image
To open or not to open? On what side of this dilemma am I? After going through topic 2 in the ONL course, and reflecting on what openness really means to my own practice, I say I am still on the closed side. Yes, I know, boring isn't it on this day and age? I enjoyed listening to Kay Oddone and Alaistar and the discussion that took place on OERs. What has helped me the most the past weeks, however, has in fact been my fantastic PBL group! We had much fun preparing the material for the open learning topic and we all ended up spending a considerable amount of time on the task at hand.  So what does the O mean for me? From where I am right now, I would say: After looking briefly through the jungle of material available on OER, Ican say I didn't know about the 4R's framework (reuse, redistribute, revise and remix) before the course. Now I look at sources differently. Consider this picture above, for example, I made sure it was available for reuse before pla...

Topic 1 - A journey through online engagement

Image
Jetlagged and a bit lost. Body clock is somewhere in mid-Atlantic timezone. I was in San Jose  last week for the Frontiers in Education conference (FIE2018). So here I am, trying to catch up with what happened during my offline period. In a course where online engagement is expected, I feel slightly guilty that it just has not been possible to find time to be present.  Our PBL group has just had the third meeting. The discussion went straight into hats. Now imagine my puzzled and slow brain (and face) doing its best to make sense of what the hats meant. Thanks to my very engaged group, I was able to feel less dumb as the conversation unfolded. Could this be the reason why some people find it hard to participate in the sometimes chaotic learning practice of the digital world? We cannot be that agile all the time! Luckily I had read the suggest article and watched David White's videos (great sources!) so at least I had an idea of what was being said on the vis...

First-time blogger terror

Just like Matthew Billington , I feel terrified to face this new territory! I guess that the first posts won't be much to 'like'. Tips anyone?