Personal Blogs

Week 8 was basically the TMA.

I felt a little lost as to what was expected with this.

Part (a) was about the drivers and asked us to discuss these in a context familiar to ourselves. The context I know most about is wine education as that's what I do. However, there isn't really a strong drive to use eportfolios, so the discussion felt a little artificial. Some of the generic drivers were applicable though, but it was hard to put them into the context.

I'm not sure whether it would have been easier to choose a different context, but that would have involved a large amount of research as it would not have been familiar to me.

Part (b) was the reflection. I was unclear as to what contributed "one" piece of evidence. This blog, for example, is mainly a continuation of the reflections from activity 2.2, so I used a few excerpts as "one" piece, but it did feel that these should really be counted as more. However, they seemed a good way to show progression.

I tried using MyStuff to compile the evidence and essays, but the rtf output lost the tabulation in the wiki pages and the html output didn't open properly on my XP machine, only showing an xml file and no html files. I've tried it since and the problem seems to be with XPs compressed folders as my linux machine shows all the html files and folders. Discussing this with Robin, it seems that WinZip also opens them fine.

However, as a result I resorted to cutting and pasting into word and zipping them up manually for submission.

Results have since come back. I got 78%, which is frustratingly close to the 85% distinction boundary (compared to the 40% fail boundary). In general, for his comments, it seems Alan felt there was too much breadth and not enough depth to my discussion, which seems fair given my points above. The breakdown was 76% for the essay and 80% for the reflection, which also seems to match my feelings about the exercise.

I've just posted my own PDP analysis grid and learning objectives on MyStuff (shared with Alan and the rest of the tutor group).

Going through the grid, I feel fairly confident with most of the technology related aspects. I am comfortable working online and feel happy with my ability to communicate online (although there are always new things worth learning in that respect including how the lack of voice intonation can effect how written comments are perceived by other readers). There are a couple of items I haven't really tried out, but I feel fairly confident to pick these up quickly once I've given them a try.

My main weaknesses appear to be in how to apply these for effective teaching and learning.

I am currently fairly unfamiliar with elearning research (except for the bits I read so far during this course - which have already help to start to rectify this situation) and different learning models, etc and will be looking to acquaint myself with more about these as we go through the course.

What research I have seen in the first few weeks of the course and the experiences of using MyStuff, the webforum/Firstclass and this blog have already given me some ideas I can use in my practice and highlighted some issues which may arise. It will be interesting to see how I (and the other students) find the rest of the course, what issues we hit and how our own online community develops as the course continues.