Personal Blogs
Where have I been thinking?
Back to Blogging
Just a little post to get back into the swing of things after a near two-week absence due to a lovely holiday in Scotland. Sadly, haven't downloaded my photos yet, so nothing visual to post.
I drove home via Jedburgh on the A68, which I'd not been to since a coach trip to Edinburgh when I was 11, some 26 years ago. As I drove down into the town, I was greeted with a sight unchanged from how I remembered: The Edinburgh Woollen Mill, complete with ample coach parking out front! I think it's due a paint job about now.
Learning objects: to share or not to share?
Post in response to views of learning objects - week 2 of the MOOC - after reading Downes (2001), viewing Lamb (2009), and Friesen. See first comment below for links
What is a learning object? - Anything and everything, it seems. An activity, a resource, a component of a course or educational session or lesson. Learning episodes are created from these learning objects.
As a non-technical person, just reading the Downes article promoting the case for learning objects swiftly became painful for me. The objections to the concept and use of learning objects in learning design, particularly from the video highlight how 'artificial' and 'unnatural' any classification system and repository becomes when you try and make it universal. I must say, I never really got fully to grips with the Dewey Decimal system. As a student, I'd always prefer to talk to my friends to try and locate relevant and useable material. The fact that it came from my friends acted as a sort of 'quality pre-judging exercise' of the resource - if they understood it, then chances are, I would. (This is already reminding me of those skills that Connectivism (Seimens, 2004) said are so important.
Certainly, a people / relationship basis for sharing materials is more appealing to me. I can see easily how blogging would do this (acting as both a respository and 'shop window', and how other connecting technologies such as Twitter would operate around this).
BUT - what of my own material would I choose to share? I don't I believe I would share everything. Though, thinking now, it's more about when I would share rather than if. There's a confidence in sharing - in that what you've got is of value to others. This tends to grow as relationships do, and I see no reason why that won't happen within online communities of practice or in wider, looser, weakly-tied online networks. The MOOC environment has made me realise the relative strength of the bonds in my H817 tutor group. Sharing and encouragement through these relationships does seem to breed further acts of sharing.
Why have I found week 1 of the MOOC so challenging?
One week into the MOOC (I'm doing as part of H817), and I thought I'd pause to reflect using the Gibbs Reflective Cycle - hey why not?
1) Description: During the first week of the MOOC, I've done some of the nuts and bolts stuff: linked blog to the aggregator, joined Twitter (I know I didn't have to do this, but I wanted to confront my lack of social media experience), completed a one hour OpenLearn module (death and postponement, from the social care offering), completed the reading and done both the Research Priorities and Open Education Visualisation activities, though haven't yet posted an image for the latter, and browsed through other's contributions on the open forums.
2) Feeling: My first foray into the course material led me to feeling overwhelmed quickly. There's just so much stuff to look at - that is the first problem. You have to define yourself a starting point, which was new to me. Also, the volume of other people on the course (around 500 I believe) leads to a huge volume of posts on the various forums. I constantly felt like I was playing catch-up; not able to keep abreast of developments as I had done in our tutor group forums for the first part of H817.
3) Good and Bad points: Good points first: surviving the first week and feeling enthusiastic enough to continue. (Would I if I hadn't paid for H817, and had been just enrolled on the MOOC? Not sure). Another good thing - I'm glad I had a go at Twitter. I rather like it, have come across a couple of snippets of info I might like to use. I wouldn't have done it if it were not for this course. Another good thing - I feel I am having the warts and all experience of MOOCs that I wanted. Boy is this not easy!
Bad points then - Easy to get isolated. If it were not for eagle eyed tutors roaming the forums and picking up on dispirited posts, I feel I might have been left out on my own. I think some of my fellow H817ers from my tutor group must have been similarly overwhelmed as I didn't experience any peer support in finding my feat.
Other bad points - technical glitches. Others, not I, had troubled with the blog aggregator. The delay in posts appearing is not ideal. When it's your first time at something (like blogging), you like some pretty near instant feedback to know if anyone else can actually read what you've posted. There was also a lack of discipline around how the forum conversations emerged (4 different areas you could post a response to the priorities activity for example). It just makes things so busy!
4) Analysis: The MOOC environment has some key differences to the tutor group led online H817 course. a) Volume of participants - this makes it hard if not impossible to read everything. So what to read? Skim or deep-dive? b) Starting points: We all had very different starting points on H817, but this seems to have been multiplied. At the start of H817 we introduced ourselves before really getting into the nitty gritty. On the MOOC, some participants had posted responses to the activities before I'd even read them! c) Lack of hand-holding by tutors. This is possibly a bit unfair - they have a lot more people to get round. But the consequence is it feels like less hand-holding. Ok, perhaps we shouldn't need it, and that is part of the MOOC experience, but I also thought peer support was supposed to be a part of the MOOC, and what I've experienced to date is not sufficient.
5) Conclusion: Looking at my above points, perhaps all of these are consequences of the increase in magnitude you get with a MOOC. I've struggled - in finding a small group of people that it's easy to converse with at a level similar to my own. The very confident and able tend to post a lot, so it's difficult to connect with those that aren't and don't. In the tutor led forums, it was easier to pick out a small number of individuals to 'bounce off'. Then you can develop a little 'network within a network' where you can cultivate a particular conversation. Again, I'm possibly being both unfair and premature here. I was certainly still finding my feet at the end of week one of H817, but we had done some additional guided activities around getting to know one another. As with so many things, this seems equally important here in the MOOC as to anywhere else.
6) Action Plan: Stick with it (I've paid!). Try and connect with some individuals and develop my 'network within a network'. Twitter has helped here, since it mixes familiar faces with those on the MOOC, so it feels less scary logging into that account than visiting the h817open forums. Keep recording all this stuff on the blog - as someone else said, it will demonstrate distance travelled (or otherwise) at some point in the future.
MOOC - Out of my depth!
Oh my gosh!
Feeling like a beached fish flapping on the shoreline at the moment. I've probably tried to do to much for my limited brain in one go - namely, get started with Twitter, enrol on Cloudworks, connect to and look at the blog aggregator for #h817open.
Finding Twitter not intuitive at all, which suprised me - or perhaps it is just me?
Just loads here to get around in one go, and not confident of completing a week's worth of activities. Don't want to get left behind as I can see myself slipping away from this one.
The other thing that's really scary, is that judging by the blog aggregator comments, there's a whole host of people who are racing ahead with the activities. This, plus the volume of comments on the aggregator is really hard to navigate and make sense of in short sessions, unless you're constantly keeping up to date with it - unlike our OU tutor forums where there was only a few of us.
I feel like I'm in a lecture hall of a hundred people, and 15 minutes in, I've realised that I'm way off the pace.
Scary
Just joining
Hi everyone
I'm on the H817 module, and am posting to get established here.
I do some work for two training providers, mainly in the Early Years, Children's Services and Education world. I enrolled on H817 to face my technological demons, and so far (6 weeks in and one assignment under the belt) it's not been anywhere near as painful as I'd feared.
I am hoping for a warts and all experience on this part of the course, as I've been excited by the potential of using OER with the organisations I work with, but really want to understand the implications for going down this path.
Looking forward to working with you all.
Blogging - use in academic research
This post is a response to 817, Week 1, Activity 3: how blogs are used to assist in the publication of research.
My first substantial post. Having read both Kirkup (2010) and Conole (2010), but not Weller (2011) due to it not loading in my browser, I’ve been heavily drawn into thinking about the motivation to blog.
This has resonated with me, because of the reticence I felt over pressing that button the first time that commits our thoughts to the online and accessible environment, even though I’ve chosen only to share these thoughts with my fellow module participants at this stage.
My barriers to engaging with blogging could be seen as the same as the barriers to engaging with Web 2.0 full stop. I feel I don’t know the rules of the game; that I am unfamiliar with the tools (simple things like navigating the site, and finding where the post buttons are); and that I don’t know what ‘self’ I am conveying.
Moving onto our module activity - With what I’ve read (admittedly limited), I don’t see much in the way of evidence supporting the view that blogs are being used to assist in the publication of research. Kirkup’s small study points to a lack of audience engagement beyond superficial ‘applause posts’, which don’t offer any form of critique or development to the ideas published in the blogs. This lack of ‘conversational scholarship’ (Gregg 2006) perhaps highlights the fact that the unique benefits of Web 2.0 are not being exploited by the academic community. Rather it is being used as another communication tool, to give academics a voice, sometimes a slightly different and more informal voice, from the ones they have through traditional publication routes, and to engage with a broader audience.
The same cannot be said about the Cloudworks site, which appears to be being used extensively to exchange ideas on teaching practice.
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