Personal Blogs

1. What is your experience of being a learner?
As a learner I’ve acquired different skills in different ways. The internet plays a big role in my learning skills nowadays.
Resources:
the internet, books (informal learning), colleagues, friends
Tools:
See my revised PLE here
Where:
Home, School, when traveling professionally (train, plane)
When:
Basically when it suits me, sometimes in the evening, sometimes in between classes, sometimes in the weekends

2. What tools and resources do you use?
I mainly use tools from the internet, see my PLE. The internet is one of my biggest resources. Besides the Internet I still use books for learning as well. I either get them at a library or order them on the internet (Amazon)
I also use my colleagues as a form of resource, communicating in meetings and reflecting education is always very helpful to me!

3. What are your views on different technologies?
I try to critically engage in using new technology for my learning. I have experienced through H800 various new technologies which I was not familiar about. Some I found useful, some I have strong doubts about. In general I believe that technology can enhance my learning. However, I still believe that some web 2.0 applications are not useful for my learning, but might be useful for others. In week 21 & 22 I found Sclaters argument about using a default tool for learning a valid one. If we don’t use a default tool, we might miss-communicate with one another.

4. Can you think of examples where technology has made a significant difference to the way you learn?
Informal learning:
preparing my songs I have to learn for various performances with my band. I used to sort them out by ear, but since the internet and numerous of online bass player communities, it is easy to get the transcription.  Makes me lazy though!
YouTube is a fantastic resource. The most difficult bass lines played in front of you on your screen and presented to you step by step.

Formal learning:
Having access to online libraries for my OU study has made a significant difference
Having e-books as pdf files
Using my Smartphone to access my forums and blogs in which I participate

5. Can you think of counter examples where you had a bad experience of a particular technology?
Not necessarily a bad experience but I would prefer to call it a less useful tool in my learning process. I still can’t see the benefits of Twitter as a learning tool for me. It only made sense to me when others from my H800 course participate, but other than that I can’t see the benefits at the moment. I still try to Tweet, but find it sometimes very useless. I can find relevant links on other websites as well, I don’t need to use Twitter for that. I would say that Twitter is my least favorite learning tool at the moment.

6. What did this do to your motivation for learning?
It made me look for other options if I hadn’t one already. When I don’t like the tool, I search for other alternatives and look for tools that suit my needs in another way, a better way.

7. How did you deal with the situation?
See answer from question nr. 6. When it doesn’t suit me I continue to search for better options which suit my needs better.
Google Docs is another example. I like the idea and I’m using it a lot, but our reports are made in massive excel files, which Google Docs couldn’t handle but Office Live could. So I use for my report excel files Office Live, for anything else, Google Docs is fine for me.

Some interersting articles by Sclater. Here are my thoughts on the article

The “Key Questions to ask” in Sclater’s (2008a) paper are valid questions in my current work environment as we are (still) trying to implement an LMS in our school. The Board of Governors has chosen a commercial company to do this, but I am inclined to agree with the comments Sclater made in his conclusion , that this kind of solution does not offer enough flexibility. It doesn’t allow for enough customisation and this is something that, in my opinion, is very important. As a school, we need to be able to continually modify the system until it meets our demands. Ultimately, the teachers have to work with the system (in terms of providing content and organising the learning environment for the students) and therefore their input is very significant.
Costs are also an important issue for us. Our LMS requires a yearly fee of an average of 3 euro’s per student. We have over 900 students which means close to 3000 euro a year on licenses only. This is a significant amount of our IT budget. Using Open Source software would certainly bring us the benefit of cutting the costs of our current LMS system.
Another advantage of using an LMS based on Open Source software is that you have a instant support community to help you set up and develop your system. Knowledge is available, it is out there and we can benefit it from it. However, I would agree with Sclater that the downside to using OS Software is the time scale involved. Working with discussion groups takes longer, people need to reply to forum questions, try different coding solutions etc. There is no instant response.
To avoid having the same old discussion about which technology to use, we need to look to other successful projects and use these results and experiences as a starting point. We have evidence that at least certain elements of these projects have been successful and can try to combine them.  We could also ask prospective users to agree on a set of important criteria, before making a selection.

Cheers, Eugene