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Anna Greathead

TMA02.... a week later

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Edited by Anna Greathead, Saturday, 2 Jun 2018, 14:24

I submitted my TMA a few days early as I was going on holiday and wanted it off my desk!

I actually completed it a few days before I submitted it but was reluctant to actually hit the send button. I was also reluctant to read through the completed assignment another time as I was concerned I might notice it was absolute tosh! 

In the end the H800 WhatsApp group encouraged me to submit and forget and that it what I did! Then I went to Cornwall for a week with my family (17 of us aged between 4 and 76) in the sunshine by the sea. It was glorious. 

As before I cannot judge how the TMA was! I had to rethink parts of it quite radically as I re-read and re-understood the question. In the end this was what I did:

Part 1a - a critical view of the net-generation

Are young people today really qualitatively different because they grew up with the internet? Not really

Part 1b - reading Price et al

Does the convenience of distance learning mean the potential loss of experience is worth it? All depends!

Part 1c - blogs and blogging

Reflect on your learning people! It's really cathartic and useful! 

Part 2 - redesign an activity

Everyone should blog! Rename it learning journal and give people some examples of how they could use the tool.

Part 3 - new research

Do some side by side comparisons of learning activities and their distance learning equivalents - do both types of exercise with the same group of students for control purposes. 

Hmmmm...... not sure why it took 4000 words given my super-succinct summary!

Here's a holiday picture! 

Family pic

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Anna Greathead

TMA02 - the panic settles in!

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I want to finish TMA02 by Friday 25th May so I can go on holiday with my family and have a week off. 

This means I now have 8 days to complete the assignment. 8 days to organize my 1000s of words of disorganized notes and quotes into coherent and logical discussion points! 

Here's my plan:

1. The Global Digital Divide - a PowerPoint Presentation

I want to present how the internet growth in Africa (specifically - it's true elsewhere too) is much more driven by smartphones operating on 3G and 4G than by more familiar (to us in the developed world) laptop and broadband set ups. Many OERs have been developed and made available which should help teachers and learners in Africa but it depends on what those OERs are. If they're videos - especially HD videos - then the data munching will make viewing them expensive and potentially time consuming and jumpy! Plus - if they're watching it on a smartphone screen the picture will be so small that only one or two other people can even share the experience. 

I am going to suggest that the growth of smartphones should impact how teachers choose to teach and how learners can best learn - and especially how the developers of OERs should proceed! 

2. The Net Generation - 1000 words

It seems so intuitive that growing up with the internet will make you qualitatively different that actually suggesting students are still, in the essentials, much as they've always been sounds blasphemous! My argument here is not that student have changed due to the internet but that education has not changed for decades. It is not fit for purpose now - with all the available technology and resources - but it wasn't really fit for purpose before then either. The technology has presented new challenges and new solutions but using technology for the sake of it without a well grounded pedagogy is a fruitless as refusing to use technology because 'chalk and talk' worked very well for hundreds of years! 

I want to suggest that practitioners must be strategic in how they employ technology and learners still need to put the brain work and metaphorical elbow grease in! 

3. Blogs and blogging - 100 words

Reflective learning fits neatly into the social constructivist theory of learning and learning journals and learning diaries have supportive literature going back decades. The blog is a new, and I would argue, improved version of this. Firstly it's much harder to lose and much easier to edit. Secondly it can (if the writer wishes) engage other students and tutors in debate and conversation. Thirdly it provides a record of a learning journey which adds to the resources for future learners. 

Practitioners who employ this reflective tool are providing scaffolding which will, all being well, result in learners becoming self-directed, independent and not teacher dependent. Learners writing a blog may find it extremely useful for organizing thoughts, having a moan, reflecting on a side tangent and planning a TMA!

4. How would I redesign blogging in H800 

I would incorporate it with the forums. Lots of people write long reflections in the forums (fora?) and I am sure they also have long reflections about less specific questions and about the tangents and active mind inevitably travels. It is a shame if these thought processes and reflections are lost to the rest of us because they don't neatly fit into a forum question. As a learner I would benefit greatly from this - and for more interaction with my own blog posts. 

Making reflection a mandatory activity is fraught with difficulty! I'm going to have to think about it!

5. Which aspects of ‘learner experience’ do you think should be investigated – either on H800 or in your own context – and which methods would you use to do so?

I haven't got here yet! I guess I ought to look to my own context as a professional rather than as a learner given that my last activity was learner based. Maybe I could assess how much doing endless practice MCQ questions benefits a learner over more visual, interactive or 'deep learning' methods. 

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