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A brief discussion on tagging and sharing, their use in popular websites and how they carry accross into elearning.

Reflection

Installing all the recommended software was straightforward (already had Audacity installed, so only needed to install Juice in the end).

Started with subscribing to a few of the podcasts recommended in the course webpage and the podcasts that were already up from the other students to get an idea of what to record on.

Spent a while trying to figure out why Juice wasn't finding any podcasts to download on any of the RSS feeds I'd added.  It turned out to be that my laptop was trying to go through the proxy server at work, but I was at home.  Switched it off when I realised and everything worked perfectly.

In recording the podcast, as with any presentation, I planned what I was going to say first and then recorded the audio.  I did the recording in stages stopping during the natural pauses, relistening and possibly re-recording each few seconds.

I did wonder whether this would make it a bit jumpy, but listening back to it, it doesn't seem  that noticable and allowed a process of reviewing while creating (as  I would normally use in a blog post).

There is unfortunately a slight hum on the recording, which I suspect is down to the quality of the microphone.  Given more time I would have experimented with audacity to see if there was a way to filter this out, but suspect it would be impossible without cutting some of my vocal sound.

It would probably have been beneficial to have spoken loader and closer to the microphone to make the audio clearer as my voice is quite quiet in places.

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 started the activities for week 4 quite late, because I wanted to do the reflection activity from week 3 first.

The reading for this section was quite daunting when I looked at the first paper, which appears to be 27 pages long. It turned out the main part of the paper was only 16 pages and the rest was appendices and references and the other 2 papers were much shorter.

My aim is now to start the reading at the beginning of the week for sections with large amounts of research in order to allow more time, even if the actual activities wait until later in the week.

The activities this week included a brief "online discussion" activity where we posted what we found out to the discussion forum. Although there were some interesting things shared and it was interesting to see what Mitchell picked out from the same paper I read, the discussion was very much everyone making a blog-style post to the forum and no real discussion around it, which seems a shame.

I am now trying to get into the materials earlier in order to reply to people when they first post these comments in order to actually have a discussion on the topics which arise. We all seem at the moment to be working individually with very little discussion of our ideas.

The criteria was interesting to put together, as part of my work I reused the Penn State examples, because I felt it was important to include good and bad examples. Alan has suggested that I go back and replace these with my own examples to show greater understanding, which I will probably try to do over the coming weeks.

Going back over the introductory podcast from week 1 of H808 now, I share some of the views of each of the presenters.

I can see, as Robin Mason highlights, that professionalism in elearning should be built upon both practice and research. As Gill Kirkup points out, factors contributing to educational professionalism in general will still be valid in an elearning context. We still need to respect the student and to offer commitment to incorporating research into our practices, developing communities, encourage participation and continuing professional development and evaluation.

I would agree with Robin Goodfellow's thoughts that elearning professionalism should include a "a commitment to learning for civilisation as well as personal development", i.e. a commitment to contributing to the field for the aid to all those involved in it, including students, tutors, administrators, etc and also to make it more approachable to those not currently part of the elearning community in any respect.

However, I do not see professionalism as being as clearly split into "big P" and "little P" as in his discussion. A couple of the speakers mentioned membership of professional bodies and qualifications as being possible contributions to professionalism. Although, I can see these has having a place in ensuring professionalism, I can't see that they define it. People who have these qualifications/memberships aren't necessarily always professional and vice versa.

Finally Chris discussed of the development of elearning and the introduction of the world wide web being one of key factors in this. I would agree with this, and would see it as being quite difficult to have viewed elearning as a profession before this, as it seems it is the web which has really allowed the building of educational communities within distance education.

I would agree with Chris, that elearning includes aspects of other professions, but I don't think this makes it any less a profession in itself.

I don't think it's entirely clear what an elearning professional is, but I would say that it would include aspects covered in each of the 4 viewpoints of the speakers in the podcast.