Way way behind in commenting on the goings on in eci831, but it's been another busy week. This past week I have listened to MP3s of George Siemens' session on Connectivism, and Richard Schwier's session on Learning Communities. I also watched the Elluminate recording of Sue Waters' session on Educational Blogging where she posed the question "what are your thoughts on educational blogging?". There has been lots of food for thought from all 3 sessions and it's very difficult to summarise where I am with it all. A few key points would be:
- I'm a lurker, but hopefully not a loafer
- I DO feel engaged, with the learning if not so much with my fellow learners
- I'm a 'not for credit' student - what I'm involved in is definitely non-formal learning with the odd informal moment along the way.
- I feel connected to the course and the social element is something I am conscious of and engaged with on the periphery. I wish I was more engaged, but there are several reasons why I am not. I'm in the wrong time zone - the live Elluminate sessions are at 2am. Not a good time when there's work in the morning! The archive is fantastic, but a live session would be better. I hope to join a live session before the course ends. To lurk in person would be so much better than my current archival lurking! Twitter lets me follow some of the activities of the other students and reinforces the concept of community. There's no doubt that the community and the connections it facilitates generate a new way of learning and accessing knowledge. It's a few years since I studied Piaget and Vygotsky and their theories of constructivism, but the new thinking of connectivism put forward by Siemens makes a lot of sense in the Web 2.0 world.
- I'm a rubbish blogger - I blog too infrequently and when I do blog I do so ineffectively. However, it does force reflection and evaluation and I hope some day to do it better.
- I'm interested in how schools can blog effectively and Jan Smith's approach to safety and parental involvement is admirable. In my work we are trying hard to open up access to blogging sites and many of our schools are certainly involved in looking at what they can do with blogs as a core part of learning. As a key tool in constructing knowlege and reinforcing learning it's hard to beat.
- Richard Schwier talked about how the web has developed into a social web, and reflected on the top sites presented by his browser. For what it's worth, my top 8 sites (as appearing in Google Chrome) are:
netvibes: all my feeds, mail, social networks gather here
twitter: no explanation needed - I guess it's the hub of my PLN...
flickr: less for social networking purposes and more as a simple home for my photos, the vast majority of which are private for family consumption only.
St Johnstone FC: probably the finest footie team in the world
eci831: well, I must be engaged if I go that often to the site!
amazon: it just has it all
linkedin: not so much social networking as business networking - keeping fingers in pies...
google: the launchpad for so much - mail, docs, alerts, reader...oh and the odd search!
A notable absentee from this list would be Facebook, partly because I don't use FB that much, but probably more because I access Facebook in several other ways (via the widget in Netvibes, via Tweetdeck or via the app on my Blackberry).
My final observation would be that I am filled with admiration for those playing a full part in the course, keeping up with the reading and posting and blogging. For my part, I will read more, and I will continue to follow and try to turn my engagement into active participation.
School report: could do better!
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