Closing thoughts. Part 1

"Finish the course with a closing post with feedback about the course. Did you learn new and useful things? Was it challenging enough? What could have been better? What could you have done better. Did the course facilitator do a good job? How will you apply what you have learned? Who would you recommend to do this course next time?" ... Said Sarah

I'm going to do the other evaluation as well but here are some bloggy, non-structured thoughts.

Yes, I did learn some new and useful things. One of the things I learned, or rather confirmed, is that there's a lot of stuff out there on the Internet and I'm just going to know small bits of it. In a course like this you get to know the mainstream applications that people are using. We tertiary people come from a rigorous academic background and we have to get used to not knowing about how to use some of the tools properly and act like neophytes.

I found that courtesy and temperance are valued in on-line educational communities and patience and support are the norm especially when newbies are involved. There's a hard core of cool powerful on-line people and these have, almost by definition, adopted a collaborative and inclusive approach to their dealings with other people. This has set a standard for protocols and etiquette in on-line sessions.

Be that as it may, I found most on-line people a bit earnest. Not naturally, rather that's the way it comes across. Don't remember hearing much laughter in Elluminate sessions.

I wanted to see real people's faces more. Not family pics, though that's better than nothing. Moving pictures of the people I was talking to. I regard the telephone and texting and emailing and recent Elluminate sessions as what you do if you can't have the real thing... a real conversation with real people. Some research I have seen says that the most powerful teaching tool is a person in a room. I'm afraid I have a hierarchy of delivery preferences. Some of my colleagues are passionate about on-line interactions and good for them but when we want to learn something together with third parties we go into rooms and talk in the old-fashioned way.

Do I want to keep going? Sure. More Elluminate sessions. Smarter use of Google Docs and similar products are the order of the day.

One of the best things was keeping the Elluminate meeting room open. All the time. I ducked in there for several purposes and learned a lot of stuff informally.

There's a certain amount of mucking around with Internet products that's not terribly efficient but has to be gone through to obtain easy familiarity. Curiosity is a powerful motivator but as an ex-manager don't know how to account for the unstructured playing that seems required. When we try to formalise how to learn things in nice sequences, like in Wiki Educator, you can get to the end of the lessons but still not be sure what you've done.

People do courses for lots of reasons. I teach microprocessors and robotics and some students get very involved but others pass quite well in a cold uninvolved way. I don't make them formally reflect. Maybe I should.

I've got lots more thoughts but that will do for today.

Reflections #2 on mini event

I'd like to do some reflections on my reflections about advertising the mini-event. Here's a list of how it could have been more widely advertised.

There were a whole lot of fellow learners on the FO2010 course and I feel the event was interesting to some of them.

Colleagues I work with could have been shoulder tapped.

I run a business group very interested in sustainability. Each of them would have been interested.

The wiki page was done late and could have been more zingy.

There was a FO2010 Google Group with over 180 people who may have been interested. Should've contacted them.

My blog has followers and casual readers who wouldn't know there was an event on. Some sort of background and countdown could have been instituted.

I am a man of three tweets in his life and could have tweeted my small circle with a mini announcement.

We have an excellent organ in Dunedin, NZ, called the Otago Daily Times that's always looking for soft news.

I teach an IT class. Could have made viewing compulsory.

Reflections on mini-event

My "mini-event" for facilitating on-line was held on Wednesday 10 November. I think it went OK as an event and very well in terms of listener engagement, mostly due to the excellent presenter Nicola Bould.

Nicola talked about the impact on the planet and people of all the social networking going on in the world today. Her message was one about being aware rather than ceasing all activity. How much coal gets burned to upload a photo into Facebook? What does Google plan to do about powering and cooling all the servers it needs? All this is on the Elluminate recording whose link is on the previous post.

I prepared a bit for this presentation and Nicola and I went over our roles that morning. I've been winging lessons all my life in a face to face situation but I know that where a lot of technology sits between you and your audience you have to make sure everything works and have a plan B for any eventuality.

Two issues were identified that I would have to work on for the next event. One was advertising which was minimal in my case so we had only a small audience. I've got to find out how to advertise more widely.

The second was the lack of instruction I gave to the audience about how to raise your hand and perform the small feedback actions. Assumptions lead to some pauses that might be evident in the recording.

I thought Nicola was excellent in the way she responded to the typed ad-hoc comments. This made the sessions more interactive.

Summing up: a great topic, a great presenter and an average facilitator.

Recording of Eliminate session on e-Sustainability

Nicola Bould talks about the other other side of the social networking world. Some serious themes and ends on an upbeat theme, including Google's sea based servers.

You can hear see the session again here

eLearning hype?

Old hands like me will recognize the unmerited hype that has surrounded some of the earlier products that were going to "change the way we learn". While I think therev are some excellent adjucts to teaching on the web and some cool applications, I don't think any of them will change the way we learn. Is this being curmudgeonly? Perhaps.

I found a good page about e-learning myths.

More about my motivation

Why did I join this class? It's just a matter I think of wanting to gather together all the different bits of "flexible learning" technologies together. When you learn things in an ad hoc way you just skim around picking up bits that seem more interesting than their neighbours. One useful aspect of a course is to give a coherence to the eclectic bits and make it look like a structure rather than just a sad album of semi-learned skills.

About me

Hi. Peter Brook from Dunedin, NZ here.

I've been in education all my life and taught in high schools and tertiary institutions for thirty-something years. My interests and qualifications are in IT and mathematics but have eclectic connections and hobbies. Right now I'm learning Portuguese at the University of Otago and teaching courses in robotics and microprocessors based on the excellent Arduino platform.

My first post

OK, this has taken a little time to get going but I'm here and starting to facilitate online.