So, #Ophelia has hit Ireland, the electricity has gone, laptop is tethered to my phone so good opportunity to write this week’s blog post without distraction!
One of the things I love about IDEL is the requirement to keep a blog – no, not this one, but another one where I get lots of helpful feedback from my tutor. I reckon I’ve been blogging over and above the course requirement and so keeping him busy and this week (called Sanctuary) is where I catch up on stuff like readings but also to formulate his feedback into my learnings.
Week 1 (constructing community) got off to a good start I thought – I focused purely on writing in my blog (put Minecraft on the long finger) but know that I should get more experimental with audio, video and the like. To be honest, I was concerned about using featured images without appropriate licensing until Pete directed me to pixabay.com and now I use that almost exclusively without worrying about breaking any laws!
Scheduling time to write my blog entries wasn’t a big deal at all, the challenge is to try and move towards a more academic tone now that I know my conversational tone isn’t too bad! Definitely not brave enough to share with any of my peers and goodness knows we have enough to read as it is without an additional burden. I also took literally Pete’s valuable advice to ‘write as you read as the act of writing will help your analysis and evaluations of the reading’ – he may well live to regret this! My final reflection of the week referred to Tuckman’s model of group stages and Pete challenged me to think about whether a learning community such as ours is indeed a group. I would have thought so but now I’m not so sure and plan to do some further research into the differences between online groups and communities.
Week 2 (technology and the teacher) saw us get into some serious reading along with searching for bots on Twitter – fun indeed!
I hadn’t come across the DIKW Pyramid up to now and included it as the featured image for this post.
I have to say I like pyramids, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs being my favourite, however DIKW makes a lot of sense. I’m not planning to critique the model any time soon but keeping it to hand for future reference (thanks Pete!).
Regarding the core readings I admit I got a little carried away with Neil Selwyn’s ‘Will technology replace the teacher?’ and I didn’t take notes outside of the required chapter – big mistake – and won’t do that again. As a result, I have some reading catch up to do this week. Pete has also saved me some time reading Prensky’s stuff on Digital Natives, instead directing me to another reading for this week –
Helsper, Ellen and Eynon, Rebecca (2009) Digital natives: where is the evidence? Britisheducational research journal. pp. 1-18.
At this rate, sanctuary week won’t be much of a sanctuary at all!
Week 3 and I found it hard to get my head around the structured blog task – not the task itself, rather how to do a good job at writing a critique of one of the core readings. I admit I let myself get distracted from the guidelines and as a result didn’t do well. It’s no excuse that both papers were tough ones – this is a master’s programme after all – but this week I plan to redo the critique playing closer attention to the guidelines and start practicing my academic writing. This has been a concern of mine from the outset and I need to get a handle on it.
Week 4 was spent practicing writing a critique of two more papers – getting better if Pete’s feedback is anything to go by but a long way from where I need to be. Practice, practice, practice will be my motto for the remainder of the semester and beyond!
Overall, it’s been an interesting time, learning loads but loads more to learn – par for the course no doubt. My research ideas notebook is filling up and hopefully this will become more filtered and refined as I read further on these topics. It’s no surprise to most readers of this blog that I’m a serial MOOC-taker, and now I have an opportunity to do more research into the pedagogy of MOOCs – just need to find an interesting angle.
And now, let sanctuary week begin!
Sandra Flynn 