The IDEL journey has been foggy and misty at times but overall it’s been an excellent experience, forging new connections with cohort peers, tutors and the wider #mscde community, overcoming my fear of Twitter, learning how to write (not critically enough mind you!), freedom to read widely (yet critically), critically analyse my MOOC participation, learning how to blog, trying to figure out Minecraft (not without peer help mind you!) and much more.
Gaps that I feel I need to fill for the remainder of the DE programme journey and beyond include (in bullet format for the PM in me that always needs an action plan!)
- Digital communication forms for successful message encoding and decoding, assignment work, discussion forum contributions and more. There’s audio, video, fancy slides, animation, blessays, web essays, circular blog posts (???) all sorts that I’m only starting to get exposed to.
- Improving my social research skills. A lot has move on since my undergrad specialisation in social research and indeed my masters dissertation way back in 2003. Things like social network analysis – who knew? And ethnography has moved on since my days studying the works of Margaret Mead – today participant observation can even be online – again who knew? Not me, certainly.
- Improving my critical reading and writing, applying the following framework to everything I read!
- What do you think is the paper’s key argument or line of reasoning?
- What has made you decide that these are the key arguments?
- What evidence does the paper put forward to support this argument?
- How convincing is this evidence?
- Are there any claims that are not convincing? Why do you say this?
- How important do you think the author’s (or authors’) key points are and why?
- Do you think the paper makes a strong case, and why?
No doubt there’s more but this is a good list for starters and I look forward to the next step on the journey – Digital Education in global context.
Sandra Flynn 