Week 1 - Reflections

Painful, very painful!

This past week was painful, my feelings about the activities can be summarized as that I was feeling just FINE (Frustrated, Irritated, Neurotic and emotional).

Frustrated, as I did not seem to have enough hours to do the activities in a manner and depth that I would have liked. 

Irritated, every time I went near the wiki it had changed or my stuff was gone. This did not feel very organized to me and left me wondering weather any testing of the interface we were using had been done.  In my mind it came across as unprofessional and besides that it was wasting my time which I had none spare of. Instructions were not consistent. Links seemed to go all over the show and not consistently to one page.

Neurotic, all this pain was mowing down my self confidence, I felt old , stupid and slow. My ego took a huge beating, here I was struggling with a subject that should come easy to me, I have designed websites, learnt to read SQL, C++, written databases  just to mention a few of my perceived technological genius. It did cross my mind that those who were not as technologically equipped would be feeling even more strain that I was.

Emotional, I never cry and for the first time in years I was ready to cry, I had been cut off from the rest of the world and was communicating with my laptop in a method that I have never particularly enjoyed. I love face to face interaction where I can read the person I am communicating with and know what they are really saying, not their words their bodies, tone of voice, eyes. The visual side in me needed and was craving the visuals. I was lonely and feeling isolated. I tried to reach out but everybody seemed to be as busy as I was and I got absolutely no response.

Reflective questions

As I was going though these activities the following questions kept repeating;

Do you learn more when you are stressed, stretched and at the end of your tether? Interesting to note here that I had no problem with the technological side of the learning I was stuck at the sheer volume and the actual process used to instill the learning. Is it not again a question of different people will learn in a different manner, which leads me to my next question. Will this style of teaching work for everybody on this course? Will some not be so overwhelmed that they will just give up? How can I make sure that I push my students enough but not too much so that the experience builds their confidence?  Does pushing people over the edge leave you with less students but the ones that will now after been broken down be built up to something far greater than the mediocrity of pulling everybody with you? (not an entirely inclusive thought).

On the positive side I felt empowered as I had learnt two new skills, wiki and blogging. I reallised that I would love to know more about how to set up a wiki for my students where this exercise has only taught me how to use a wiki.

Reflections of each activity in terms of behaviorism, Constructivism, Cognitivism and Connectivism

I decided to turn the activity on its head and look at each learning theory and then how this was learnt in each activity. To my surpise I found that elements of each learning theory could be found in each of the activities.  The learning design was mainly constuctivism in nature as by the end of the activities I had found that I was analyzing the activities and had created a new reality based on the readings and course design. Although I started off feeling FINE, I had learnt a valuable lesson and I am now analyzing and changing my behaviour instead of just one of the above.  Here follows my mind maps of how I thought the learning theory had connected with each of the activities.

Reflections and more reflections

	Reflection on own learning with this activity – what was it's value to me as a learner?	Reflection on potential for my learners (how could this strategy be used to support the learning of your students?)	Diversity (learning preferences, contexts etc) Does the design of this activity support a diverse range of students? How?	eLearning and digital pedagogy How could the design of this acitivty, as an online e-Learning strategy, support learning?
Profile wiki	Did not enjoy all the personal probes Fast way to get to know a lot of people and know detail of them – means nothing if I have not met them Interesting to meet people and then go back to profiles Wiki not well set up which caused some frustration – links were not followed thru and pointing in different directions, I was not in control of the situation.	At beginning of the year to introduce learners as the year progresses they can revisit profile Insert arbitrary field like what is your favourite colour out of these 7 choices, Get them to read profiles and sort themselves into those liking the same colour – gets them to have to scan thru profiles fast and organize themselves. Get them to present a person other than themselves - to the class by using profile instead of talking to that person. Person they have to present can be drawn from a hat so that you don’t have people presenting their friends	This activity would support a huge diversity of learners, ADDHD children which are not always neat. Children who find it difficult to talk to others and connect with people can learn about their peers without any interaction.	Students can get to know each other although they are not face to face. The trick is just to get them to read though all the profiles as I felt this step got bypassed in this activity.
Blog reflections as a journal	I had never done a blog before and enjoyed learning how to do one found it relatively easy and self explanatory	2 ways – if you have a blog as a teacher u could post homework listings parents and kids can refer to them. Students can do their assignments on them, imagine if you had a blog with all your school work on it – bit hard to burn though. Would be fun to have a month long activity where they have to daily reflect on their learning at school, most students I speak to seem unable to verbalise what they have discovered in that day. This would then allow them to have	A blog is a wonderful tool for any student to do on a daily basis to digest and reflect upon their learning’s, the can even invite their friends and family to share the journey with them.	Fantastic digital pedagogy.
Learning Theories wiki	Hated it, I did not like the fact that there was no face to face communication. Felt like I was in school hoping to be picked and nobody called I felt like an outcast. I sent emails nobody replied. The course coordinator was a blessing. The activity itself has merit as I learnt to use VYew and once the partner issue was sorted I did get a deeper understanding of the topic by sharing thoughts and bouncing ideas off a partner.	I would use this when try to get students to grasp complex concepts.	By getting students to work in groups learnings get transferred across a broad spectrum of learners with the quicker more indepth students being able to share with other students and some of their ways of thinking are bound to affect the other students.	As an e-learning strategy this works as the students get to spend some time with another human instead of just being dependant on their books, words and computers.

Conclusion

These activities are very powerful in enabling and pushing a student to learn a lot in a very short space of time. For me personally this has been a successful interaction as I have not just learnt how to so I have also in some cases formed a opinion of how I would not go about it.