In retrospect

Hello,

This has been an overall great learning journey . . . I learned much about learning ventures (fictional and real) and felt there were brilliant ventures out there I would love to add to my technological tool box. The highlight of the course, in my opinion, were the OER’s; I really enjoyed viewing, participating and communicating in each one.  I found the info was presented in a dynamic manner using a variety of Web 2.0 tools and that they were quite interactive in nature.

It took me quite a while to get used to this blog format learning platform, I feel there are some elements that could offer a better navigating experience and a better way of keeping track of messages as well. Here are some suggestions:

1) One should not be able to post a message without clicking a category, once the message is written then the message is automatically sent to that category.  I don’t know how many times I forgot to click the category before clicking ‘publish’ and my message ended up in the ‘uncategorized’ blog.

2) Once in a Category, I found it extremely lengthy to scroll up or down to find posts, there must be a better way to do this.  Perhaps categorizing posts by date (within each category) could work, so you just click on a dated tag, cutting down on the number of messages to look at and easily finding older and more recent posts.

3) I found it was at times difficult to develop a community of learning, mainly because I felt messages were often posted to respond to the topic at hand more than to respond to each other. Perhaps it would be best to further encourage activities that foster colleague response – aiming for deeper discussions.

4) It might have been nice to have 7 OER weeks instead of 8, the last one ending Week 11.  This option might be possible by adding one more person to each existing OER group or starting the OER’s a week earlier if 8-weeks of OER are necessary. I found that the feedback provided by my peers was quite valuable and really regretted not having been able to consider their suggestions prior to handing in my presentation. Had we finished OER’S by week 11, this would have given everyone a week where they could post their pitches – get feedback from their peers, tweak their presentations if necessary and then post a final version and hand in their assignment by the end of Week 12.

I have certainly learned how to better evaluate learning ventures through ETEC 522, but I have also learned that I don’t have the ‘entrepreneur’ bug – not in the learning venture domain anyway. Through everyone’s presentation and the OER’s I have also accumulated many more technological tools that I feel can enhance my teaching practice.

Good luck everyone with the rest of your MET journey or your future ventures!

Marie-France

 

 

Posted in: Uncategorized