As I begin my second course in the Masters of Educational Technology program, I look forward to applying new technology, engaging in new conversations and begin new adventures in learning.

The first week of Design of Technology Supported Learning Environments has now been completed. My initial shock at seeing the reading list, assignments and expectations is over. Now the work is on the go and each day I whittle away at a few more readings, a few more posts, a few new tasks and a few new challenges. The course began with a listening challenge on Last.fm. The next memorable task involved creating a Picasso-style drawing. With this course underway, I continue to look for the connections between what I am learning and what I am doing in my daily work with elementary students and staff.

FEB 13th, 2011.

The course is now at the mid point and we are set to take a reading week break. This will give me time to catch my breath, stop reading and responding to posts for a while and just focus on assignments. It is such a challenge to keep pace with what is required, essential and important. It is so easy to get sidetracked after finding an interesting website that links to another, to another and leads into the unknown. As this happened, I came across an article titled  TenTips and Tricks written by a UBC masters program participant that is very relevant to this topic.

One of the assignments for this course includes creating a new wiki entry or altering a current wiki entry for the Design Wiki 510. This wiki was started in 2007 and has undergone many changes, additions and adaptations since it’s inception. I have claimed the topic [Hypertext]. This one initially caught my eye since everything on the internet is hypertextual. It is the basis for learning that is connected, linked and interwoven. It brings new ideas into light that would not be discovered unless ‘linked’ from someone else’s ideas. The whole notion of the universal brain comes to mind when thinking about hypertext.

The second assignment has also begun. It is a group project to develop an online learning course. The group (Patricia in BC, Deb in Manitoba, Angela in Chile and myself) have worked well together to create our initial proposal for submission. It is a course designed to support e-mentoring for professionals in various fields of endeavour, such as nursing, teaching, business, etc. We have used skype meetings to talk through our ideas, google docs to create a framework, google site to break apart and create our proposal and now we move into WebCT and Vista to create our course. Once again, I am spending time learning how to use new technology and Web 2.0 tools. The more I do, the more I learn, the more I create and the more I know (in true knowledge building fashion).

Feb. 27th, 2011.

My first assignment is now completed. (Hypertext) My  ventures into html editing, writing in a wiki environment and blending facts with personal impressions has resulted in a work that I am proud to show and share. I wonder if this sense of accomplishment is felt by everyone who has worked on wikipedia entries. I wonder if it will matter to me if the wiki entry that I have so lovingly crafted will be changed and altered by someone in the next course. It is still challenging to share written material for editing by others. Collaborative work in googledocs is something I am just starting to do. I still feel I need to have permission or explain when I go to change or correct someone’s work.

APRIL 10TH

ETEC 510 is now completed and the final review is done. The last minute work I completed today included updating the wiki-space collection that I started several weeks ago. It is unfortunate that I did not start it at the beginning of the course since many interesting links, clips, activities are not included. If others from the course had access to edit and add, that would make it a true wiki creation. The link for the wikispace is: http://etec510collection.wikispaces.com/

Today I also migrated the WebCT course that my group designed for the major project for ETEC 510. I did not want to lose all the work done or not be able to access it in the format in which it was designed. So, I took a few hours today and moved the links, content, format into a UBC blog site: https://blogs.ubc.ca/mentoringdesign/