Wednesday, July 21, 2010

Online communities

Sarah Stewart's facilitating online course started on Monday - accompanied, on my side, by vague feelings of anxiety. I wasn't terribly sure what I should be doing as years of F2F lectures and teaching clearly have me conditioned into a fairly inflexible mindset. So what a wonderful surprise it was to log into my blog today to discover a whole lot of comments awaiting - mostly from people I have never met! It's really quite exciting to realise how rapidly one can expand one's personal learning network! So the anxiety has gone and I'm really feeling enthusiastic about what I can learn from everyone.

Isn't it amazing how these great opportunites invariably coincide with busy times at work? Today Stevie Smith's poem, Not waving but drowning kept popping in to my mind! I did some very small research at the end of last year in which I looked at how our first year students were accessing (or not) our LMS (Moodle). I got a lot of really great feedback which I have been implementing into the design of the new Moodle pages. Unfortunately it's quite a radical shift from what we had before, and I really need to redesign the early pages so that they are consistent with our new, improved approach. And the new enrolments start next week. Eek! I guess if I don't sleep between now and Monday I'll be fine!

3 comments:

  1. Hello Jean,
    Saw your light on, so I've popped in to make a comment. Like you I've had my blog for years at: http://coachcarole.wordpress.com but don't really expect comments.
    It's been refreshing to get a few this week.
    I like the fresh waves of your blog about communities. My main interest is seeking like minded folks on use of eportfolios and building a Community of Practice.

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  2. Hello Carole

    Thanks for visiting - Judging from your blog you're a lot further down the e-road! I hope to see you in the classroom later tonight, although my test run was hopelessly unsuccessful!

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  3. I do not call myself an instructional designer but that seems to be part of my work these days. I am really looking forward to talking to you about how we design activities and events to engage people in the online environment. What would you say is a really important to take into consideration when designing online activities.

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