ONL_andme

  Sow how do I feel about the past two weeks? It's easy, and it isn't.  Our journey through the learning design topic was strange. I think we made a honorable attempt at structure. We did all our reading on time, were well-prepared for the first PBL group meeting, sat down to follow the rules - only to end up putting something entirely different together spontaneously on the spot in the second meeting. And from there on things just fell into place in what felt like an exemplary case of spontaneity, good team work and initiative from the wonderful, competent individuals in our group. What happened is that Christian introduced us to yet another great resource from his "toolbox": UCL's immensely useful Learning Designer , an intuitive and easy to use tool for planning anything from individual seminar sessions to entire study programs. Learning Designer allows for visualizing and organizing course designs in a pleasant-looking, well-structured layout, but what's r...

When was the last time I cooked a nice dinner together with a group of friends? I know for sure that it must have been a rather long time ago. And then along comes ONL topic 3 and with it our topic leads Christian and Lynette who proposed a nice little social learning experiment for our group. We did not actually prepare food together, but what we did cook up was at least as fun and inspiring - and actually a really interesting experience of a kind of social learning that was new to me: We spent the past two weeks engaging with the material proposed for this topic with the help of the social annotation tool perusall . By (as a group) actively trying out a tool dedicated to enhancing asynchronous social learning, we added an experimental, practical approach to our theoretical reading on the matter - and we continuously reflected on both aspects during our (synchronous) Zoom sessions as well as (asynchronously) in the FISh document.  I think that the kitchen metaphor that we picked i...

These past two ONL weeks went fast! After a short phase in which we collected information and exchanged ideas, we decided to channel our thoughts about the new topic into a mini series of short narrative videos - the journey of a teacher going "open". I am absolutely thrilled with how these turned out (thanks to Lynette , who, as it turns out, is an amazing storyteller!), and I can't wait for us to share them with the community. But how about my personal reflection on the topic, then? I remember my reluctance when we first started on this topic. Not because of a lack of enthusiasm for open learning, but rather the contrary: This matters to me, personally, because I believe that freely available access to education is one crucial step on the way to more equality in a much more general sense. There are few things that are quite as fundamentally important as this, and I have no doubts whatsoever about this: Going open is the right (and the only responsible) thing to do. I im...

Swapping out the main character of our introductory video to ONL topic 1 only took half a dozen clicks in mysimpleshow - really no big deal at all. So here it comes: The additional version starring "Tino". However, our team member Lynette finally made me realize what I SHOULD have done to avoid the "Tina problem" in the first place. Stay tuned for what she came up with (for topic 2)! :D 

  We are getting started! I feel that during the past two weeks, PBL group 5 has been growing into a team while we were working on topic 1.  During our first meeting we had quite an animated, multifaceted and really engaging discussion about various angles from which to approach the scenario. The "focus" part of our FiSh document, however, quickly started looking a little bit less than focused, and we eventually decided that if we could not discard enough of what we had come up with to narrow our work down to one aspect, we might as well spread out and research various different ones simultaneously. Which is what we did from then on, and as it turned out, our different paths led us to a lot of common points eventually. We chose to create a "ThingLink" to present our findings as it allowed for enough space to present multiple facets of online learning and digital literacies in an easy to navigate, well-structured way. So far, so good.  As I was tasked with the "...

Hello world!  This would be where I admit that I am a little wary of the concept of sharing what I have to share with an unknown audience of random people out there. Sharing? Yes, fine with me. New people? I am okay with those as well. But the entire idea of "everybody, come and see!" is just not... me. However, I am giving this a go, and, apart from this very first entry and warning, I am going to keep it matter-of-fact and hopefully focused on the subject.  So I am doing this course about Open Networked Learning. I am curious (this is interesting in a good way), and willing to give new things a go. Which is probably a big part of the point of being in this. I'll see how it goes. :) (<-- Yes, I use emoticons. A lot. Get used to it.) [Oh, and that profile picture of mine is about 15 years old and admittedly rather unserious. Blogger seems to have remembered it from when I used the predecessor, blogspot , as a "Bilderlager" for holiday pictures to share with ...