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Showing posts from April, 2021

Our creative kitchen (Topic 3: Learning in communities)

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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 in ou

"We are open" - or are we, really? (Topic 2: Open Learning - Sharing and Openness)

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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