Wednesday, January 14, 2009

Thoughts on FOC 08 Course

First of all I would like to thank Leigh for being such a great Facilitator: always there to help & lots of great tips and suggestions, but never dictating or impressing his opinions on the students. Well done Leigh!

I really enjoyed the communication both via e-mail & blogging. It was very interesting to see different perspectives and ideas develop through the communications. There were some very helpful hints and lots of problem solving from all participants.

The discussions were thought-provoking and motivating. The discussion about facilitating, teaching or moderating I found particularly interesting because it brought out a perspective I had never considered before so I learned a lot from that.

I am not great on the technical stuff but found I enjoyed experimenting in Second Life & online networks. It made me see the difference between a network & a community more clearly. Also visiting Second Life made me realise what wonderful learning tools virtual worlds such as Second Life could be. There are many other programs & tools available but I didn’t explore them in depth as at present I don’t have a purpose for them but I will know where to look when I need them.

I did find it difficult to read all communications because there were so many on different topics I tended to read the blogs & e-mails I was interested in, otherwise I just got bogged down with the reading of communications & behind in the tasks we were expected to do.

Overall an enjoyable, practical and very useful course providing ideas and some tools which I can use in our Community Learning Centres. Connectivism (a theory of learning by communicating with others and sharing ideas) is a great way to learn and can be applied to all learning environments.

2 comments:

Leigh Blackall said...

Thanks Vida, I'm glad you enjoyed the course and got something from it. I have a few ideas on how to better manage the over whelming communication that comes through in this course, thanks for reinforcing this need. You did great in the course and I trust Manakau has been in touch with your results> If not please contact me. See you on the next open course :)

vida said...

Participants had different interests on the course: facilitating, technical stuff, new tools etc. It may be useful to add a project of their choosing to research & post to their blog or present to the group. We sort of did that when we facilitated online but I think this could be more in depth like choose a tool & demonstrate how it can be used in real life or do some research on facilitating methods & tools available or set up a learning facility in Second Life. I'm not sure if I have explained myself very well. I think what I am trying to say is let students choose what they want to research & see what sort of results they come up with (within the scope of the course).