Final reflection

Personal impression
I started this course with strong preconceptions. I had them not about the course but about elearning. I do understand that elearning is here to stay, but I still prefer face-to-face learning. Since elearning is so young then perhaps we have not found the right way how to do it: theoretical concepts are arising and practical experiences as well. After 5 years the world (concepts) of elearning are bit different.
I also do realise that the facilitator/professor is no longer the only source of the truth, but I still miss classroom discussions (IRL), somehow it seems to me that synergy is better there. You can argue and you hear answers straight away. In elearning everything takes place in some time period. If not msn/or skype (but skype is not so easy to use yet, the quality of connection is not
stable) then there is always some time between arguments. Sometimes it is good (if arguments are angry), but to me it kills the synergy.
It seems to me that to have an excellent online project together is a huge challenge. This kind of projects will be more successful when participants have met each other or are the same level (possess similar knowledge). If not, then there will be some frustration among participants.

What else did I learn?

First some practical note: communication between representatives of different cultures can be problematic. Not everything is understood the way you think. This is for sure. After one episode I tried to be more careful while writing my posts. The result of that was perhaps my statements were not so strong as they should have been. But in this i am not sure.

The patterns of behaviours are different. It was interesting to see how different people behave. As learning in formal educational system to me always has something to do with the power, it was interesting to see how representatives of different cultures deal with it. It would be interesting to analyse these patterns.

How hard it is to come out with common understand about something. For example: I proposed several times to use in our course design term "football" and not soccer and did put also some links what did support my proposal (to me FIFA is a strong argument). Still we had no common understanding and used football and soccer at the same time. Create common understand before you act? Or act anyway? In my opinion common understanding is very important and this can be created only with cooperation (this was the reason why I tried to comment other work in our wikispaces as much as I could).

It is hard to motivate somebody if you can't have a personal contact: emails are easy to miss. (so have telephone number and an address!). About motivation I did write several times. To me intrinsic motivation is very thin and it depends on several other aspects than just a will of humans. It does not mean that it does not exist, but during learning process intrinsic motivation is easy to die. If learner will have the feeling of failing then intrinsic motivation gets damaged and does not drive anymore.

Don’t cover the facts. I think that the students of this course should have known before that some students will join later. It would have helped to avoid the feeling of loneliness in the group.

If some members of the project-group do know each other and live/work together - it is easier for them to cooperate with each other than with members of the group with whom they have not met. If one school has several students participating in this course the learning outcome might be better because they have a chance to discuss things/subjects with each other.

In online course always accommodate students with good channels for discussion. Even if some students don’t understand the subject it is possible for them to observe the discussion and still have a better understanding about the subject. I'm not sure if everybody did get what is course design all about.

If you want to have an excellent project and communication - first you must have some plan and structure. Otherwise you will loose a lot of time while scratching and gain nothing.

What else? I thought a lot about self-directed learning and intrinsic motivation. The problem with them is that even though I like the concepts I have never seen this working out in formal course at university level. My presumption is that the preconditions for self-directed learning and intrinsic motivation are not preformed.

I did learn something about football :). The idea that football could be the subject of our course was great (so we have to thank Oleg) and now it seems to me that everything can be taught in online / elearning way. Wow, this is something! So there is a huge plus to elearning / online courses side 

As learning process is a development process then learners want frequent feedback (especially if they are not having weekly classroom meeting): am I considering every (most) aspects of this phenomena? Is my argumentation logical? In formal educational system were there are some home assignments: how are my assignments done?

Taking responsibility for your own learning.

Well …
I think I did take the responsibility for my own learning. In my opinion learning materials were great and they raised several new ideas. I tried to reflect the practise (incl this course) and the feelings/thoughts/ideas I had during this learning process. Actually this was a first experience to me to formalise (write down) my thoughts and comments. This gives a good overview when and what I learned.
At one point I thought about self-directed learning and intrinsic motivation as how far these concepts are from real life. Now I think that perhaps the preconditions of these things are misunderstood.
If we are taking a look to our students in this course, it can not be that only some 20% of students take a full responsibility of their learning. (Around 25% did finally the tasks required to complete this course). To me there is a conflict between theory and practise.

About feedback - If I would have to decide now again whether to join this course, then I would think hard and probably would not join.
I wrote into several posts my feedback: materials great, course too intensive, more feedback and support from the facilitators is needed, next time try to use the forum also and discuss there interesting subjects (not formal information about the course) and add some pictures or jokes about elearning :) (have some fun); clarify your target group, be in dialogue with students (and make sure that the learning takes place - that people learn 'right' things). Elearning is more demanding and that includes facilitators also. If you want students to take the responsibility of their learning than you must take it (responsibility) also. Analyse this course: what worked out and what did not. I don't know whether there are some quality measures, but to me it seems that if from the group of 8 only 3 graduates, then this is not a success story. Sry. Try to get some information (data) when and why people decided to leave this course. Read reflections and try to understand why do people have negative feelings about this course (last reflections of participants describe having negative feelings about this course and I share their feelings, the conflict I had/described several weeks ago is still there). If necessery collect data about it. Analyse your pedagogical approach: I'm not sure that everything was ok there. Give students more freedom: some elective material, alternative assignments (wikis, more than 1 possible headings for essay per week). Have plan B for the course.

So, this was the last post. Dear reader, have a wonderful summer and take care!

Reflection week 13

1. What was the most important thing you learned this week?
You can improve something all the time, but it is important to understand that there is a time to draw the line. I'm kind of perfectionist sometimes and I can see the mistakes and want to improve them. We can't do it for ever ;)

2. What was particularly interesting/boring in this week?
We finished our course design and this was interesting. Unfortunally only 2 of us had the strength to carry out all the course more-or-less on time, but I'm glad that Robert joined us eventually.

3. Was there something you didn’t quite understand and want to know more about it?
This time no :)

4. What kind of questions/ideas/experiences this week’s activities raised for you?
How to improve our course. What are the weaknesses right now and what should we do.
but well: we don't do with our course anything anymore :) I'm glad this is over :)

5. Which tools did you use this week, explain what was the purpose of using these tools
MSN - to communicate with my friends, MS Word - to write reflections, blog - to post reflection, Wikispaces - to reorganise our space. Skype also.

6. With whom did you communicate during this week, how many times, with which tools, and for what purposes?
Jasna to discuss/synchronise our activities.
-----------------

Feedback for group1

I have observed your work from the beginning and first I would like to congratulate you: nice work!

So just few comments what you might consider:
It would be great if you could specify what can students expect from facilitators? What kind of activities or feedback and when.

Your structure of course web page is good, but seems a little statical/boring. Just something 'extra' - a picture or joke could do the job. One recommendation: just look at the pages through eyes of the students and try to make it more student-friendly.

About schedule: 10 weeks seems a long time (for every iteration 2 weeks). I just wonder whether students will remain motivated. Maybe you don’t need 10 weeks for this subject?

And a little about evaluation: there was one question I did not understand: "Evaluate the quality of the overall concrete arraingements of the course". Perhaps you can specify that? This was the reason why I did not answer to this question.
The second thing is that I did not understand were you want me to put my free feedback? As in evaluation-page says " post free comments on the discussion area of this page for evaluating our groups course prototype" I tried to do that (leave free comments on the discussion area), but failed many times.

Reflection - week 12

1. What was the most important thing you learned this week?
Well … technology can not be trusted. First I had a difficult week because our internet connection failed. It required several days form us to make it work again. The second problem was with our wikispaces: the system somehow did get craze. But I do hope that everything will be ok this week.

2. What was particularly interesting/boring in this week?
Reading feedback to our course was interesting, to see what happens with our wikispaces was interesting and unpleasant at the same time. Boring: it seems that only Robert; Jasna and I are worried about our group-work. This makes evaluation of the group-mates difficult. There is nothing interesting going on in their personal blogs as well….

3. Was there something you didn’t quite understand and want to know more about it?
What happen with wikispaces and my internet connection :)

4. What kind of questions/ideas/experiences this week’s activities raised for you?
How we should move on with our course design? Are there only Jasna and Robert left?

5. Which tools did you use this week, explain what was the purpose of using these tools
MSN - to communicate with my friends, MS Word - to write reflections, blog - to post this reflection, Wikispaces - to reorganise our space and left there few comments, Skype - to have an emergency meeting with Jasna and Robert.

6. With whom did you communicate during this week, how many times, with which tools, and for what purposes?
Jasna and Robert to discuss/synchronise our activities.

Reflection week 11

1. What was the most important thing you learned this week?
I was in Paris for few days in this week and I learned how wonderful world can be. How good the food can be and that it is possible to paint like Monet' did. I saw water lilies and I would now I know that it is possible to fall in love with … paintings.

2. What was particularly interesting/boring in this week?
Reading material offered again good ideas how to improve our course design. I do hope that my group-mates will contribute to do that.
Evaluation form I found very useful. It would have been good idea to introduce this earlier so that students would get more information about what is required. It certainly helped me - we are not so capable that we could think about everything.
Boring: I had no discussion about evaluation form with others. It seems that our group activated for one week only.

3. Was there something you didn’t quite understand and want to know more about it?
I guess not …
I'm not sure in evaluation criteria of this course. If some of members of group don't contribute and even local facilitators can't help to make it happen, then what can other members of the group do?
I'm not sure how I will evaluate the outcome of others. As this is experimental course and everything is not gone as planned earlier I don't think it is fair to be very hard on my course-mates. But at the same time: few of us are working quite hard and I don’t want to be unfair to them as well.

4. What kind of questions/ideas/experiences this week’s activities raised for you?
How to evaluate my group-mates….
And one other remark: even group 1 did not finished their evaluation form on time ….

5. Which tools did you use this week, explain what was the purpose of using these tools
MSN - to communicate with my friends, MS Word - to write reflections, blog - to post reflections, Moodle - for materials, Wikispaces - to write my part of course design and comment the work of others, e-mail - to clarify with Teje who should be our evaluators

6. With whom did you communicate during this week, how many times, with which tools, and for what purposes?
I posted few comments into our wikispaces area.

Reflection - week 10

1. What was the most important thing you learned this week?
Learning is social activity. I read just today Terjes question why our group did not communicate and discuss like this earlier. Well, we did not have a forum before and now we have a common goal to work together.
If we are talking about new generation (generation 2.0) then we must take into consideration that not only they are using different tools, but their way of thinking and contributing is also different. Forum enables quick discussion for many people, but the contributions are usually short. To communicate with many people blog is not flexible enough.

2. What was particularly interesting/boring in this week?
Interesting was how do different people think and work in forum. This was great. I really liked Olegs contribution (he knows a lot about football), but not only. I liked very much Olegs willingness to work further with the material and openness to have a dialogue.
What was interesting to me also was how do different people interpret the same information (vision in our case) and work with it.
It was nice that we did not have any reading materials for this week. I’m getting tired of this course as this is intensive.
What annoys me is that I can’t find enough time to write answers to my comments. I find these comments usually very interesting and I see them as part of discussion about elearning, but as we have always something new to do I put my priorities there. But I think that these comments are more useful to me to understand better the elearning world. So it makes me unhappy that I can not find enough time for this.

3. Was there something you didn’t quite understand and want to know more about it?
No.

4. What kind of questions/ideas/experiences this week’s activities raised for you?
What are goals and sub-goals in course design?
And one remark also – during last week when it was clear to everybody what to do and how to do it, everything went well. Now we as a group are a bit stuck again and it seems that members of our group do not know what to do next.

5. Which tools did you use this week, explain what was the purpose of using these tools (eg. social talk, to regulate my team activities, to work on documents)?
Skype – group meeting to clarify our plans and activities. MSN - to communicate with my friends, MS Word - to write reflections, blog - to post reflections, Moodle - for materials, Wikispaces - to write my part of course design and comment the work of others, e-mail - to clarify what Teje meant by sub-goals and to communicate friends/colleagues.

6. With whom did you communicate during this week, how many times, with which tools, and for what purposes?
With our group and Terje.

Reflection - week 9

1. What was the most important thing you learned this week?
What kind of passion is required to create something powerful and good in the world level. Yesterday I heard Berliner Philarmoniker with sir Simon Rattle. Wow, the fame they have does not come from nothing. I think you can do something really good if you like it and feel passionate about. I think that Estonian National Symphony Orchestra performs also good, but what differs them from BP is passion. Same thing is about teaching - to be a good teacher you have to feel passionate about it.

2. What was particularly interesting/boring in this week?
As this weeks assignment was reading and commenting the work of group-mates. Well, there was not much to read. First we don’t have learning contracts (this required divided roles). Then there are no materials in our collaboration space (but we will have them by the end of this week). I do hope that all group-mates will contribute finally something.
The only one who has done everything on time is Jasna. As usually I looked up some course-mates blogs: some of them are doing really great job and I admire the group-work of group1.

What was interesting: as I'm trying to write some reading reflections I did not finished on time, it is rather interesting to see how my thought about something change in time.

3. Was there something you didn’t quite understand and want to know more
about it?
Is self-directed learning only a nice theory? Self-directed learning and intrinsic motivation are so complex terms and they both have so many preconditions that maybe this is the reason why it is hard to see qualitative self-directed learning? Or maybe it does not succeed in formal education system as this system does not meet these preconditions? So many questions… I graduated andragogy few years ago and somehow I do believe in self-directed learning, but I don’t know success-stories from formal educational system. But there is always a chance that this theory has no real practical background.

4. What kind of questions/ideas/experiences this week’s activities raised for you?
How I can review something what does not exist :)

5. Which tools did you use this week, explain what was the purpose of using these tools (eg. social talk, to regulate my team activities, to work on documents)?
Skype - to communicate Jasna and Terje, MSN - to communicate with my friends, MS Word - to write reflections, blog - to post reflections and see whether others have done something, Moodle - for materials, wikispaces - to set up common space for our group, e-mail - to communicate friends/colleagues, doodle - to vote.

6. With whom did you communicate during this week, how many times, with which tools, and for what purposes?
With Jasna and Terje via Skype to discuss our group-work and how we should go further.

Reflection week 8

1. What was the most important thing you learned this week?
From theory I found Garrison, Anderson, and Archer model about "community of learning" brilliant. The theory behind elearning is quite new then the level of maturity is still not good. We have some first thought and surveys about it, but we still can't say that we understand how elearning is different of 'normal' learning. Even if we can say the difference between two of them, it is still not clear how to manage effectively elearning. Reading materials did not answer. Instead of an answer I read how almost everything in elearning is a challenge. Well, life is a challenge :) But it made me think whether the theory has gone too far away from practical world and the use of theories in practice is getting harder and harder? Theory has gone into the level where there are no easy answers/solutions anymore.

2. What was particularly interesting/boring in this week?
This week readings I found particularly interesting and boring at the same time: I did get confused: readings were like about everything and nothing at the same time. Maybe it's just me: I'm kind of bored and don't find everything so interesting anymore.
There was no active communication between our group members. What worries me is that half of our group has not contributed and shared their vision about our course. This makes moving forward hard. Sometimes I am afraid that we don’t (in our group) fully understand the world behind course design and tend to take everything too primitive level. I'm not sure how (or whether) I can help here.

3. Was there something you didn’t quite understand and want to know more
about it?
Fischer compared human and technology-based learning and it shows that technology is great enabler, but the question is how to use these possibilities without falling in love with technology and still preserving students attention. The importance of attention can not be underestimated.
There were two things I did not get: HOTS (seemed not systematic enough) and learning objects. Perhaps I have to do in the future some more reading about them.

4. What kind of questions/ideas/experiences this week’s activities raised for you?
Should we reorganise our group since there are members who don’t contribute? It seems that we can not rely on them.
I'm still observing the work of other course-mates and it seems that if the group-work is going on well in the personal blog there is less activity. The question is why?
We should have some structure into our course design. Terje suggested to take the main aspects from our course weblog and I agree. This can help understand better the work behind course design (what needs to be done). Sometimes I do get the feeling that the readings are not done or are done very superficially and this blocks our work.

5. Which tools did you use this week, explain what was the purpose of using these tools (eg. social talk, to regulate my team activities, to work on documents)?
Skype, MSN, MS Word, blog, Moodle, wikispaces, google docs, e-mail, doodle.
6. With whom did you communicate during this week, how many times, with which tools, and for what purposes?
I actually contacted with my ex course-mates from andragogy to discuss theory of self-directedness and intrinsic motivation.

Reflection 6 & 7

I had several exams during the past few weeks. This is the reason why I have not contributed here for a while. I tried to participate in group activities, so I don’t think that the group suffered because of my lower activity. I'll try to catch up.
I have received several comments to my writings and I'll try to write some answers. Writing an answer to the comment is also reflection.
1. What was the most important thing you learned this week?
Planning isn't everything. You can plan your time, but life can make some unexpected changes.
I believed that theory can explain everything. I had very interesting course during the past three weeks. From theoretical view this course was a disaster: monotonous lectures and professor, but the material was so intriguing that this course still changed my understanding of art, history, learning and life. I am very demanding when it comes to teaching and I had a lesson that: even if everything doesn’t follow the "right way", it still may be very interesting and useful.
2. What was particularly interesting/boring in this week?
Struggles: with my English. I have never learned how to talk or write in English and sometimes this annoys me, because everything takes more time than I wanted.
It was interesting to see, that communication motivates people. We had with our group nice meetings via skype, but surprisingly: when it comes to private contribution some members somehow disappear.
3. Was there something you didn’t quite understand and want to know more
about it?
About theoretical part I probably will have some questions, but first I have to read course materials. :)
4. What kind of questions/ideas/experiences this week’s activities raised for you?
First question remain the same: whether students still suffer with the overload of information and assignments? Is it too much to read, reflect your learning, reflect theoretical material and participate activley in group activities?
And one idea: we should have (in our group) some structure in our skype-meetings. If we discuss everything then nothing gets done :). Last time everybody talked about something (everybody had some questions and ideas) and it was kind of difficult to follow the discussion.
5. Which tools did you use this week, explain what was the purpose of using these tools (eg. social talk, to regulate my team activities, to work on documents)?
Skype, MSN, MS Word, blog, Moodle, wiki deki, google docs, e-mail.
6. With whom did you communicate during this week, how many times, with which tools, and for what purposes?
I communicated with my group.

Reflection - week 5

1. What was the most important thing you learned this week?
Well … As I have one very interesting course called History and Visions of Interactive Media and all the material in this course is looked at through artistic approach then this shadows everything else what I learned this week. I'm beginning to understand where the roots of interactive media are and how interactive media developed. Sometimes it's not nice to look at (cutting eyes or things like this), but it has rocked my world. After this every other learning experience of this week does not seem too serious or important.
2. What was particularly interesting/boring in this week?
I'm still struggling with the design of this course. I'm afraid that quite a lot of students will have negative impression about elearning. And there are real lives behind this course: real credit points, real money, real disappointments.
It was interesting to see learning contracts done by some other students (reading material).
3. Was there something you didn’t quite understand and want to know more
about it?
Not really. I probably must do some reading about motivation to understand how to motivate (or what drives the motivation) people to learn. How in reality to support them.
4. What kind of questions/ideas/experiences this week’s activities raised for you?
Questions: whether students still suffer with the overload of information and assignments? I have understood that few students are communicating with Terje quite a lot. Even if this is just some social talk in the evening - why are they communicating only with the facilitator why not with the rest of the group? Is there a way how we could make our group blog to work? I'll try to write comments to our group blog if there is something to comment or something for me to say…
5. Which tools did you use this week, explain what was the purpose of using these tools (eg. social talk, to regulate my team activities, to work on documents)?
Skype, MSN, MS Word, blog, Moodle, wiki deki
6. With whom did you communicate during this week, how many times, with which tools, and for what purposes?
Had a nice conversation with Terje, Jasna, Robert and the outcome is that we will have an other session quite soon.

Reflection - week 4

1. What was the most important thing you learned this week?
It's hard to say. This week I can not distinction anything. Somehow everything is at the moment blurry.

2. What was particularly interesting/boring in this week?
I struggled again with my motivation and thought a lot about course design. Terjes comments were really interesting and I'm thinking what to answer to them. I read one comment form Terje were she suggested that perhaps student's must not go to deep into all the materials but perhaps should decide what is important and what is not. I tried this approach this week and … did not like it. I can not read diagonally, if I want to take the best out of it, i have to go deep…

3. Was there something you didn't quite understand and want to know more
about it?
No :). I have always wondered if students answer that they do get everything - it is usually a lie.

4. What kind of questions/ideas/experiences this week's activities raised for you?
It was really great to read Terjes comments and it gives me motivation to write some answers and continue discussion. And this made me think: what not use this for motivation. What not to make it assignment for one or two weeks? No other homework - students just must read reflections and reading overviews made by others and write comments to them. As we all have read the same papers this might cause deeper reflection even.

5. Which tools did you use this week, explain what was the purpose of using these tools (eg. social talk, to regulate my team activities, to work on documents)?
Skype, MSN, MS Word, blog, Moodle

6. With whom did you communicate during this week, how many times, with which tools, and for what purposes?
I did contact with Terje - we had nice chat about course, just some feedback.

Reflection week 3

1. What was the most important thing you learned this week?
I think that the most important thing I learned was how complicated it is to design and implement a good online course. Having students with very different backgrounds: some argue about socio-cognition (vau!) and some don't know what reflection is.

2. What was particularly interesting/boring in this week?
I struggled all week with my motivation - it was sometimes interesting and sometimes annoying.

3. Was there something you didn't quite understand and want to know more
about it?
There are many questions. As theories behind elearning are quite new, they often arise more questions then they have answers.

4. What kind of questions/ideas/experiences this week's activities raised for you?
How to design and implement a good online course?
When I joined this course I had intrinsic motivation. Course sounded so interesting but for some reasons I lost my motivation. So actually I was looking answers why it happened in readings of this week and I tried to reflect my thoughts and expectations just to understand what is going on with me.
I'm not enjoying this course and I'm not having fun. I do understand that I have not been very active during this course yet, but I found so many people among students who are even less active as I am. So the problem is not just me.
Materials of this course are great - very interesting but also difficult. The problem might be that even if students have questions they don’t ask them. I know that I don’t. Usually these questions do not have one right answer and they need some discussion. This is something what is ease to do in classroom: you just ask and you get an answer and then you can ask again and all the time you actually think along. Here, even when I do ask my questions - my thoughts are not all the time with the context. Here time actually disturbs learning process and synergy. Plus I do feel that we have to much information: over 100 pages of different articles, over 100 slides plus blogs of students/facilitators to read. Everything has different approach, different layout …
Second thing is that I don’t know were to start: where should I post my question? Wiki? Forum? E-mail? Blog? I tried blog but I don’t still have no answers. So this is a wrong way. But I don't know what is right! EMIM forum? Until now it is more used to test and it is unclear to me whether it is for deeper discussion or what kind of questions it is for? Here perhaps might be a good idea if facilitators would take a bit more active role and post some questions there. I spent a lot of time to go through other blogs in our course. There are few brilliant students who write brilliant posts. Perhaps it would be good idea that facilitators will choose every week some interesting ideas/questions to post there so everybody will have a visible opportunity to read/discuss with others. So good posts/ideas come visible for them who don't know much about elearning and we could have several brilliant discussions. Perhaps here some encouragement from facilitators side might help. At the moment there very little discussion about theories we read and questions we have. Another thing: I read that many students write that they have no questions … I can not believe this…
Another thing I thought about is that perhaps there are too many tasks for students. In the begging there are to many environments were we have to create an account. Perhaps this is a little scary? For me it was! And it takes time to get to know those environments - more then one week. All students have different background: for some it is technically to demanding (don't be in love with different environments!), for some it is theoretically to demanding (my background is in adult education and sometimes it is hard for me to understand everything or to select what is really important). As we don't have classroom discussions and explanations I do feel left alone with my study and struggles.
Too many challenges create frustration and kill motivation. My suggestion is to take some time off and give students more time to adapt.


5. Which tools did you use this week, explain what was the purpose of using these tools (eg. social talk, to regulate my team activities, to work on documents)?
Skype, MSN, MS Word, blog

6. With whom did you communicate during this week, how many times, with which tools, and for what purposes?
I wrote 2 comments for Jasna (actually one was more to Terje), one comment for Terje. Via skype communicated shortly with Oleg and Lesavik 
More I read different blogs (facilitators and studens) and their comments. I still need some time to adapt.

Week 2

What was the most important thing you learned this week?
From article: learning process must have fun together. This very important - perhaps even more important then knowledge about behaviourism, constructivism…
What was particularly interesting/boring in this week?
We still don’t have discussion, but it is not ease to have discussion with 70 persons and we just formed our group.
Interesting - I'm still trying to figure out how exactly work with this blog.
Was there something you didn’t quite understand and want to know more
about it?
There are some thoughts in my readings blog. I must sure how do authors understand "tacit knowledge" and how knowledge becomes "tacit".
What kind of questions/ideas/experiences this week’s activities raised for you?
Experiences … I'm a little more experienced how to handle my blog… but I'm still not an expert.
Which tools did you use this week, explain what was the purpose of using these tools (eg. social talk, to regulate my team activities, to work on documents)?
Moodle, Blog. I looked some links Moodle offered.
MSN, Skype - to communicate with my friends 
MS Word - to write reflections.
With whom did you communicate during this week, how many times, with which tools, and for what purposes?
There was no communication from my side with co-students during this week. I read blogs of co-students and facilitators and tried to figure out what kind of persons stand behind them.

Week 1

What was the most important thing you learned this week?

There were several interesting approaches in articles: content-content interaction; Ermter-Newby’s taxonomy and many more. Idea that web’s in-built capacity for hyperlinking has been compared to the way in which human knowledge is stored in mental shema.

What was particularly interesting/boring in this week?

Boring - there was no discussion this week, but this is normal.

Interesting - everything is new and therefore interesting.

Was there something you didn’t quite understand and want to know more
about it?

Two things:

1. content-content interaction - I have always thought that interaction takes place between to subjects (student-student; teacher-teacher; student-teacher). It is hard to me to accept that interaction could take place between subject-object or even object-object. How can to contents interact with each other?
2. “agent”-idea in Online Learning and the Semantic Web I did not get. It would be great to know a little more about Semantic Web.

What kind of questions/ideas/experiences this week’s activities raised for you?

It is too early to say. Second chapter of the book was very interesting for me.

Which tools did you use this week, explain what was the purpose of using these tools (eg. social talk, to regulate my team activities, to work on documents)?

Scuttle, Moodle - to get started :)

MSN - to communicate with my friends, but it had nothing to do with this course.

With whom did you communicate during this week, how many times, with which tools, and for what purposes?

There was no communication with co-students during this week. I read introductions/blogs of co-students and facilitators.

Hello

My name is Kersti and currently I am studying at the University of Tallinn in Estonia. I am a student of IMKE.

I like travelling, photographing. Every country is different and there is always something to discover and perpetuate. So I have lot of pictures. If I should somehow categorize them, then the biggest catalogue would carry a name "Croatia" :)

Beautiful country (excellent food, good wine if you know what and where to eat and drink) and from my point of view Varazdin is not a typical Croatian city …

But we in Estonia have white nights in summer-time :)


I have used before: blog, wiki, msn, skype, orkut (community portal).

My interest in this course: what is e-learning, how can e-learning be successful, learning strategies, …

I am little sceptical about e-learning and this is my first e-learning course. I do hope it changes my preconception.

Other expectations:

I want to have some structured knowledge about e-learning.

I am curious whether e-course can create synergy between learners and teachers.