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.
5 comments:
Thank you for the reflection. It was the initial idea that students could comment others weblogs, but in some reasons they have problems with handling their own weblogs. It would be great to see that students actually comment each other, challenge others with their comments, argue about the topics...but obviously we are not ready for these kind of open discussions. First I thought this is the problem that Estonians have (also Finns) that they are reserved, shy, moderate...not very open, don't show their emotions, don't ask questions, but the more I work with international students the more I get confirmation that it is not only about estonians
There are some groups where comments made by other students are very common. But it seems that in these groups there are some students who know each other and interact with each other in their everyday life also.
For others: maybe the overload of information and too many environments (I use only few of them) scared them away. Other thing is that students do have very different knowledge about education and learning and this might be frightening also. It seemed to me that there are 2 kinds of comments: some encourage others (it is not a problem that you feel insecure about your English …), other have very deep content in their comments (about socio-cognition). First kind of comments I don’t think necessary to write. To the second kind of comments I usually have nothing to add… To build up comment-writing between students requires students who have similar previous knowledge-base.
Just one more thought: if commenting of blog post made by others was an assignment of one week - two weeks, perhaps this could encourage communication between course-mates? The assignment would be in that case not reading some academic materials but reading course-mates blogs and writing comments.
I agree that we probably should have paid more attention to encouraging students to comment each other's weblogs. On the other hand we kind of expected that this is something natural and students would do this anyway. My logic is that if I work in a group I would definitely want to know what is going on in other group members' weblgos and reading something would always trigger some own ideas. Well sure writing down my ideas to somebody's weblog is probably the tricky one. At least in some groups it works pretty well.
I visited again several blogs of course-mates (I do it every day now:). It seems that more active are students how have their real-life course-mates also studding in our elearning course - it gives them possibility to talk and reflect more, share experiences and get support. So if students are close to each other (and with one of the facilitators?) in their everyday life, then the discussion is more active in blogs and group spaces also. And one more thing: groups depend on their facilitator: they reflect the facilitators behavior (if facilitator doesn't have rss feed members of group don't have it either...)
First of all most of you don't know this, but both Bulgarian students and Spanish students started with this course few weeks later due to their other studies. We knew it, but we still decided to start with our course. (It was agreed with all the facilitators). So this is one of the reasons why quite many are behind the schedule and we expected this. Regarding the facilitators, it is interesting to see different approaches that they have taken and compare these strategies later. So do you have some recommendations that I should/should not do?
Facilitator can't make students close to each other, this all depends on students themselves.
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