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.