First Official Reflection on Course Learning

Ok, the challenge is to reflect for 500 to 800 words. Since the reflection is the most difficult part of the course for me, this could be too much. I chose to call my blog Reflections on Learning because I knew this would be expected of us, and I wanted to remind myself that it needed to be done.

One. Thinking about how my prior experience may be affecting my views of the course by doing comparison and contrast with other recent learning:
Coming off only doing 15 points in Semester One, and doing that course in between urgent work deadlines has meant a radical shift for me in terms of viewing this course. This course requires more work (well obviously!)and much more engagement with the process as well as the content. My Semester One course was offered in online and f2f mode but the online was really just watching and listening to the recordings and power-points then doing what the others had done in class. I went to one face to face class and found it much more engaging than working alone in the online mode. This course has genuine online engagement and the mode and pace of interaction has been carefully considered and planned. It is more like the two courses I took last year. My prior experience and my work experience have not involved the use of wikieducator but have been very much based in using an LMS and websites. Therefore, I found it difficult to accept that making the course more inclusive for others in other parts of the world meant making it more difficult for me. (Egocentric but true). I had been used to working towards making online offerings device agnostic and therefore avoiding the use of frames, and flash and trying to use HTML5. So my prior experience led me to think I would be able to use my iPad a lot more than has been possible. In particular, I cannot view videos there and this has meant a more disjointed learning experience, as my partner and I have to share the PC, which he often needs to do some work on in the evenings, too.

Two. Thinking about new content and its application:
In week one we made a blog, picked a topic and began an annotated bibliography. Making and using a blog was the only part of this that I was unfamiliar with, and I reflected on that previously  in my introduction blog. Picking a topic, as others have commented on, was hard when we were doing it in a vacuum and really only had the title of the course and the assessment tasks to go from. I wished to have a topic that was relevant to work and that I already wanted to know the answers to or wider viewpoints on. Although I like my current topic, it doesn't really fit too well with what we started to look at in Week two - the ecological approach and arena model. That approach applies quite well in my personal experience, just that I am not in the playing field but in the stands. It has been helpful to share with the rest of the class and see where each person sees themselves fitting. I have been surprised by the people who had not realised until applying this approach that what they did in their classroom could affect a wide variety of other stakeholders, though they know that other stakeholders affected them. I guess I juggle that to various degrees all day. I hear from students, teachers, IT professionals, our own group, senior management, parents, other professionals etc., on various aspects of the same topic or project so it  feels far too interconnected to me sometimes. The arena model in a way reminds me of the butterfly effect. Yes, I am quoting wikipedia, and for a quick introductory overview, I think that is appropriate even in a postgraduate course. I am impressed that we have as one of our lecturers such an experienced educational thinker who can form elegant models and theories. I feel fortunate that Niki and Wayne are the ones taking us through this content and I love that we get prompt feedback on where we are going individually as well as summaries for us as a group. In terms of applying content, I have found this week's models fascinating and have already begun to test their application in work I am doing. They ring true so far, and I suspect that my preferences for some models over others is based  on being not very task oriented but very strongly people oriented in my approach. I will have to be careful not to let this bias interfere with chosing the most applicable theoretical framework.

Three. My questions:
Can I spend enough time interacting with the rest of the class? I like it when we all answer a question on the forum, as then I get a real feeling that we are all in this together and can start to see our common and different views and knowledge. Going in and out of the blogs is too messy for my mind to collate this holistic view. Maybe we will do this in the MOOC bit in the next weeks?
 Do we get to read each other's essays? This follows on from my first question.

 So there it is... first official reflection...

Music listened to while preparing this blog post: Monday, Monday by The Mamas and The Papas. (because we are singing this in the Lincoln University Campus Choir at present, and there is a particular note I don't get). Got to multitask :-)