Water Under the Bridge - Reflection Time Again

Avon River punting station. L. Ainsworth March 2012

It seems like a long time since I reflected last. I have not maintained the intensity and excitement of the mOOC and scenario planning time, though the work we have done around the organisation has been extremely relevant and valuable for me at work right now and has informed some decisions and directions.
First, though, thoughts about the assignments. I took a few days away from course work and found it hard to go back. Work expanded into the gaps, though I did get a lovely weekend away at Le Bons Bay and a bit of time in the garden. I've learned (again) that it is best to keep at it with assignments and doggedly work to complete them; this piece of learning should help me with the final assignments and keep my motivation high in the next couple of weeks. I definitely appreciated the focused feedback provided when we received our grades, though it was not as detailed as some I had received in other courses. It was interesting to see where my assessment of my own likely grade using the rubric was out in a couple of places, but mostly quite accurate. By this stage of my career, I expect I should be able to assess my own outputs, so it was reassuring to find that was true.

Next, we looked at Wayne's analysis of the SP4Ed, and thought about the international context of our study. For me, the takeaway message was around the critical mass building the experience. I thought by the substance of the comments we were making that we all participated because we wanted to engage with the content and the people, not because the driver for some of us was the need to be there for the course credit. I would really like to go and read through the entire conversation stream again from start to finish. ( Not right now, though). Related to that was the interesting analysis of the source of our participation - I knew that I had migrated during the first week from Twitter to the WikiEducator messaging stream for most of my posts because the WE stream permitted slightly longer posts, and it gave instant gratification, rather than moving back and forth from my normal Twitter stream to follow the hashtag. Seemed like other people used that more as well and it would be interesting to know why. Who is there at different times of the day or night depended not just on the timezone but on what people had going on in the rest of their lives - work, family commitments, sport etc. but there was an international flavour most times I was there.

Working on e-learning benchmarking for the past two weeks has, as I said, been helpful. I have read a lot, as this was an area that was not familiar to me, though the general principles were, and I have used other models/evaluative tools to benchmark in other settings. Really engaging with what best practice can be for an organisation in general, and for mine and others in particular has been a learning opportunity that I am fortunate to get within the context of this course. Change with digital technologies must be measured if it is to be sustained and developed (this backs up reading that we did for the change models earlier in the course). The connection has become quite clear in the last week.
Ideally, I think, we should establish a base measurement before commencing each new aspect of change, but in the real world, does this actually happen in educational organisations? I would like to know the answer to that question. Do we always then close the loop, and build on the reflections and progress in the ideal action research spiral upwards? This fits with the four modes of reflection that are shown in a table in the reference below by Tiong. They are: reflection to action, reflection in action, reflection on action and reflection for action.
In my working life, I have not observed this happening in a consistent manner and maybe that is due to changes in staff, changes in priorities, changes in funding? Trying to model it as one person is difficult enough if wishing to achieve consistency!
Anyway, doing the practical analysis exercises has helped me with this particular section of the course - I do learn better if I reinforce my reading and thinking with some actual doing! Even the wretched mind-mapping was a good opportunity to move further forward with learning to use a new software than I managed in the earlier mindmapping exercise that we undertook. patience and persistence pays off.

Finally, when Wayne continues to remind us that everything we might want to know is quite likely available on the open web, (true e.g. last year I learned how to successfully patch an airbed from Youtube) spending time without power last week makes me very happy that I also have plenty of print resources available to me at home and at work. I miss being able to keyword search when using them, but I love that I can flick back and forth in the pages. However, I am glad that the storm wasn't closer to when our next assessments are due in.



References:
Rusten, E. & Shuman, S. (2008, June 21). Critical thinking in education. Retrieved from: http://www.slideshare.net/erusten/critical-thinking-in-education

Tiong, H.B. (2007, June18).Engaging in  reflective practice. [Blog post]. Retrieved from: http://www.classpointconsulting.com/articles/ReflectivePractice.html

Music listened to while preparing this blog post: This week it has been the CD Gloria: the sacred music of John Rutter. John Rutter has written some excellent Christmas carols, but this is some of his other work. I especially enjoy his version of  All things bright and beautiful.