My plan to actually blog here seems to not have worked very well. As usual, life got crazy busy, and I was put out by a head cold for a bit. Perfectly normal for November. But even though I haven’t been writing, I’ve been thinking a bit. The fourth topic for the ONL course was designing for blended and online learning, and well… It’s an interesting topic, and made me reflect how hard this can be.

I’m not really a natural teacher, but I’ve been teaching to some extent for the last fifteen years. At the beginning, however, it was done without much afterthought in a way I think it’s done more often than not. During this topic, we discussed models for how group learning in a blended environment can be achieved, and how to design for it. I suppose a lot of the discussion focused on the blended aspect, but I still found myself thinking about the group aspect too. Maybe because one of the reading materials that were assigned for this part of the course was the Five stage model of online learning by Gilly Salmon, which definitely puts online learning in a social context. And like one of the other people in my PBL group pointed out, it pretty well described how our group developed.

During my day to day work, I teach information literacy mainly in one shot sessions. This means that I can’t really watch how the collaboration within a group develops, and I can’t really set up groups unless the people are well acquainted beforehand – it takes too much time to get started when all I have is two hours. But much as I’ve learnt that teaching something greatly enhances my understanding of a subject, this course taught me that a good group collaboration can make me understand a topic better, and to view it from more angles. (It helped to have a good group of people willing to try out things and to talk things through, something I haven’t always had in other courses that included group work. The PBL group I worked with for ONL181 was a great group of people to work with – thank you guys!) Also, what I teach is never a students primary concern. How to search for, sort and use information is something they need to solve another problem. This means that I need to be very deliberate in how I plan for facilitating communication and the production of something that students can use not only for finding whatever information they need at the moment, but to be better prepared for future courses. Right now, I’m thinking about how encouraging them to collaborate perhaps could help them build an understanding of some information literacy concepts, rather than just let the session solve their immediate need for some pieces of literature to fulfil the current assignment.