personal – Intercalat-ed

So, I need to finish up my ONL181 writing. I don’t really know what will happen to this blog after the course is finished, but for now I’m thinking I’ll keep it and maybe add stray thoughts when I feel like it. It would certainly be useful for me to have a way of remembering what I was thinking about a year or two ago.

Lately, online learning has been on my mind quite a lot. But also learning in a PBL group, which was actually one of the things that seemed interesting to me before the ONL181 course started. I’ve never participated in a PBL course before, and that proved to be a very interesting experience. I still don’t understand how and when PBL should be used, possibly because of what I normally teach. Neither pure maths nor one-of info-lit sessions really lend themselves to it. I also suspect it takes a bit of practice to learn how to be a good student on PBL courses, I somehow feel like I’ve brushed on the surface but haven’t gotten as deep as I would have liked for some of the things we’ve been working on. But now I know a little of how PBL works at least.

One thing that was really interesting during the course was that we were using tools that were new to most of us for a lot of it. I’ve been trying to notice how I react to these new tools, but also how they work for the others in my group. It’s interesting how differently people take them on, and how we interact with online tools, even though everyone in this course seemed to be quite good at handling technology. Much more so than the students I meet regularly. Their ability to handle technology varies so much that this is one of the reasons I sometimes hesitate to use online tools for teaching. Also, I primarily meet students that don’t take online courses, but are rather more used to face to face instruction. But the ONL181 course has definitely encouraged me to try to use more online tools, even though I need to do it carefully, choosing the right tools and using them in meaningful ways. I find it hard to know what works sometimes, especially since these days I usually only meet students once during a course, but I’ve decided to try.

I found the video conferencing aspect of the ONL181 course to be working surprisingly well for interaction. This is really something that has changed during the last few years, and something that I believe will make online teaching a lot easier.

So, to put an end to my ONL181 ramblings, it’s been a lot of fun, it’s been sometimes confusing, and I did learn a number of new things. Thanks to everyone in my PBL group! And to the organizers! I’m looking forward to probably act as a co-facilitator for one of the groups in ONL191, so this adventure is ongoing…

I keep trying to decide whether I should start this post of with some kind of explanation, or if I should just jump in and write a short comment on some of the course material for ONL181. The ONL181 course is the reason I started this blog, and we’ll see how much I write here except for course writing. But one of the first topic suggestions was to share a bit of our online journeys and I thought that could serve as an introduction of me. So I’m just putting this at the start of the blog to get me started and avoid an experience as disappointing as the one had by Dennis Upper (1974).

One of the suggested readings was an article by David S. White and Alison Le Cornu (2011) . There was also a couple of related videos that I quickly lost interest in – so much music and walking around and very little content – not even turning the speed up to 1.25 helped very much so I stuck with the text. The text, on the other hand, I found interesting. I’ve always disliked the digital natives narrative, though my reasons to do so were mainly personal. When I first read about the visitors and residents a couple of years back in a blog post for Jisc written by Donna Lanclos (2016) I immediately found the model more appealing, but I never went on to read the original source by White and Le Cornu. My reasons for disliking the idea of digital natives were mainly personal – I’m too old to be a digital native, but still I had an online residency before social media was even something anyone had heard of. I lived an large part of my life online from about when I was 15 to around 25, even though towards the end of that period I had met most of the people I interacted with regularly both online and offline. Since then, life outside the online world has seen more appealing, and I simply haven’t had time and energy to spend to maintain more than a very sporadic online presence. These days, I’m much more likely to use a visitor approach to being online. I’m still quite able to use online tools for most things when I need it, but a lot of the time, I just don’t see the benefit of engagement. I just prefer to think of it as something I choose, rather than being the only way things could be based on when I was born. I moved out, and I go back mostly as a visitor.

b41f9266267135.5b10151f5cd9b — Photo by Benjie Dutton used under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

Sources

Lanclos, D. (Feb 23, 2016) The death of the digital native: four provocations from Digifest speaker, Dr Donna Lanclos, Jisc. Available here
Upper, D. (1974). The unsuccessful self-treatment of a case of “writer’s block” Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 7(3), 497-497. Available here
White, D. S. & Le Cornu, A. (2011) Visitors and residents: A new typology for online engagement. First Monday, 16(9). Available here

Tag: personal

Housekeeping and other practicalities

A personal reflection on the visitors and residents typology

Sources