damir’s blog

Well, we finally reached the end of one specific course for me.

Right today we me and my college mates and facilitator Igor had a brief meeting of our final thoughts  about course. And reflections are prety positive and good. Since this is first time we participated in such way of studying we all gained new experiences, knowledge and find out about pros and cons of online learning and virtual teamwork. For someone it was great experience, becouse they meet new people, had a lot informal chats, exchange music and pictures and so on so on - they make good and fun friendships and find out something about someone from different countries. For me I cant say that I experienced such thing because all of our teamwork was strictly based on tasks which should be done. I don’t know was time the problem or something else that we didn’t meet our selfs inside team better but I’m sorry for it. It is great to have good collages for work,  but  bit of fun, informal socializing and meeting someone or something better than this … no.

But related to the course i gained some new knowledge and have better perception of online learning and teamwork now than I had before. In this matters I’m quite satisfied. However whole thing was pilot project so at the end it came out very well. All teams made they courses which are interesting and cool.

Now little bit about materials and else: there was way too many materials for me! I know that principe is to find out by yourself what is more or less important, but this semester I was really underlimited with time. And final thing which is in my mind are tools: in past 3 months I find out about a lot of online tools that a never heard about before and they are more than useful. I-camp really did good work in this manners. And of course, this tools I will continue to use.

And final thoughts: my personal evaluation of whole course is very good (4/5), and  if I will or would have chance I would like to participate in more similar projects.

PS - CROATIA WILL KICK ASS ON EURO 2008!!!! PROUD TO BE CROAT!!!!!!  OOOOOoooooOOOOOOooooooOOOOo!!!!!!!

1. What was the most important thing you learned this week?

Well this week(s) we are easily coming to the end with course so we should do our final tasks…that means to evaluate someone else’s course and analyze comments of our course…

So let’s begin with second one:

I think that Zoho tool for questionnaire was pretty effective, since we got 5 comments (evaluation reflection) on our course. I was specially interested in Kersti’s comment: she let us know about 2 bad things which recommends should be changed: 10 weeks is too long for our course (2 weeks per iteration) and i think she is right…she noticed that students could lose motivation after that long period. And second: our course is to static, we have only text within our course..very little pictures, so she recommended that even one joke picture would make course better…totally agree. However, other comments and evaluations are positive, especially about our topic which is very interesting to everyone who evaluated it..

And now about my evaluation of group 2:

Their topic was football…looks like euromania before Euro Austria&Switzerland is omnipresent! Very creative topic!  Ho  would think  someone will integrate sport topic in e-learning??I like i t very much!!  They course is nice, full of pictures and videos, which is impressing. However,  a little criticism on topic: everything is cool, but you need football field, balls and coach and than everything would be perfect!

2. What was particularly interesting/boring in this week?

It was interesting to see our course from perception of other people…every critics works well and can only improve it. It is also interesting to see other group’s work..looks like this e-learning course was successfully after all..groups show they creativity and applied knowledge..

 3. Was there something you didn’t quite understand and want to know more
about it?

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 4. What kind of questions/ideas/experiences this week’s activities raised for you?

How possibly could I continue to work on e-learning topic after this course? Since my thesis is about moodle, kind related to e-learning…so i will try to embed my  knowledge and experiences with different tools in my thesis and make it as good as possible..

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)?

Wikispaces, blogs…

6. With whom did you communicate during this week, how many times, with which tools, and for what purposes?

Nobody particular..just reading…

1. What was the most important thing you learned this week?

Well, this week I learned how actually Zoho tools are cool! I didn’t imagine Zoho as so powerful until I checked some video tutorials on Zoho creator. It is very cool tool to create very complexed forms and it offers a lot programming and database features, which would be really hard to design by our own. Well we used it only like our evaluation questionnaire, nothing complicated, but cool however. I hope that it we bill useful as I imagined..

2. What was particularly interesting/boring in this week?

Our course is finished, so we can just wait for comments of other people…

 3. Was there something you didn’t quite understand and want to know more
about it?

Not exactly

4. What kind of questions/ideas/experiences this week’s activities raised for you?

How will this evaluation progress, since there is lot of groups and members, I hope that respond should be good..

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)?

Mostly Zoho, I used it to create questionnaire. I was impressed with the tool, It is very good (maybe because it is one of the first of that kind that I used). I’m sure that I will use it further after the course. I also used wikispaces, blog,….

6. With whom did you communicate during this week, how many times, with which tools, and for what purposes?

Sonja over the wiki discussions, and we tried with chat on skype but we couldn’t synchronize…each was away while another online… :-)

1. What was the most important thing you learned this week?

Nothing specific this week…just guessing how others will reflect on our course. Hope they will like it. Topic is attractive and interesting so I believe it will work out just fine. Finally looks like we are successful since some members of group quited (least I guess so)..

2. What was particularly interesting/boring in this week?

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3. Was there something you didn’t quite understand and want to know more
about it?

-
4. What kind of questions/ideas/experiences this week’s activities raised for you?

How to present course to others…looks like this task is only one left since the proto is almost finished..

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)?

Wikispaces, blog, wikispaces, moodle, etc. etc. … .. .

6. With whom did you communicate during this week, how many times, with which tools, and for what purposes?

Little with Kai over skype, and some discussions on guno…

My objectives: Why i wish to learn/do something, what is meaningful for me/for my group as part of the assignment i am responsible of?

To learn main concepts and methods of distance learning and learn to use all web based tools offered in this course. Also in my country educational system is trying to apply more e-learning because they realize all the advantages of this method. So I think that in future I’ll be able to create, organize and administrate online courses. I think it will be appreciated and privileged job. For me international teamwork and cooperation is also high motivation factor.

What resources will i need: What software tools and resources i am going to use? Resources can be people, different artifacts, materials.

PEOPLE: Members from my group one, facilitators Kai, Terje and Igor and course members from my faculty.

WEB BASED SOFTWARE RESOURCES: most of web 2.0 based technologies that are used in our course (doodle, blog, wikis, google group, i-launge, scuttle…), google gadgets, moodle etc.

DESKTOP BASED RESOURCES: Microsoft office, and Photoshop, Adobe tools, Macromedia tools if necessary.

LEARNING MATERIALS: e-book’s and resources included in course, links and web pages and forums dedicated to online learning, comments and advices from facilitators and other members.

How will i do it: What is my strategy to achieve my objectives? What is the order of my actions? How will i use different resources in my actions?

I will read materials, communicate with group and faculty members who are part of this course, ask for advices if something I won’t understand. My actions will be based on teamwork and individual work.

Evaluation criteria: How do I know that i was successful? Develop measurable criteria to evaluate your activities in respect of your objectives.

My success will be based on my activity in discussions and course design, following weekly tasks. Comments from facilitators and group members are also result of my work.

Self-reflection: Did i achieve my objectives? Use the criteria what you developed to assess how well did you work. Reflect, what worked and what did not?

Regarding on my objectives there are things that I achieved. Most important is that my knowledge of e-lerning, course design and web 2.0 offered in this course was poor before I took part in it, so my personal opinion is that current progress exists. Also I experienced new kind of (virtual) teamwork which is new and valuable experience for me, in a positive way. However there are disadvantages of distant teamwork we all experienced, but it will be lot easier in future when knowing what can i expect.

In his reflection Mikko was right that we need plan b if something unexpected occurs. (read Mikko’s reflection on week 9)…

So here is what i think (also in his comments):

Do we have time for plan b? however, course is designed well but problems can always occur….maybe if whole designing e-learning course has backup plan with unexpected situations would help us…

Whole e-learning stuff is still new for most of population, so some transitional step should exist….my idea is to combine e-learning with weekly live meetings, but it is not possible for us, right? My experience with combined schedule is great: we have normal classes, but e-learning is just secondary tool which helps in organizing class (e.g. all homeworks and task are on e-learning system) and everything related. Even group chat can’t do that much as when we are all in same room discussing. Maybe video conference would do? But someone can be technically limited….

However it is disadvantage but it is still pilot project which should be improved by preforming it and see how it is going.

1. What was the most important thing you learned this week?

Well, our course has been defined and materials gathered. So let’s reflect on it. There are some pros and cons from my point of view: topic is good and efficient; blogs are very popular lately and used in lots of aspects, so in education too. Our vision of blog usage has been well defined so learners should learn basics of blogs and their use. RSS is also related to it because it is great way to automatically gather informations than searching for itself. I put interesting link with video presentation of RSS to our del.icio.us, so check it out, I’m sure you will like it. But what is in my atention are materials. We only use links to pages related to topics which is good and bad. Good because they are rich and learners can catch all relevant informations related to current topic. Bad because links are now available, but we don’t know if same links will be available in 6-12 months. It is possible that for some reason they will be gone. And also, learners are forced to be autonomous with their materials. For someone it is great opportunity, but someone can find that too hard and don’t know how to use and handle that much materials. Also, some articles in wikis may not be consistent. Everyone can write articles in wikis, but it is not promising that author is expert in current area and that everything in articles is true and consistent. But however, we are time limited with course schedule and own business to design our own materials. Conclusion: topic is great, efficient, useful and well motivated learner should manage to use it correctly and learn what was intended for him to learn. Other people from my faculty find our topic very interesting and I was pleased to hear that. And we are not much behind schedule, so i think we did great work..i mean, Sami and Mikko did most of it, but is really hard to keep up their tempo.

2. What was particularly interesting/boring in this week?

Since we are close to finalizing our course there were little tensions from my side too keep up with schedule and and do all tasks.

3. Was there something you didn’t quite understand and want to know more
about it?

I don’t know how to keep up with Finnish crew, they are way to good and fast to follow them! I am athletic kind of person, but i didn’t manage to have that much shape to synchronize with them..keep up good work guys!

4. What kind of questions/ideas/experiences this week’s activities raised for you?
It is great to see how course is developing, hope we will do great work (we already did) and that others will like it.

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)?
Mostly wikispaces and our account at del.ico.us

6. With whom did you communicate during this week, how many times, with which tools, and for what purposes?

Kai via skype, discussions in wikispaces…like usual..

1. What was the most important thing you learned this week?

 That creating course materials is not as easy as it looks. In our faculty, links are optional materials for learning..primary are pdf-s and ppt.-s with current topics regarding course - so we are not forced to look for materials for ourself. We are not totally e-learning, we have classical classes so it is expected. Our course is completely online so it is understandable that we have different kind of organizing materials…

2. What was particularly interesting/boring in this week?

Course is getting couple of weeks to the end, so there is little pressure on me, will i manage to do everything i planed and should do..
3. Was there something you didn’t quite understand and want to know more
about it?

 I didn’t understand how will our course materials be organized, so i was bit lost…but Mikko made del.icio.us account so it is bit easier.
4. What kind of questions/ideas/experiences this week’s activities raised for you?
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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)?
Wikispaces, wikispaces, wikispaces…

6. With whom did you communicate during this week, how many times, with which tools, and for what purposes?

Everybody…using skype, discussions in wikispaces, e-mail…

In past few weeks there were many theoretical materials given to us. Most of them were on theoretical basis, less about current tools. However from this materials i figured out that whole e-learning process is not as easy as I imagined. It looks even easier than classical learning. But e-learning is combination of classical pedagogic model and technology based learning. For example, I learned about two way of assessing students: teacher and peer-to-peer assessment. Even though there are some pros and cons of this model, it is much more appropriate in e-learning than classical. There is also wide range of stuff about whole e-learning, but this course helped me to understand it in much closer way.

Hey everybody!

THIS POST is published both in my blog and in our wikispaces to set focus on it.

Since our approximate deadline for course works is 10th May I felt to write this post to set some things clear (which i don’t fully understand). It is related to our course materials generaly (and other parts). I assume that we should find some internet resources as a literature for our topic, but should we design something by ourself or this will be enough??? Please explain, I don’t want to understand things in wrong way!! Because if we will (and we will) use bookmarks as resources we need some tool where we can implement it. I ask all this because i don’t want to start writing (my) our materials because I’m bit afraid it will not be good, I will not hit the topic. MY MAIN IDEA is to split tasks who will do what because there is too much work and too little time to do it randomly by everyone not knowing who is doing what. Final product is group work, but generated by our individual work. PLEASE COMMENT so we can clear misunderstanding and focus on individual work for course.