Terje's blog

We have managed to finish the course “e-leraning” for this year. In general, I am satisfied with the participants, their contribution and interesting group work products. Sometimes they challenged me with their sophisticated posts and interesting questions, sometimes I had to be disappointed if some of us just stopped in the middle of the road, although the beginning had been so promising.

Thank you very much for your contributions and effort to make this course happen.

See you next year!

All the best,
Terje

…has started. It means that this is a last chance to finish all the tasks and catch up with the course schedule. The final deadline is 16th of May.

Furthermore, now it is time to look back and think…what was done and how, have I fulfilled my goals, what actually worked for me and what not, what are my strengths and what are the aspects I need to practice more - a self-reflection on my own progress.

I know it is not easy to put a grade for myself. We are not used to do this at universities and it will be even part of the final grade. However, I still hope that this is a step further…not only a teacher/facilitator/professor assesses students’ work, but also students as adult learners evaluate their achievements.

Cheers,
Terje

The course “e-learning” is almost in the end. This week the groups should take a critical look back at their work and their course prototypes and evaluate their achievements (as a group). So it requires the group members to find a consensus.

Grading system is available on the course Wikiversity page (A - outstanding, B - above the average….). It would be nice if you could also explain your grade for your work (for instance what is good or what didn’t work, etc.). If your course prototype page enables you to post this comment there, it would be nice, but otherwise you can also use one of your group members personal Weblog.

This grade will be added to your individual grade at the end of the course.
But I already know that the groups have done an amazing work

See you around,
Terje

I was going through the participants personal Weblogs and realized that I haven’t really kept up with the communication flows I have created in every participant’s weblog by writing comments and questions. I have a feeling that this tends to be a common pattern that comments to comments leave unattended…I seem to be a quite good example of it…unfortunately.

Another thing which got my attention was the constant notification not finding a common time for a group work. This is a good example of group members’ priorities and shows very clearly that they have more important things to do. On the other hand I find it a bit offending (if I would be a group member) because in my opinion group members should reflect on their resources…either reorganise them or acknowledge that they don’t have time (whatever reasons, which is not important) for the group work…

My colleague Hans said once very nicely … the criteria for a blog post should be the following: I am not ashamed of what I publish. So considering the resources I have at my hand at a given point of time this is the maximum I can come up with. I think this is a quite fair criteria. For instance, if one uses one particular word 4 times in a blog post and all these times one has managed to mis-spell it in addition to other typing mistakes, then I start to wonder whether this shows satisfaction of that person. This is not about lack of English, not at all…I think we should be more critical to ourselves…

Finally, I have noticed that we very often forget to explain why. “Why” question, giving reasons, rational explanations are left behind. Just coming up with some sort of list without any explanation of why and why I think this is important…it is not enough to consider the task completed on an acceptable level.

Cheers,Terje

…still one of the most motivating factors in adult learning. I think in order to save the course participants from spending their Eastern holidays on scribbling their course assignments, next time I should put fixed deadlines every week and say “no later submission will be taken into account for a final grade”. On the one hand it could be a good strategy to organise other’s time and distribute tasks. On the other hand it could be a good practice for the participants to organise their time. It is about taking responsibility for the consequences and make choices. We all know that life is complex and there are many unexpected situations we don’t foresee, but at some point we have to choose and re-evaluate our resources. Facilitators usually don’t care about the reasons not making deadlines…But I start to like the idea of very strict and continuous deadlines as they would help to keep the participants engagement to the course and would help group work…

See you around,
Terje

I am wondering about the progress of this course. We are already in the 5th week and it still looks like the course has just started. Why is it still so slow? Is it about lack of motivation, lack of time, lack of understanding of what to do and how or lack of … ?

If there is no motivation to work on that course then this is not one of your main interests right now and you are in a wrong place;

if there is no time to work on that course then obviously this is not one of your first priorities and you are in a wrong place;

if it is not clear what and how to do then one should contact with the facilitator and ask for clarifications…

I have a feeling that we have so strong habits and attitudes towards what a course should be, how learning and teaching should take place and what the roles of teachers and students are. The biggest challenge seems to get rid of traditional habits and understandings…

So, this is a friendly reminder (look at the week 5 on the course wiki) that by the end of this week (4.04.2010) all the individual and group tasks that were required for weeks 1-5 should be finished. Later submissions would not be taken into account for getting a final grade.

Nevertheless, I found some nice thoughts from some of the participants’ weblogs…

… thinking of learning 15 years ago and compare the strategies and methods with what is happening today…

… questioning about the definition of learning, information, knowledge…

… analyzing the issues about security and openness in an e-learning process…

Cheers,
Terje

Hello,

As we have some new participants and most of you missed the first videoconference, I propose two options for participating in the second videoconference. We are going to use a Flashmeeting tool for carrying out our videoconference. For those who are interested, more information about the tool can be found here

The proposed times are:

1. Wednesday, 24th of March, at 19.00 pm. The link to the flashmeeting is here

2. Thursday, 25th of March, at 11.00 am. The link to the flashmeeting is here

These meetings are not obligatory for the participants, however, it would be very nice if all of you can attend even for a short period. So, please choose one of the proposed meetings. Of course I don’t mind if you want to do it twice :).

The purpose of the meetings is to get to know each other better, to talk about the problems and issues that have raised in this course, share our experiences, etc.

Just in case here are some steps if this Flashmeeting tool doesn’t seem very intuitive for you.
1. Click on the link provided.
2. Click on “go to the meeting”
3. Choose “enter meeting as a quest” and click on “continue”.In this page you can also test your equipment (camera, headsets, microphone). In order to do that click on “open test application” and follow the instructions.
4. If you don’t want to test your equipment just write down your name, make a tick in the box “I agree to the terms and click “enter”.

Flashmeeting allows to speak one person at one time. So if you have already entered to the meeting space and want to say something you have to click on “start broadcasting” and after you have finished you should click on “stop broadcasting”.

Hope to see you all,
Terje

As you haven’t taken an initiative to reorganise groups I took this task for myself. Hopefully you are ok with the changes. If not, feel free to move your name to a group you want to be, but no later than this week, because the group work should start now. The groups can be seen here

Cheers,
Terje

…from Tuesday (16th of March) till Thursday (18th of March) I will be traveling and might not be very easily reachable. If you have problems, questions, concerns you can still send an e-mail, I’ll do my best to reply.

Cheers,
Terje

Hello,
I had a look at the course participants and it seems that we can think of forming only two groups. According to the list of registered participants we should finally end up with 5 members in each group. What do you think?

Cheers,
Terje