Greetings from sunny Victoria, where my MA residency has begun.
I'm somewhat remiss in making more entries here, but the program activities should cure all that. I'll explain...
During pre-residency, we submitted a group response to our Moodle environment regarding challenges experienced in the e-learning environment and potential strategies for addressing those challenges. One of the suggestions my team made was to start a learning journal to help track and record learning experiences, learning challenges and (one supposes) using the journal as a reflective exercise.
The session facilitator, in his responses, did state that the creation of such a journal would be one of the 'assignments' during the residency.
While this idea was hardly original, I was pleased to see it as part of the program. Even since Curt Bonk's presentation at E-LEARN, I've had some curiosity about the value and place of blogs and the like within the learning evnironment (F2F and online.) I look forward to this exercise.
Now the big question is: will I be able to use my existing forums or will I have to create something new? I admit to a certain reluctance to 'reinvent the wheel', but I'll stifle myself and go along as necessary.
We had our introductions and the like this morning and we had a very interesting small group discussion about our exeriences with Moodle. I enjoyed that experiential exercise in navigating the environment, particularly because we are the first cohort to be using this newly-deployed platform. I hardly feel like the proverbial guinea pig, but more like an active beta tester. There is a broad range of skill and comfort levels with respect to technology as a conduit for learning, and there were actually a couple of people who wound up coming in late to a forming e-community and I found their reactions to the group postings and comments to be very educational from both the user and practitioner stance, however, I'll need to form my thoughts in more detail before I add them here.
Now, its off to a quick lunch and we kick-off the afternoon with introductions to research.
