For this post, I thought it would be beneficial to focus on the questions suggested in the course:

• An occasion when real collaborative learning took place, that moved your own thinking forward
  • Within my day-to-day working environment, I am constantly engaging with a team of academics. Importantly, these ‘academics’ (in most cases) have their own particular realms of interest and work, including: business management, FP and IP education, teaching and learning, law, and humanities. This diversity sparks debate around our college’s approach to contemporary topics such as retention (the article by Ameijde, Weller and Cross, 2018, is fascinating) and general student support.
  • Furthermore, in my other role as campus edtech I work with a team across campuses. This engagement broadens my understanding of not only my working environment, but also introduces a number of supporting and constraining factors that I might not have considered if limited to my working environment only.
  • A particular example here would be the development of the Gauteng Regional Artefact, as part of our regional edtech conference held earlier this year. During this conference, vice-principals, edtechs, and other notable academic members worked collaboratively to develop an edtech training artefact.
• Your own Personal Learning Networks – how have they developed and how they could be taken further
  • My PLN is both face-to-face (as discussed above in my working environment), as well as particularly internet-focused, with a number of different ‘channels’, some more formal than others, utilised to enhance a my learning in a broad array of areas. Examples include:
    • Extensive use of YouTube for tutorials, explanations, and additional material support.
    • Khan Academy for lecture material
    • Enrolling in MOOCs (through EDx previously) to enhance a new skill (programming languages in this case)
    • Facebook, where I have previously asked for research input
    • Twitter, where I follow a number of educational technologists and news sources
    • My work environment, as discussed above
• Reflect on how you can use technologies to enable your own networks for learning processes
  • As mentioned above, web-services (especially SNL), have been pivotal to my learning in a PNL-type manner. I have omitted blogs on purpose, as although I understand their significance, I have not (to be honest) utilised a blogging network to its full potential. This is certainly something I would like to develop in the future.