This week’s topic is one that I have already broached a bit in one of my first comments (“Introduction week 2”). Also, the one time in the course that the group is supposed to delve into collaborative learning of different kinds, I cannot participate. The irony is not lost on me and these weeks, I remember seriously considering quitting the course. Not because it seemed like a waste of my time, but because I did not have the time to take full advantage of it – and I let my group down. So what makes me stay on? One reason is that I don’t want to leave the group in a lurch any more than I already have. The other reason is that I am still hoping that the course will begin to make sense, that is, that the hours I have after all invested in it will begin to pay off. Possibly, indeed very likely, that investment has still been too small and that is why I am not feeling the rewards yet.

One suggested topic for this week’s blog is to account for an occasion when collaborative learning took place, that moved my thinking forward. This one is simple. A number of times when I have sat as a student in a seminar, I suppose. Occasionally also as a teacher in class, but those occasions are quite rare, unfortunately. What I take from this is that I need to create situations where students have the opportunity to collaborate, or at least coöperate. I talk about this difference at length in my second blog post, so I won’t do it here. 

Another suggested topic is to account for one’s own Personal Learning Network. So what is mine? At the moment, my PLN consists mainly of publications, printed and online; MOOCs, although not recently; university online courses that I am taking, such as this one; blogs I read by other people in my profession; or, as Oddone says, “a constant cycling and remixing of ideas and knowledge and information … constantly changing”. At times in my life, my PLN has consisted of what I have felt to be the best and the brightest, sharing the most exciting ideas and participating in the most stimulating fora. But to be honest, at the moment I feel a bit starved. Still, breaking it down (inspired by Oddone) here is what my current PLN looks like, I suppose:

P – Personal : Yes, it all begins with me and my passions, interests etc. They determine the direction of my learning, the focus and the motivation.

L – Learning: Much of my learning is connected, online courses not the least. But not all of it. The kind of learning I do in isolation, on my own, is much harder and I often feel more lost. This is partly because it is a kind of synthesizing as well as learning, which requires more of me than the kind of learning I tend to do when I am connected. 

N – Network: It is easy for me to be overwhelmed when I pursue my own PL. Where to start, which direction to pursue (at the expense of other directions) and when to end it etc. Looking at this experience as a “network” rather than a loss of control might actually make it easier for me to accept this aspect of that experience and navigate it with more confidence.

References:

Oddone, K. PLNs Theory and Practice, parts 1-2.