So, time for the next blog post…..and what shall I discuss? It is still a new concept to me to use a blog for capsulizing my learnings. One part of it is who are my readers and what might they be interested in? But this pretty much goes for all of us who are digital immigrants, I guess, and as a youngster I never had a diary for my thoughts and speculations.

But here we go! The last couple of weeks have been full of new learnings, and I especially think of starting a Twitter account, and then trying to use it. Somehow, it was not that hard to understand, but I have not arrived at seeing that it could be useful to me. Neither on an institutional nor personal level (White & Le Cornu, 2011). This is actually one of my core questions when it comes to using new technology and learning; do I have to use all these new tools just because they are available? Well, as you have might guessed already my answer is no. You must not loose yourself and enter a state of uneasiness and anxiety just to follow the IT development. My opinion is that one takes it a bit slower and initiate new ways of learning step-by-step instead of overwhealmingly buy every new IT-item, and the adjust the learnings to them. I prefer in the early stages to look at the ”what”, and then the ”how” in my teaching.

So, am I stuck in a state of reactionary? No, I bluntly claim. The last couple of weeks have also contained getting to know a tool that I liked, but it happened with a bit of peer-pressure. Constructiuve peer-pressure, I must add. As one of the group leaders for the first topic we had to pick a tool for our presentation, and Padlet was our choice. I guess that I would never have looked into a new tool that fast and that much without the feeling of not letting my group mates down. And I learned how to use it, maybe not master it, but use it after following an instructive film on YouTube. And my group mates appreciated my effort and we solved the assignment. But, I can without doubt inform you that I was a bit exhausted afterwards. But, it was the good sort of exhaustion.

Another experience from these last couple of weeks is that I see how hard it can be to balance synchrounous and asynchrounous learning activities. When you present something for the group and they are busy and not able to comment or confirm your effort you can feel some increasing stress. Was it good enough or just terrible? Finding a way of keeping in touch regularly is important. For the following weeks I’m not the group leader, and that is a bit of a relief. But, I think that I’ll keep in touch with my group leaders quite often. I know that I appreciate the confirmations, and I guess that this is not particularly my experience.

References
White, D.S. & Le Cornu, A. (2011). Visitors and ressidents: A new typology for online engagement, First Monday, vol 16, Number 9