Time goes fast when you are having fun… and it is now time for me to write some finishing thoughts around my engagement in the ONL 181 Course.

First of all I would like to thank the participants in my PBL Group for a fantastic time and great collaboration work. It has been fantastic to work with them and I truly feel that my Personal Learning Network has grown and now contains wonderful people from other countries and cultures which in it self is an exciting experience.

When I started this journey I wrote about my former online participation and digital literacies. I wrote that I so far used online tools/applications mostly for private use and I thought that my digital literacy was quite good. During the last weeks I have been introduced to at least three new online tools for collaboration and I realize that this is just the top of an iceberg. There are so many cool and fun online tools to use for collaboration. This course has surely aroused my curiosity of which other tools that are out there. The new tools that we have used have been very user friendly which is a basic requirement for such tools so that how to use the tool doesn’t take over to much time from the actual collaboration. I have added these three new tools that we have used in our PBL Group for collaboration and presentation to my visitor and resident model (White, D. & Le Cornu, A. (2011)) and when I look at it now I have used online tools much more in resident and institutional mode than before.

My Digital involvement after the ONL course divided into Personal, Institutional, Visitor and Resident mode

Another thing that I have found interesting is how fast our PBL group got to be a well working team that could embrace and collaborate around new topics and make something presentable for each topic. We have had great discussions within the group which is fascinating considering the short time that we have known each other and the fact that we have only been able to speak online through Zoom. In topic 4 we were introduced to the 5 Stage Model by Gilly Salmon. I can see that this ONL course is built upon the same thinking as in that model. In the Connecting stage of the course we got introduced to and got access to the tools that we were supposed to use. Then in Topic 1 we worked a lot with presenting our selfs and our online identity and former digital literacy. After that we could start to gain new knowledge in Topic 2, Topic 3 and Topic 4 by collaborating in different tools and having online collaboration discussions. One of the reasons that our PBL Group worked so well together is probably thanks to the design of this ONL course and the design course is something that I will bring with me if and when I am going to design my own online course. Another thing that I think made our group work so well together is that we had great facilitators who guided us through each topic.

Thank you very much for this time. It has been a fun and educative experience.