I started these
weekly blogging exercises with doubts about their purpose and effectiveness but,
I did enter the exercise with an open mind and a willingness to learn. Which was a good choice. I had the frame of mind that the blogs
were just my ideas and opinions, which were free from strict scaffolding and
almost without purpose. I thought “it’s my ideas I’m blogging, why do I have to
write them down, I thought of them can’t I just store them at the back of my
face and say I blogged it?”
After two months of blogging, studying,
commenting and exploring new ICT’s I had battled through too much information
to even keep track of my ‘good ideas’. So after browsing my previous posts and
rediscovering informative, well written insights that I don’t even remember writing,
then having a personal battle about why I’m struggling to write an essay that
makes sense and how can I somehow employ ‘past’ me to do what ‘current’ me can’t,
aren't we the same person?... Anyway, I found the ability to rehash old lesson
content and especially my opinion on that content to be helpful and then
reapply that past knowledge to more current information forming a deeper
understanding of the topic, and at times altering my opinion. But that was just
my personal experiences with my own blog.
Having other students access and
comment on my, sometimes misguided, blogs was quite scary and rewarding at the
same time. Not only rewarding because someone might agree with you but because
they might disagree. It can be difficult to notice flaws in your theories,
because it’s your theory and that’s how you saw it. But a friendly comment
regarding something you may have missed can be beneficial, it may open a whole
new area of learning. The only failure I have experienced with the blogging
tasks in an entirely personal event when I read other blogs and discover a
wonderful, thorough piece of work which makes me feel inadequate. There is a
flip side to the aforementioned failure and it’s the ability to explore the
thoughts of someone approaching the same material as you for the first time and
gathering another perspective which can be incorporated to your beliefs. My
outcome in regards the experiences with class-wide blogging is a positive and
enlightening one that I MUST incorporate into my education career. The way I
will do this is not totally clear to me as yet, but it will be done!
The learning
activities regarding ICT collaboration have been most useful to me. I see
collaboration as a type of learning the students don’t know they are
participating in whilst achieving higher order thinking skills. I hope to
harness the power of ICT collaboration during my career. I don’t want to over
utilise the activity, perhaps only use it at the start of the term to promote
open thought and expression and encourage creation, analysing and applying
skills which can then be applied during solo tasks. The readings from this week
have been promising especially Weimer’s (2013) “Five
things students can learn through group work” and “Online
groups-Cooperative or collaborative.” Paulus (2005). Paulus (2005)
maintains; Instructor support for students ‘dialoguing’, is critical to
collaboration – this may mean professor prompting discussions among groups
and/or providing encouragement and further direction to students at the beginning
of the group process. Which is
important for me to note when encouraging ICT collaboration. Paulus (2005)
continues; When groups come together to solve a problems, they need to
use online
tools to collaborate, Skype, Google +, Google Docs, Elluminate
Live, and need to be introduced to the tools early in the course and have time
to practice with them. Which forms a strong digital pedagogy foundation,
promoting technological knowledge and manipulation. I enjoyed this reading. Weimer’s (2013) “Five things” highlights; They
can learn why groups make better decisions than individuals.
Students can see how different perspectives, constructive deliberation,
questioning, and critical analysis can result in better solutions and
performance. And They can learn content, as in master the material… they are figuring things out
for themselves rather than having the teacher tell them what they need to know.
This is just to name a few. Insightful, exciting and modern, all my favourite
things.
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