After checking out the course infrastructure and setting up my blog last week, Open Networked Learning took off for real this week. I attended a ZOOM meeting where the ONL facilitators presented themselves, gave a overview on the course and talked about upcoming activites. To see faces and hear voices always makes a big difference – it helps a lot to connect and get involved. This was also the case with the first meeting of my PBL group. It is amazing how technology enables us to meet people with very diverse backgrounds and immediately launch into a discussion.

I am really looking forward to the first topic of the course: Online participation and digital literacies.

Methods

• Ground rules for PBL group collaboration: ONL provides templates for organizing and structuring group collabortion. Our PBL group hast started defining some communication rules e.g. to always use Google+ or to use the ‘Like’ button to help gourp online presence. More rules need to be defined such as the levels of visibility, engagement and responsibility in the collaborative work and how to work with peer support and feedback.

• Zoom! for synchronous online meetings: ONL uses Zoom for group sessions and although we struggeled with connection issues (with about 50 particpants), the tool seems is supposed to be very reliable.
• Google+ for asynchronous communication: The PBL groups use a dedicated Google+ community to communicate. Our group has eight members plus two facilitators and communication works smoothly so far. There is also the general ONL181 comunity which is a bit overwhelming with over 150 members posting.
• Padlet for presenting: Our PBL group is creating a group padlet to present ourselves to the wider ONL181 community. Again I am amazed by the simplicity and efficacy of this tool.