One of the main reasons for taking the ONL course was to gain confidence as a pedagogue. Earlier I had felt that although I can do well in my own teaching; I didn’t feel I had the language to express myself fully when talking about education with others. After these 12 weeks I think that there has been a positive development in how I identify professionally. Now I have expanded to new arenas where I can be a digital resident, by blogging and tweeting about pedagogy.
The most interesting part in ONL was to collaborate with a group of people I did not know before. Since we live in different parts of the world we can never meet in person. So, the communication depends a lot on what digital tools are available. As an IT trainer and ICT pedagogue, who take great interest in software, I often reflected about that during the course.
For asynchronous communication we had the ONL community space and Google Drive. I felt a bit frustrated at the shortcomings of the community space. I missed being able to tag people, and to get notifications for new comments (not only new messages). So even though I could make comments for further discussions, I suspect that probably the others wouldn’t notice it. This tool was okay as a message board but did not encourage having discussions. In a pedagogical point of view, I think that could make the difference between collaboration and cooperation.
In the book Teaching in blended learning environments: Creating and sustaining communities of inquiry (2013), the authors write about that the strength of blended learning is the ability to combine verbal and written communication. The idea behind the Community of Inquiry is for students to have a meaningful conversation where they listen carefully to each other and both build on each other’s ideas but also challenge opinions that might not be supported by facts. The benefit of having a discussion in writing is that the response can be more thoughtful.
These limitations of the existing platform in ONL was not necessarily all bad. Because we also had a lot of freedom to try out other solutions. It was fascinating to see how our ability to collaborate was affected by the tool we choose for each topic. I think that the most successful collaboration was in topic 3 when we used the tool Coogle. In this tool we could build a mind map and add to each other’s threads. The line between ”mine” and ”yours” was not as strict as they were in most other presentation tools. This also happened to be the topic about collaborative learning, so probably we were also in the right mindset.
Finally, I want to say thank you! To the organizers, my PBL group and our facilitators. This was a great experience and I am happy that I got to spend it with you!